Professor recognized for a lifetime of mentorship
Mary Jo Ondrechen, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, joined the Northeastern faculty in 1980 and has been mentoring students ever since.
For Mary Jo Ondrechen, mentoring is about more than just offering advice on academics and professional paths.
Mentoring also means creating space for students to share personal challenges — sometimes offering pep talks, other times helping them see weaknesses as opportunities to build their skills.
Perhaps most important to Ondrechen, a Northeastern University professor of chemistry and chemical biology, mentoring involves the ability to listen.
“You have to be a good listener,” Ondrechen emphasized. “You have to be attuned to the needs of the person.”
Jesse Peltier can attest to Ondrechen’s skills. An assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology and an affiliate faculty member in chemical engineering at Northeastern, Peltier’s path to his current roles wasn’t always straightforward.
“There are these moments where things aren’t working out as well as you had hoped research-wise, and you’re struggling, and you’re wondering, do I actually belong in this field?” said Peltier. “You start to wonder if this is for you.”
But he was fortunate to cross paths with Ondrechen. “Having Mary Jo as a mentor meant that she coached me through some of those problems I was facing,” Peltier said.
He said Ondrechen focused him on his long-term goals, gave him perspective into why he was pursuing academic chemistry and “provided a very strong level of emotional and psychological support when I was going through those really difficult times,” said Peltier, who went on to win fellowships and awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Academies, and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES). “She was just a completely holistic mentor,” he said.
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There are many who, like Peltier, owe a lot to Ondrechen’s mentorship. It’s a skill that has now earned Ondrechen the 2026 Lifetime Mentor Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The award honors an individual with more than 25 years of experience as a mentor who has mentored significant numbers of underrepresented students: women of all backgrounds, men from minority groups underrepresented in STEM, and people with disabilities.
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Ondrechen, a member of the Mohawk Nation, has long been active in AISES. She developed a project providing career guidance, support, and mentoring to Native undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars in the STEM fields who, like Peltier, want to become faculty members at colleges, universities, and tribal colleges. The AISES Lighting the Pathway to Faculty Careers for Natives in STEM has helped to support the mentorship of nearly 200 aspiring Indigenous STEM scholars. It’s how Ondrechen met Peltier, whom she called “one very special” mentee.
“It’s kind of funny to think that my mentor in the program ended up being the one who’s actually running this program, which in my opinion has been really instrumental,” Peltier said.
“It’s a very high honor coming from the AAAS,” said Ondrechen, speaking of the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.
Ondrechen joined the Northeastern faculty in 1980 and has been mentoring students ever since. Since then, her renown as a mentor has spread.
In addition to Northeastern students, Ondrechen has mentored junior faculty at the university and even people outside her field. In fact, she noted that one of the people who nominated her for the AAAS award was a computer scientist.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ondrechen said that she has benefited from mentors herself.
Her family included “very wise elders” but she also had role models elsewhere, she said. A female high school chemistry teacher taught Ondrechen that women could succeed in the field (and that chemistry was fun!), and a colleague at Brandeis University helped Ondrechen “change the direction” of her research in the middle of her career and shift from what she called “hardcore physical chemistry” of small molecules and materials to developing ways to predict protein function.
So, she has paid it forward.
“I want them to believe in themselves,” Onderchen said of her mentees. “Whatever they’re working on, I want them to feel like it’s theirs and whatever has been achieved, that they can be proud of because they did it.”
That pride seems to be mutual.
As she received her award at the annual AAAS conference in Phoenix in February, three of the Native scientists Ondrechen had mentored over the years were in the audience.
“When I was up on stage, it was announced that there’s this tradition in the Native community to recognize honorees with a blanket, so they came up on stage and they put a blanket over my shoulders,” Ondrechen recalled. “It was a very moving experience … it was a beautiful thing.”
