The history of America as the world’s leader in technological innovation has long been bereft of the extensive, groundbreaking contributions of men and women of color. The omission has been deliberate and in keeping with the prevailing ethic of a society unfortunately laden with prejudice since its inception.
Minorities and women, though, have continued to use extraordinary brainpower and research techniques to develop the technological movement that runs today’s world economy.
Scientists like Abhijit Mahalanobis develop major components of the missile defense system for the U.S. Army, while Wendy Williams ensures the continuing health of thousands of children.
Robert Shepard alternates between helping the nuclear industry harness atoms and helping developing nations find new food sources in underutilized plants, while Joanne Killinger wages war on diseases affecting the young and old.
Wayne Greaves and Jonathan Abraham are at the forefront of those seeking innovative cures to lethal viral killers, while Michael Smith’s research paves the way for modern laser surgery, and Malika Jeffries-El finds synthetic alternatives to damaged nerves.
And yet, the existence of these and other minority scientists and the contributions they have made remain unsung. That must change.
That is why, five years ago, Science Spectrum magazine enlisted the participation of the country’s major technological companies to help develop the first peer-reviewed awards honoring the finest minority research scientists in the nation. Those companies meticulously assessed some of America’s finest under-represented science workers, and below are the winners. They are the people behind the science of life---the 2006 Emerald Honorees.
Affirmative Action
Alicia Thomas
Associate Director - Sensory Sciences
Kraft Foods
It is impossible to discuss affirmative action and mentoring young scientists of color at Kraft Foods without starting at the desk of Alicia Thomas. And it is not as if Thomas, the associate director for Global Sensory Sciences, had nothing else to do but advance minority interests.
As a scientist with the global food giant, Ms. Thomas has had her hands on Kraft products and American taste buds for the past 25 years. Along the way, she was responsible for reducing the calories in Breyers ice cream and ensuring no loss of flavor―or customers―for Breyers Free. In addition, she and the more than 50 scientists she manages ensure the shelf life and sensory quality of Kraft’s array of worldwide products.
Thomas, a Chicago native, earned a degree in microbiology at Purdue, where, she says, “I was very cognizant of how much of a minority I was, and that was culturally shocking coming from Chicago. We started with 20 African Americans in the School of Science, and when I graduated, there were only three of us.”
She joined Kraft Foods research division in 1976 as one of a handful of Black scientists, and it took time for Thomas to learn to navigate the hidden rules that permeate corporate life and make it difficult for minorities to succeed. So she made it her mission to change the environment for those Blacks who followed her.
“With the sciences,” she says, “there is often a quandary as to how a corporation goes about bringing in scientific talent and nurturing that talent. There are survival skills you need to know.”
She developed a senior leader program, the Kraft Foods African American Council, which is now at five Kraft research facilities. The program pairs minority employees with senior managers, who are then responsible for their protégé’s career development, and their own performance is measured by their protégé’s success. On a broader level, Ms. Thomas pushed for the creation of a management forum where issues affecting minorities within the 2,000-member research operation could be addressed.
In addition to raising her own three children, Ms. Thomas has made time over the past decade to serve as a judge for the Chicago Public Schools regional science fairs.
Career Achievement – Government
Jonathan Ransom, Ph.D.
Branch Head
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The American space shuttle has been described as a flying brick with a fragile shell sitting on a fireball with four million pounds of thrust. For that brick to return safely from space, a rapid thermal transition must occur―from -250º F to a flaming 3,000º F―an unparalleled stress on its surface structures.
The American space shuttle has been employed in space research and exploration for the past 25 years, and for the duration of those 25 years, NASA’s foremost expert on computational mechanics and stress analysis for metallic and composite structures and materials has been Dr. Jonathan Ransom.
He is the author of more than 30 technical papers in national and international journals. As manager of the Computational Structures and Materials Branch at the Langley Research Center, Dr. Ransom is one of the few senior-level African Americans at NASA.
His specialty is researching how cracks propagate from the stresses of heat, cold, and interstellar radiation in different materials. Dr. Ransom was team leader and principal developer of a rapid modeling method, which revolutionized structural design and analysis and eliminated much of the expensive redesign and remanufacturing work. NASA earns more than $80 million annually by licensing this technology.
Ransom grew up near Norfolk, Virginia. He received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Virginia State and both his master’s degree in engineering mechanics and doctorate in aerospace engineering at Old Dominion University. He makes time to mentor engineering students from Spelman College and North Carolina A&T.
Ashok Kuman, Ph.D.
