Office Hours: Lasting Bonds Bentley Professor of Chemistry Erich Uffelman reflects on mentorship in and out of the classroom.

Bentley Professor of Chemistry Erich Uffelman, faculty mentor for the women’s basketball team, helps cut down the net after the team’s 2026 ODAC Championship win.

Having Washington and Lee students in my life, both in Lexington and sometimes beyond graduation, has been one of my life’s greatest blessings.”

~ Erich Uffelman, Bentley Professor of Chemistry

For four months, Bentley Professor of Chemistry Erich Uffelman wore the same tie to every Washington and Lee women’s basketball game. It was a Christmas gift from two of the 2025-26 players, Quinn McGuinness ’26 and Elka Prechel ’26. The Generals went 28-0 in the regular season and ODAC tournament and made the program’s second NCAA Sweet 16 and Elite 8 appearances, finishing the season 31-1.

Uffelman has been the team’s faculty mentor since 2004, when Ernest Williams II Professor of Spanish Ellen Mayock launched a program pairing W&L faculty with varsity sports. He says he was delighted to be paired with women’s basketball.

“I know nothing about basketball,” he says, “and I don’t even try to talk about basketball with the team.”

What he does, he says, is show up. Uffelman attends every home game he can and makes himself available to anyone on the team who wants to talk.

“Sometimes, just showing up at the games is about all that I do,” he says. “Other times, members of the team want to talk to me about various aspects of their life, and I’m delighted to do that. That’s the main reason why I do it.”

Coming Full Circle

Last academic year, Uffelman had two women’s baskeball players as advisees —McGuinness for three years and Emily Straughn ’27, who also took his Chem 110 course. And that team also included a full-circle moment: Mary Schleusner ’26 is the daughter of Anne Redford Schleusner ’93, a chemistry major who, as a senior, took Uffelman to lunch on his job interview visit to Lexington. Her enthusiasm, he says, was a large part of what convinced him to come to W&L.

Uffelman is quick to credit the coaches he has worked with for over two decades.

“Our women’s basketball coaches over the years have been wonderful,” he says. “They value not only their players’ performance on the court but their growth as individuals, and they have great interest in their academic success.”

The Right Match

Uffelman’s approach to advising starts with academics at the heart.

“Job number one is getting people into the classes they need,” he says. “For some students, that is the relationship, and that’s totally cool. If they want more, I’m totally open to it. But it has to come from the student.”

His own undergraduate advisers at Bucknell University shaped that view. One once told an inorganic chemistry class that no matter what a professor does, some students will love working with him and others won’t.

“That’s why it’s important to have many amazing colleagues,” Uffelman says, “so a student can find the person they resonate with.”

Borrowed Space

Uffelman’s most intensive form of student mentorship happens about 4,000 miles from Lexington, in the conservation labs of Dutch and Belgian museums. Every two years, he takes a small group of students to the Netherlands for four weeks during Spring Term to study the technical examination of 17th-century Dutch paintings, often in museums’ conservation laboratories.

“It’s the most intense teaching that I do,” he says.

It is also where his standards are least negotiable. Uffelman interviews students before they enroll in the Winter Term prep course that precedes the trip.

“I tell students, ‘This is the coolest, most interesting business trip you’ll ever take — but it is a business trip,’” he says. “‘You don’t have to be great at art history. You don’t have to be great at science. But you have to be supremely reliable.’

“We continue to access these spaces because W&L students rise to meet those expectations,” he adds.

Uffelman also takes summer researchers to the Netherlands to do more in-depth work on old master paintings, standing inches from the art and using analytical instruments most undergraduate students never touch.

“Former students from these experiences as well as my regular courses have become some of my closest friends,” he says.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of W&L: The Washington and Lee Magazine. Contact us at magazine@wlu.edu.