Feinberg’s Medical Faculty Council (MFC) honored the recipient of the 2025 Mentor of the Year award at a virtual and in-person workshop on May 5.
This year’s recipient is Allen Heinemann, PhD, professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and director of the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research at Shirley Ryan Ability Lab.
At the workshop, Heinemann shared insights from his career, spanning more than 40 years of mentoring fellows and trainees, while leading rehabilitation research.
Heinemann will officially receive his award at the 2025 Lewis Landsberg Research Day in September. He was nominated for the award by Megan McHugh, PhD, professor of emergency medicine, and several other mentees wrote letters of support. McHugh has been a colleague of Heinemann’s since 2011 and introduced him at the workshop.
McHugh said that while Heinemann’s impact as a scholar is remarkable, with over 500 peer-reviewed publications and more than 25,000 citations, the Mentor of the Year award recognizes Heinemann for how he has brought others along with him.
“Allen embodies everything the Mentor of the Year Award stands for: excellence, generosity, humility and a deep and abiding commitment to lifting others up,” McHugh said.
Heinemann joined the faculty at Northwestern in 1985 after earning his doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the University of Kansas with a specialty focus in rehabilitation. For more than 40 years, he has led research focused on health services research, psychosocial aspects of rehabilitation including substance use disorders [KM1] and measurement issues in rehabilitation. He leads the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research at Shirley Ryan Ability Lab.
During the workshop, Heinemann discussed the fellowship program he has led since 2003 through the Center for Education in Health Sciences. As director of the program, he has worked to provide training experiences that forge alliances in health services outcomes research.
Heinemann has dedicated his career to advancing rehabilitation research and training programs, mentoring 58 postdoctoral fellows, 36 pre-doctoral fellows and five Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation residents.
When reflecting on the award, Heinemann said, “This is not about me. This is not about the fellowship program and the mentoring I’ve done. It’s about the people, whose lives intersect ours, who we learn to love and care about want good things to happen to.”
Heinemann said, as a mentor, it’s important to remain curious: “I am not an OT, or a PT, or a speech language pathologist, or a process orthotist, but I am interested in the human condition, and I am interested in questions that help us improve services that make people’s lives better and enhance quality of life. So, I share the curiosity about the problems that trainees and mentees bring to us.”
Additionally, he noted that mentoring is key to furthering research and improving quality of life for humankind in the future.
“We are going to be on this globe for a limited period of time and the work that we do hopefully should transcend and continue after that,” Heinemann said. “And it’s by being generous and generating the next generation of scientists and scholars. I hope that we have a lasting legacy.”
Heinemann likened mentoring to conducting a symphony: “I like the image of a symphonic enterprise. It’s like we’re part of an orchestra. We’re part of something that’s making something beautiful. … It takes a conductor leading the operation, but it is every instrumentalist and vocalist that makes the symphony happen.”