Program Manager
Office of Technical Directors
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
The government was faced with a billion-dollar problem, and the solution was found with a pencil at lunchtime. Literally thousands of government buildings, including family housing, were covered with hazardous, lead-based paint that required extraordinary efforts to remove.
“It was a big problem,” says Dr. Ashok Kumar, “and removing the paint costs an arm and a leg.”
It was past noon, and Dr. Kumar was tapping a #2 pencil, deciding whether to keep working or warm up lunch, when the eureka moment hit him: “What if the pencil’s yellow paint could be burned off with graphite?”
So he crushed the pencil point, spread it on the side of the pencil and stuck the pencil into the office microwave oven. “The result was, the graphite got burned and the paint blistered off,” Kumar says. “The microwave worked just fine, and I had lunch.”
He also saved the pencil, and earned a patent for developing the revolutionary process of removing lead-based paint with a graphite spray and directed microwaves.
That was a day’s work for Dr. Kumar, program manager of the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory for the Army Corps of Engineers, a capacity that makes him one of the Corps’ leading environmental engineers. He is the developer of seal-healing coatings―microcapsules smaller than a hair that contain healing epoxy to prevent low water corrosion in stationary structures, such as canal locks and oil platforms.
Dr. Kumar holds six U.S. patents, has authored more than 180 technical publications, and is a fellow of the American Society for Materials International.
Career Achievement – Industry
Wendy Reed Williams, Ph.D.
Director, Research Education
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
For Wendy Reed Williams, research was everything. Growing up outside of Baltimore, she says, “I would put pond water into a jar and look at it. I was fascinated the next day when it was cloudier and was always interested in finding out how that happened, what the processes were.”
She entered Howard University thinking that she wanted to become a doctor, “and realized I wanted to be behind the scenes and give the physicians what they needed.”
What doctors needed most was basic research that provided the tools to facilitate cures and treatments. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in zoology from Howard in 1993, she earned her doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in molecular genetics and biochemistry six years later. She worked for two years at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, learning to make transgenic mice for research use, before moving to Philadelphia, where she began research on pediatric cancers.
At Children’s Hospital, Dr. Williams rose through the ranks to become director of a staff with 250 faculty investigators, 1,100 researchers, and 250 trainees. She works with them not just on the nuts and bolts of research, but on the ethics of science.
“The fact that the Tuskegee case could go on for such a long time is amazing,” she says, “and so were the experiments with Jews in Nazi Germany. There is a moral side of me that realizes that there are things that you do not do in pursuit of science. Unfortunately, that doesn’t occur to everyone. Part of what drives me is the desire to make sure people understand that morality is important in what we do.”
Joanne Killinger, Ph.D.
Senior Vice President, Drug Safety & Metabolism
Wyeth Research
It was the little things that fascinated the young Joanne Killinger. In particular, why did the single-celled euglena eat from its environment when it was in darkness but resort to photosynthesis when exposed to light?
“I tried to figure out whether it was the visible light it needed for photosynthesis or if it could function in ultraviolet or infrared light,” she recalls. “I was fascinated because it behaved like a plant and an animal.” She won the New England science fair by showing ultraviolet light could do the trick.
Curiosity, dedication to strenuous research, and a refusal to take “no” for an answer have been hallmarks of her career. When the young, married Killinger entered Purdue University to seek a doctorate in biochemistry while starting her family, the department head told her to drop out and be a stay-at-home mom―even though she had the highest grades of any incoming student. Instead, she went to each individual professor, secured their support, and they collectively persuaded him to give her a chance.
“I feel good about that,” she says, “because I was able to do something that helped other women become scientists and have a family, which, at that time, was a difficult thing to do.”
Killinger got her doctorate in 1973 and rose through the ranks at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to become senior vice president for Drug Safety and Metabolism of their research arm. In that capacity, she oversees a staff of 550 in four American sites and a laboratory in Italy. She has also found time to volunteer, serving a three-year term on the board of the Hospice of the North Country in New York.
Community Service
Rube Williams
Technical Staff Member
Los Alamos National Laboratory
It’s not as if Rube Williams didn’t have enough to do. As a staff member with the Nuclear Systems Design and Risk Analysis Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dr. Rube Williams spent most of his days researching advanced nuclear reactor designs and microscale thermal physics.
He is one of the nation’s foremost designers of fission reactors―essential components in today’s nuclear navy―and was tapped to head the installation of radiation-monitoring systems to track special nuclear materials in Russia and other international locations.
If that weren’t enough, Williams is also a visiting professor of nuclear engineering at his alma mater, Texas A&M University, and has spent more than 27 hours in weightlessness conducting near-zero microgravity experiments for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
But Williams wanted more. “I always wanted to work with kids,” Williams says. “Wherever I’ve been, I had a tendency to tutor or teach mathematics to kids.”
