The Guiding Light

By Jonathan Riggs

Kelvin J. A. Davies, Ph.D., D.Sc.

For the second year in a row, Kelvin Davies, Ph.D., D.Sc., has won a USC Mellon Mentoring Award, given for outstanding achievement by individual faculty in helping build a supportive academic environment at the university.

The James E. Birren Chair of Gerontology at the USC Davis School of Gerontology as well as professor of molecular and computational biology in the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Davies has now won honors for mentoring both graduate as well as undergraduate students.

“We at the USC Davis School are very proud of his achievement,” says the School’s Dean Gerald C. Davison. “It’s gratifying when a professor of Dr. Davies’s stature shows such commitment to and effectiveness in mentoring all students.”

To thank his nominators as well as all of his students, Dr. Davies wrote the following:

Mentoring students can be one of the most rewarding aspects of a professor’s life. The opportunity to help guide (not sculpt) the development of young minds is a privilege of academe that few in the “outside world” have the opportunity to experience. “Mentor” first appeared as a dramatis persona in Homer’s Odyssey. The original Mentor taught, guided and set an example for Odysseus’s son Telemachus while Odysseus himself was engaged in the Trojan wars and a subsequent, decade-long, quest to return to Ithaca. Interestingly, the first Mentor, in at least some of his incarnations, was actually a demigod-just the way we academics like to picture ourselves!

Winston Churchill said that “We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.” Like most scholars, I have found that I learn at least as much from my students as I teach them, which makes the entire process so much more than equitable. I always hope that I will make a difference in my students’ lives; I certainly know that they have exerted a huge impact on my own view of the university and the world.

One of the differences between teaching facts and figures, important as they may be, and actually educating, is the attempt to help students find their inner wisdom. Or, as Benjamin Disraeli once said, “The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.” Ihope that all my students feel they have been helped and supported through their interactions with me; I also hope they have felt stretched at times, and challenged to be their best. A university education offers many opportunities for growth. Hopefully, as a mentor, I have helped my students to reach their own growth potential.