To encourage more women to pursue careers in science, engage them while they’re young, says molecular biologist Lydia Villa-Komaroff.
“When girls do science as kids, they can maintain interest,” she says.
Villa-Komaroff fell in love with science in high school, when she attended a National Science Foundation Summer Science Training Program at Texas College in Tyler, Texas. She went on to earn a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — only the third Mexican-American woman to do so.
Today, Villa-Komaroff is the chief scientific officer at a company whose machinery will sort cells and purify them so they won’t be rejected by the body’s immune system, as is often the case in bone marrow transplants.