But tutoring is informal and its benefits limited to a few. So he has taken a three-year leave of absence to develop the Jet Learning Laboratory in Houston, a special program that has taught math and science to some 800 school children.
Jet, which functions like the Sylvan Learning Centers, is an after-school enrichment program primarily serving minority students in Houston’s public schools. The program, now in its third year, serves kids from 3rd through 12th grade, as well as students from local colleges and universities.
“We want to build strong foundations in math and science for these youngsters,” he says.
Educational Leadership
Ronald (Shawn) Blanton, Ph.D.
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
In an increasingly technological society where thousands of microscopic processors give each other instructions in innumerable combinations, is it possible to find where an erroneous signal may be coming from, or is it necessary to just scrap the whole system and try again?
Starting over is always an option. But it is more effective to consult with Dr. Ronald (Shawn) Blanton, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Blanton has become one of the foremost experts in the development of systems used for testing integrated semiconductor circuits and microelectromechanical systems.
“When you manufacture a million chips a day,” Blanton explains, “there is a fraction that just don’t work, and it is not obvious why. I develop techniques to discover if they work or do not work in an efficient manner―and you have to be able to do that quickly, since they are moving a million chips a day. Delphi makes chips that control air bag deployment in cars, for example. You want to make sure that every one of those systems is working and that you are not shipping bad products to the end user.”
Blanton is also associate director of the University’s Center for Silicon System Implementation, which focuses on the development of new types of integrated circuits as an alternative to simply making the circuits smaller or adding more transistors.
While developing these testing systems, however, Blanton was also actively recruiting minority students to come to Carnegie Mellon. He organized the university’s chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers and, for the past decade, has headed the University’s recruiting efforts.
“It’s depressing to go talk to students who are bright and do not have a clue about graduate school,” Blanton says. “Every year, we are breaking this mold and opening their eyes.”
Robert Shepard, Ph.D.
Executive Director, S.E.A.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
In the early days of harnessing nuclear power for commercial and military use, Robert Shepard took his newly minted Howard University doctorate in organic chemistry and joined the relatively young organization called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). He was responsible for developing methods for counting atoms in a system that assembled commercial and weapons-grade uranium one molecule at a time.
“The fabricating facilities,” Shepard says, “were all going from uranium hexafluoride to uranium oxide, and we had to be concerned about this highly strategic material. How do you make sure that what goes into the process comes out at the back end?”
It was Shepard’s systems that improved security for nuclear resources throughout the country, and in 1980, he represented the NRC by presenting a paper on the subject at an international symposium in Scotland.
“Here I was,” he recalls, “on an official passport coming out of the tobacco fields of North Carolina. I was wondering if it was real.”
In 1984, he became the NRC’s first loaned executive, spending four years at Howard University applying technology to solving food shortage problems in Africa and other developing nations by ascertaining the nutritional properties of lesser-known plants.
Shepard, who was the highest ranking Black scientist at the NRC, then persuaded the Department of Education and the NRC to work with Historically Black Colleges and Universities to strengthen their research opportunities and capabilities.
That led to his forming the Science and Engineering Alliance (SEA) between the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Alabama A&M, Prairie View, Southern, and Jackson State Universities. While SEA consists of those four schools, other HBCUs are brought into the mix for specific research projects. A federally funded SEA grant to study the impact of climate change on the gulf coast included researchers from Mississippi State and Florida A&M.
In the ensuing 15 years, SEA has provided scholarships, summer jobs, and graduate appointments to hundreds of minority students interested in careers in high-level scientific research.
Lifetime Achievement
Dr. Donald Wilson
Dean
University of Maryland School of Medicine
In 1991, Dr. Donald Wilson walked into the University of Maryland as the first Black dean of a predominantly white medical school and found an attitude that troubled him a lot.
“They felt they were second class citizens,” Dr. Wilson says. “They were comparing themselves to Johns Hopkins and felt they were inferior. There was a feeling that since they were at a state institution, people expected them to be okay but not outstanding.”
He ordered an assistant to apply for a federal grant as the primary researcher, even though the usual practice was to seek a subcontract from Johns Hopkins. That lack of confidence was one reason research grants totaled only $77 million that year.
“We submitted the grant and we won it,” Dr. Wilson says. “That was the first indication to the staff that they were, in fact, excellent and had talent.”
He convinced the staff that the way to grow both financially and in stature within the medical community was to improve the level of primary research funding. “A lot of people who had talent didn’t apply for grants because they didn’t think they were competitive,” he recalls. “I insisted that if they wanted any money from the dean’s office, they had to get it from the NIH [National Institutes of Health] first.”
