Rising investigators who are interested in a career in research should carefully choose a supportive mentor and keep an open mind when selecting a research focus, according to Theresa A. Guise, MD, FASBMR, and Stephanie S. Watowich, PhD.
In March 2026, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (MD Anderson) announced that Guise and Watowich were elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).1 The AAAS recognizes scientists for notable contributions to science and society. The 2025 class includes almost 500 fellows who were honored for achievements in research, innovation, and public engagement. Fellows of the AAAS are elected annually by the AAAS Council and are recognized at a ceremonial Fellows Forum.2
“It’s a great honor to be elected as a fellow of the AAAS,” Guise said in an interview with Oncology Fellows. “It’s taken 34 years of research and academic work to achieve the status to be able to be accepted into the fellowship. It gives me an opportunity to help in the framing of our research, to be involved in the administration aspect of science, and to fund programs to enable us to reach the rest of the country and the world. [It also allows me to] to talk about the importance of research, both at the translational and clinical level, and why we must continue to do research. We [need] to support research because it’s a basic need to treat our patients with diseases that we have no treatments for.”
Guise is a professor in the Department of Endocrine Neoplasia and Hormonal Disorders at MD Anderson in Houston, Texas. Watowich is the Vivian L. Smith Distinguished Chair in Immunology, the deputy department chair, and a professor in the Department of Immunology, at MD Anderson as well as a member of the graduate faculty at MD Anderson UT Health Graduate School.
In interviews with Oncology Fellows, Guise and Watowich discussed the role of mentorship throughout their careers as researchers, advice for early-career investigators who are interested in research, and their future research goals.
Advancing Your Research Career as a Young Oncologist: Key Takeaways
- Theresa A. Guise, MD, FASBMR, and Stephanie S. Watowich, PhD, were elected as fellows to the AAAS.
- The AAAS recognizes scientists for notable contributions to science and society; honorees are elected annually by the AAAS Council and are recognized at a ceremonial Fellows Forum.
- Guise and Watowich underscored the outsized role of mentorship in their careers and now serve as mentors themselves to the next generation of investigators.
Oncology Fellows: What does your election as a fellow to the AAAS mean to you?
Watowich: It’s an enormous honor [and] I’m extremely grateful for it. This is a profoundly impactful organization in America that supports science across all disciplines, and just to be considered for the honor and [then] to have achieved it is huge to me.
How do you plan to use this honor to further your research goals?
Watowich: [Fellowship with the AAAS] provides additional contacts across the country with other scientists, potential opportunities for collaboration and critical feedback for our research, and more exposure of the work that we’re doing at MD Anderson.
Guise: I’d like to use it to showcase examples of research, how we’ve [gotten] research into the clinic, [and] how we can use this research to impact patients. [I want] to emphasize that this research was only possible because we had funding from national levels, philanthropic charities, [and] patient organization groups. It really took a village to springboard our research into a place where we could apply findings in the clinic.
What has been the role of mentorship throughout your career and how do you approach being a mentor yourself?
Watowich: I am extremely grateful to my PhD and postdoctoral mentors, both of whom supported me for the AAAS fellowship by providing very kind letters of recommendation. I’m also extremely grateful to my current department here, department chair, James P. Allison, PhD, who has been an incredible scientific mentor during my time at MD Anderson.
These individuals, and many others who I don’t have time to name, have shaped the way that I think [about] and do science, and have pushed me to be a rigorous, critical investigator. This also includes individuals who are not at MD Anderson across the spectrum of my career.
The way that I take that [support] and push it forward to the next generation is by leading some research training activities at MD Anderson. I’m very grateful to be co-investigator on several externally funded research training programs with our Department of Experimental Radiation Oncology. We mentor [individuals] across the research spectrum, from postdoctoral fellows to graduate students to summer undergraduates. Those opportunities allow me to [conduct] mentorship activities across the institution, but also equally within my own lab. It’s very important to me that every individual in my lab obtains the career progress that they’re interested in. I try to tailor my mentoring individually to each person in the lab. This is incredibly important to me.
Guise: Mentorship is one of the most rewarding aspects of my job. I’ve trained over 50 fellows and junior faculty, and to see them become interested in research, develop their own ideas, be successful in formulating those ideas into research projects, and succeeding at those research projects is extremely rewarding to me. Seeing the future generation of researchers grow into the field is amazing, and they bring such talent and energy.
