Sheila A. Stewart, PhD

2024 Dean’s Impact Award Recipient

Sheila A. Stewart, PhD, is a tireless mentor for trainees in her own lab and for students and postdoctoral scholars throughout WashU Medicine. Beyond the breadth and depth of her efforts in those areas, she is an active, effective mentor of faculty at all levels from brand-new assistant professors up through the department head. She cares deeply about all department members’ success, not just as scientists, but as healthy and happy people. As vice chair of the department, she has touched every aspect of its mentorship and community-building programs and has woven an inextricable link to its scientific programs. The metrics describing her mentorship of trainees are stunning. While in her own lab, she has mentored 12 PhD students, 10 postdocs and 14 undergraduates; she has also served on over 50 PhD thesis committees and over 30 qualifying exams. She is an active participant in the department’s trainee Work-in-Progress series, which she helped start, and she organized the Work-in-Progress talks for the Siteman Cancer Center’s Mechanisms of Cancer Biology Program (MCBP). It is telling that almost every assistant professor who has joined the department includes Stewart on their list of mentoring committee members. She serves on several of them and would likely serve on all of them if possible.