And get it they did, raising the level of research grants to $350 million last year. The increasing prestige of the school’s research―particularly in AIDS and schizophrenia―boosted philanthropic giving from a paltry $1.7 million in 1991 to $37 million last year.
Dr. Wilson is immediate past chair of the Association of American Medical Colleges, which represents the 125 accredited U.S. medical schools and 400 teaching hospitals, and he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Lifetime Achievement – Diversity
Anthony Santiago
Vice President, Global Strategic Sourcing
Bristol-Myers Squibb
It is difficult to go through life without being affected by Bristol-Myers Squibb. The pharmaceutical giant makes Excedrin and Bufferin, baby formula, and treatments for cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
Anthony Santiago joined the company 25 years ago after receiving an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked his way up through successive layers of responsibility until reaching his current post as vice president of Global Strategic Sourcing for their domestic and international needs. Santiago made sure that the company has the most efficient supply train, and he made sure that their billion-dollar global supplier network was diverse.
“I make sure we have people dedicated to bringing in business with diverse suppliers―that is minorities, women, veterans, and the disabled,” he says.
Through Santiago, Squibb works closely with the National Minority Supplier Development Council, the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, and other organizations to develop an ever-expanding network of diverse suppliers. About 30 percent of Squibb’s supplier spending is with minority firms.
Internally, Santiago has worked with the company’s senior management and human resources departments to improve both diversity within the workplace and the retention of minorities and women. Today, 24 percent of the company’s managers are women, and about 23 percent are minorities.
Santiago has also made time to serve on the board of directors of the Boys and Girls Club of Mercer County, New Jersey, which supports some 1,600 youth in a downtown Trenton youth center and in five area elementary schools.
Most Promising Scientist
Malika Jeffries-El, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Iowa State University
The problem can be simply stated: Develop a single-molecule conductive polymer capable of carrying electrical charges and adhering to different surfaces.
The solution can be simply stated also: Create a monocapped conductive polymer with alkenyl end groups and block copolymers.
The implications, however, are enormous. What Dr. Malika Jeffries-El developed as a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University was a polymer that can be used in critical health care. “These are like artificial nerves to conduct electricity to living cells,” she explains.
But for Jeffries-El, the Brooklyn native and patent holder, the specially designed, ground-breaking polymer is simply one of many interesting puzzles she hopes to solve that will better the lot of mankind.
She says, “You could basically override the circuitry or reroute signals in people who are paralyzed. That is one of the major applications―helping people with spinal cord or hearing loss or any significant nerve injury damage.”
Her work with polymers is an outgrowth of a curiosity nurtured in childhood. “I always wanted to know how things worked,” she says, “and realized in high school that chemistry has infinite possibilities as to what you can make and explore.”
She received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Wellesley and then earned her doctorate at George Washington University. Dr. Jeffries-El then spent four years developing her monocapped conductive polymer at Carnegie Mellon before accepting a faculty position at the Iowa State University. There, she has expanded her repertoire to include nanotechnology and plastic solar cells.
Justin Shekwoga Baba, Ph.D.
Research and Development Staff
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
If it weren’t for bad weather, Justin Baba might still be teaching neophytes to fly. He emigrated from Nigeria to attend LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas, to learn to fly airplanes. He graduated in 1994 and worked as a flight instructor. Unfortunately, he says, “I hated flying as a job. I felt like my brain was rotting away. When there were weather delays, I would watch CNN, and they always had interesting segments on science and technology.
“I thought I should be doing that. And learning how my body really worked.”
So he pursued a degree in biomedical engineering, earning a doctorate from Texas A&M in 2003. He was immediately hired by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to help develop and grow the biomedical engineering research program at the lab’s Engineering Science and Technology Division.
In the three years he has been there, Dr. Baba has shaped the future direction of their biomedical program. He developed a means for motion-corrected spectral imaging, which allows for detailed monitoring of brain functions while the person is alert and moving around. He then developed a revolutionary, noninvasive skin cancer detection system, which is now undergoing clinical trials at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
In addition, Dr. Baba chaired a technical session on optical diagnostics of cancer and assessment of tumors for the International Society for Optical Engineering, and he makes time to mentor students at the Roane County High School.
President’s Award
Dr. Wayne Greaves
Senior Director, Clinical Research
Schering-Plough Corporation
For the past 30 years, Dr. Wayne Greaves has devoted his life to unraveling the intricacies of, and finding solutions for, some of the world’s most intractable viruses.
