My adviser John Krommes, a theoretical plasma physicist at Princeton University, is an active researcher and outstanding teacher. He takes as much time as needed with students and watches out for our career development. That is why he received a Graduate Mentoring Award last year from Princeton.

Good mentoring begins with good teaching. In plasma physics, it is easy for students and professors to neglect the fundamentals and work from established results. That does not happen with John. He teaches from first principles. Students in his class are guided by more than 300 pages of handouts that he updates every year.

John makes plenty of time for his students. When Jill Foley, one of my fellow students, was preparing for her general exams, she asked John for a brief meeting to go through some questions. They spent eight hours reviewing the most challenging topics from two years of plasma-physics courses. “He didn't just give me the answers but led me to them so that I knew how to take that path again,” says Jill.

John nurtures young scientists by really listening to our ideas. For example, we recently worked on the creation of fake data to test a data-analysis technique our team is using. John wanted to focus on the fundamental plasma physics required to simulate data that more closely resemble the experimental data. But my thoughts on this problem led me to new understandings of the analysis technique itself. Instead of pursuing the topic of greatest interest to him, John took about five hours to understand my questions and ideas and to discuss them with our experimental partners. After much thought, he sent me an 800-word e-mail guiding my next steps.

John also contributes to our future as researchers. For example, even though both John and I are primarily analytic theorists, he has suggested that I invest significant project time acquiring skills in numerical simulation. This will probably not be essential for my thesis but may be important for my employment prospects.

The demands of pursuing a thesis and the all-too-frequent struggles with demanding, abusive or absentee advisers seem to cause a lot of soul-searching among graduate students about their career paths. But I know that after graduation, I will be seeking a research job as a plasma physicist. John Krommes deserves a great deal of credit for that confidence.