Over his career, Dale Bauman mentored 40 graduate students receiving MS/PhD degrees, and 20 post-docs and visiting scholars. His mentees have become faculty members at universities around the world or key industry researchers. These individuals represent the next generation of educators, scientists, and industry influencers and many have already become leaders in agriculture science. This was the basis for his selection as the ASN Dannon Award for Mentoring. Bauman was also faculty advisor to undergraduates (~20 annually) and over the last 10 years before retirement he directed 43 undergraduate independent research projects and supervised 14 senior honors thesis projects. Bauman’s loyalty and allegiance to his former students and his willingness to be a “lifelong” mentor is a tribute to his character and passion for his “teaching” trade. By the mid-1990s, Dale had inarguably become the world’s thought leader in multiple fields (biochemical pathways of ruminant fatty acid synthesis, homeorhesis, rbST, and nutrient partitioning). During the 1990s and 2000s, Bauman became the global authority in 2 more scientific areas: milk fat depression (MFD) and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) synthesis. He discovered the role of nutrition and management practices on milk composition and the application of this knowledge to address diet-induced MFD, a problem that had perplexed dairy producers and baffled scientists for almost 150 yr. Bauman and associates first identified that CLA isomers inhibited mammary fat synthesis and proposed the “biohydrogenation theory” to explain MFD. An important component of Bauman’s research focused on “functional foods” to improve the healthfulness of ruminant-derived foods. His group’s original contributions include developing analytical methods, identifying biochemical pathways of CLA synthesis in the rumen and via endogenous synthesis, and demonstrating nutrition and management practices that influence milk fat CLA content. Bauman and collaborators demonstrated that the major CLA isomer in milk fat has anti-carcinogenic and anti-diabetic effects in biomedical studies and they were the first to show that CLA effectively reduces mammary tumors when fed as dairy products.