The second annual Harvard Medical/Dental School Excellence in Mentoring Award has been won by Marshall A. Wolf, professor of medicine at the Medical School and training director of the medical residency programs at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Almost 3,000 nominations from faculty, house officers, postdoctoral fellows, and students were submitted.

"It is a great honor to receive this award," said Wolf, who said his own mentors -- Bernard Lown, Thomas Warthin, Louis Weinstein, and Eugene Braunwald -- provided him with invaluable help in his career development.

Wolf said that the key to mentoring is to find the right faculty who will help mentees "achieve their goals and keep them going down the right pathway." He describes his own job as helping "my trainees to reach their full potential. It's important to be clear that you're trying to guide mentees in the direction they want to go in and not where you might want them to go."

That Wolf is successful in this is attested to by many present and former medical housestaff. In nominating him, one past mentee wrote that Wolf "learns what a given individual can do easily and successfully and works with them to find the niche in medicine where they are most likely to be successful . . . guiding gently and firmly and always with the best interest of the trainee in mind. He spends hundreds of hours each year doing this, and he is the best."

Wolf urges young people to seek out mentors. "Realize that they are an important part of your development." His advice to senior faculty: "There is always time to mentor; it depends on what you set your priorities on."

A graduate of Harvard College and the Medical School, Wolf has been at Brigham and Women's Hospital for most of his career.