Arguably the most impactful of LeRoy Poff’s work has been in the arena of riverine conservation management, but his applied work is solidly and uncompromisingly built upon foundations in basic ecological science. LeRoy’s dedication to basic science is strongly reflected in his mentorship style, which allowed generous space for graduate students to pursue wide-ranging ideas. Student research in the Poff lab has spanned spatial scales from local (e.g. biotic interactions on single rocks in a streambed) to continental, and temporal scales from seconds to evolutionary time. Study approaches have been similarly wide-ranging, including (but certainly not limited to) experimental manipulations in field and lab, underwater photography, nearly every available method for collecting and quantifying in-stream organisms and the terrestrial adults of aquatic insects, sophisticated statistics for interpreting large datasets, GIS, and population genetics. We grad students earned this intellectual freedom on the conditions that: 1) our work was grounded in ecological theory and logically built on the results of others, and 2) we could justify our ideas concisely to him, in writing. As such, we learned that the following activities were crucial: Read. Write. Go to NABS (now SFS) to meet others and hash out ideas. I will celebrate LeRoy’s mentorship style with examples from my own research and experiences as his graduate student. The extraordinary diversity of LeRoy’s contributions to stream ecology has stemmed not just from his own breadth of interests and experience but also from his unique mentorship approach, which is trickling down by way of his students to inspire breadth, creativity, and collaboration in the next generations of stream ecology students.