It’s a wide-open field right now because not as many individuals are going into research as in the past. It’s our job to mentor more individuals and encourage more young investigators to do research. For my own trainees, I like to let them explore what they’re interested in. I give them ideas of what they could do and give them some freedom, so I can determine how much independence they have. I also provide guidance for them in case they make a mistake, which we all do, and teach them to learn from the mistakes.
It’s continually a 2-way process because not only do I try to teach my mentees, I also learn from them. I expect my mentees to be the expert, the go-to person in the field that they decide to research, and I hope that they will teach me something about their research to help me move forward in my scientific life. A life in science is a life of continual learning.
What is your advice to early-career investigators interested in pursuing a research career?
Watowich: The rigor of the research and the research question that you’re investigating are critically important, and it’s very important that it is of great interest to you. Equally important is the environment in which you do that research [and] the people that you’re surrounded by. Your mentor [needs to be] supportive [and] allow you independence but also be there to guide you when you’re needing some input. The colleagues that you’re surrounded by and the other trainees in the laboratory [need to provide] a holistic educational and mentoring environment. This very important for not only obtaining your own goals but being happy in what you’re doing.
Guise: I would tell them to keep an open mind. For example, I’m an endocrinologist who does oncology research. When I was a fellow, my first patient I saw had lung cancer and high blood calcium. We treated his hypercalcemia, but when he rolled over in bed in the hospital and fractured his hip, we found that he had a metastatic lesion to the bone.
My mentor at the time said, ‘this is the time for you to start your research project.’ I thought, ‘I’m an endocrinology fellow, and this sounds like oncology to me,’ but what I learned was that tumors are like endocrine organs. They make factors that act locally and systemically, just like endocrine organs. I learned a lot from that, I fell in love with the lab, and I understood at that time that there was a lot of crossover between oncology and endocrinology.
In my clinic, I have learned continually to keep an open mind about what your interests may be, and that sometimes means taking advantage of opportunities when they arise. I may have had a goal set to be an endocrinologist, but I had an opportunity to study an oncology patient. Even though I was a little skeptical, I took that opportunity and it opened my career of 34 years of studying cancer and bone.
If you have an opportunity that may seem like it’s not exactly what you’re interested in, you should explore that opportunity and determine if it’s something you may have a passion for. I’ve never regretted that day that I decided to study in the lab, but on that day itself I was questioning my mentor and what he was instructing me to do. You need to trust your mentor; they have more experience and advice to give you than you may realize at the time.
What are your future research goals?
Watowich: We have a significant project developing a new cellular immunotherapy, and one of the goals of this work is to see this therapy translate to the clinic. I’m very honored to work with some clinical investigators here at MD Anderson who are supportive of the work that we’re doing and very invested in moving this therapy forward to the clinic. Should we be fortunate enough to achieve that, it [will be a] great success for [everyone] involved.
Guise: In my research, we study how cancer interacts with the bone microenvironment, and how cancer treatment affects the bone microenvironment, specifically how abnormal bone destruction not only affects tumor growth but the whole body. When your bone is breaking down, it releases growth factors into circulation, which can act on the brain, pancreas, muscle, [and] heart. We believe [cancer] is like an endocrine organ in that it stores factors and it releases those factors that control distant organs.
We are hoping to convince [individuals] that there are not just siloed areas of research. The bones, brain, heart, [etc.] ‘talk’ to each other, and we have evidence that the bone can ‘talk’ to the brain. When you have abnormal bone destruction, it can cause impairment in your thinking. That can cause your heart to not pump as strongly, and it can cause your muscles to be weak. In our traditional science or the dogmas in the field, we study these individual silos, but we don’t think about how they interact with each other. Our goal is to make it a standard practice to think about how your area of research interacts with other areas in the body, and how that could affect the patient.
References
- Two UT MD Anderson researchers elected AAAS Fellows. News release. MD Anderson. March 26, 2026. Accessed May 1, 2026. https://www.mdanderson.org/newsroom/two-ut-md-anderson-researchers-elected-aaas-fellows.h00-159853767.html
- AAAS Honorary Fellows. American Association for the Advancement of Science. Accessed May 1, 2026. https://www.aaas.org/fellows
