“Even as a postdoc, I was still planning to go into the biomedical industry,” Dr. Tefft says. “Dr. Lerman was quite instrumental in me ultimately deciding to pursue a career in academia instead.”

Intro to academia

Dr. Lerman’s career intrigued Dr. Tefft, showing Dr. Tefft a side of academia he hadn’t considered.

But Dr. Lerman didn’t merely inspire; he helped make such a career possible for Dr. Tefft. An example: During Dr. Tefft’s time at Mayo, Dr. Lerman helped Dr. Tefft apply for and secure a competitive National Institutes of Health K99/R00 grant, known as the Pathway to Independence Award.

By funding mentored research for up to two years and then independent research for up to three years, the grant helps recipients launch their academic research careers. In Dr. Tefft’s case, he used the grant to explore nanotechnology as a way to develop next-generation magnetic biomaterials for prosthetic blood vessels and heart valves, ideally freeing patients from the need for antiplatelet and anticoagulation medication.

“Dr. Lerman was extremely supportive of me applying for that award. I had to put it together pretty quickly, because I learned about it right before I was about to lose eligibility,” he says. “He easily could have said, ‘No, it’s too late.’ But I am grateful that he said, ‘Yes, go for it.’”

That’s just one example of Dr. Lerman’s practical support, Dr. Tefft says. Along with Dr. Lerman, Dr. Tefft’s other mentors — including Gurpreet Sandhu, M.D., Ph.D. (MBIO ’92, BIOC ’94, CV ’03, CVIC ’04), Dan Dragomir‑Daescu, Ph.D. (PHYS ’04), and Robert Simari, M.D. (CV ’92, CVIC ’93) — put Dr. Tefft’s success and needs ahead of their own, Dr. Tefft says.

“Even as a junior faculty member, I’ve tried to pay that forward, to be less worried about my own career and my own career advancement, and more focused on what might be best for my students and my trainees,” Dr. Tefft says.

Dedication to your mentee is a long-term commitment, Dr. Lerman says. He’s been acting as a mentor for over two decades and takes the responsibility of mentorship seriously.

Thinking big for the patient

Working with mentors like Dr. Lerman, a clinician investigator who sees patients, clued Dr. Tefft in to patient needs in a way that his biomedical engineering doctoral degree did not, he says.

“I realized a lot of the things I was reading in the literature as a graduate student were kind of off the mark. When you go and talk to the clinicians, they say, ‘That’s what the engineering community thinks we need, but really we need this thing over here,’” Dr. Tefft says. “I had just graduated with a Ph.D. from Northwestern, and it was kind of humbling to say, ‘All right, I’m just getting started here. I have a lot I need to learn about doing translational research and what the needs of patients are.’”

Dr. Tefft’s mentors not only helped him better understand patient needs but emboldened him to aim high to meet those needs.

“I really appreciated that my mentors were big thinkers,” Dr. Tefft says. “I think they could have all had really nice careers seeing their patients and publishing moderate-impact papers. But that wasn’t what they wanted to do. That wasn’t their mentality. They really wanted to make a difference and improve healthcare for patients. And to do that, you have to take risks, and you have to think big.

“That really rubbed off on me, and I think that’s been a big part of my success with bringing in grants and defining my own research directions. I haven’t been afraid to think outside the box and to make big plans.”

Dr. Tefft is certainly thinking big. In 2024, he received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation to create a living heart valve prosthesis for children born with congenital heart disease. A biodegradable scaffold would act as the initial support structure and would be seeded with cells from the patient. The hope is that with time, the cells would create their own extracellular matrix and degrade the artificial scaffold, creating a living, functional heart value that would ideally be indistinguishable from a native valve.

“A child needs a valve that can not only last indefinitely, but that can also grow with them. And of course, existing heart valve prostheses don’t grow and they don’t last indefinitely,” Dr. Tefft says. “We’re going to try to mimic that embryonic developmental pathway in our engineered valves to hopefully end up with bioengineered tissue that more accurately replicates native tissue.”

For this project, Dr. Tefft is still drawing on the lessons learned from his mentors at Mayo Clinic, such as the value of collaborating with clinicians and basic scientists, he says. And as always, Dr. Tefft is striving to consider the needs of the patient first.