After receiving his medical training in Montreal, Dr. Greaves spent two years at Vanderbilt University with a fellowship in infectious diseases, followed by two years at the Centers for Disease Control as a sleuth, tracking disease vectors, especially those that cause sexually transmitted diseases.
“Then along came HIV/AIDS,” he says. “It was a new disease that was unknown and exciting to understand.”
Greaves went to Howard University College of Medicine and spent the next decade researching the disease and developing different medical and societal methods for dealing with its spread and treatment.
“It was frustrating at first,” he recalls. “In the early days, there was considerable denial that it was a problem that affected the African-American community. It was seen as a gay, white disease, and it wasn’t talked about.
“And while it was a taboo subject, the infections were being transmitted. It took a while before there were culturally relevant and sensitive messages that would reach the Latin American and African-American communities.”
Dr. Greaves developed AIDS outreach and treatment programs for adults and children at Howard and then went to Schering-Plough’s New Jersey research facilities in 1997 as a project director seeking new drugs to treat the disease in its early stages. In this capacity, Dr. Greaves directs research in the company’s facilities here and abroad and interacts with affiliated labs around the world, pursuing innovative treatments and seeking cures to the HIV virus.
“I have done a lot in helping to care for people who are infected,” he says. “Here I hope to develop a drug that may be meaningful and useful on a much broader scale, and in the process, help millions of people.”
Tammara Combs-Turner
Vice President of Professional Development BAM
Microsoft Corporation
Tammara Combs-Turner is a child of the modern technological society who may one day become one of its leaders.
She graduated magna cum laude from the talented and gifted high school in her native St. Louis, and she then earned a degree in computer science from Xavier University―becoming the first in her family to complete college.
Her relationship with Microsoft began during her sophomore year of college, when she was recruited as a software test engineer intern. She went on to hold five internships while at Xavier and then while earning her master’s degree in computer science and computer human interaction at the University of Maryland in 1999.
She then joined Microsoft Research, specializing in community technologies while pursuing a doctorate in information sciences at the University of Washington. As a program manager at Microsoft, Combs-Turner works on developing tools to help measure the interactions and improve the communications among users of online newsgroups.
In addition to her academic pursuits and technical work, Combs-Turner is vice president of professional development for Blacks at Microsoft―an organization within the company responsible for recruiting, mentoring, and career development. And she makes time to participate in a pre-college ministry through her church and, with her husband, rear two children.
Professional Achievement – Government
John Abrefah, Ph.D.
Staff Engineer
Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
The 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania and the complete meltdown of a reactor at Chernobyl, Ukraine, seven years later made it clear to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that many of the assumptions of nuclear fuel behavior and reactor stability were wrong. The nation’s nuclear fleets―commercial and military―were ending their second decade of operations with urgent questions about their long-term operating capabilities.
The timing was propitious for John Abrefah, who left his native Ghana to study nuclear engineering at the University of Manchester in England. He originally intended to become a medical doctor, but he decided to take the advice of his professors, who thought he would make a better engineer. Abrefah then came to America and earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in nuclear engineering materials from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987.
The U.S. Department of Energy brought him to their Battelle-Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to help answer these questions. Dr. Abrefah specialized in core damage scenarios for light water rectors and the kinetics of long-term fuel degradation. Over the next two decades, Dr. Abrefah’s work would allow the Department of Energy and NRC to establish the standards for the use of nuclear fuels including, for example, the need to replace fuel after 18 months to avoid unnecessary deterioration in the reactor core.
His studies on exothermic fires resulting from the exposure of the highly radioactive spent fuel helped establish standards for the massive spent fuel cooling pools used at every nuclear facility. It is Dr. Abrefah’s research that has led to the operational standards making nuclear power an addition to our energy mix rather than a menace to our lives.
Arthur Davis
Laboratory Director, Pathobiology Laboratory
U.S. Department of Agriculture
The mission of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is to ensure that the nation’s agriculture and livestock industries keep our food safe and healthy. Both of these goals rest on the research scientists who examine everything from the nutritional content of the vitamins we take and those we inject into livestock, to the diseases that sometimes infect livestock and threaten the health of the nation’s consumers.
At the heart of that mission is the USDA National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, headed by Dr. Arthur J. Davis. As chief of the Pathobiology Laboratory, Dr. Davis and his staff search for signs and causes of bacterial infections, chicken flu viruses, West Nile virus, and other parasites or organisms. They stand guard for toxicants throughout the food chain. Dr. Davis in particular is the nation’s authority on Mad Cow disease.
His affinity for the field comes naturally. “I grew up on a little plot of land near Tuskegee, Alabama where my parents planted stuff for us to eat,” he says.
Davis received his bachelor’s degree in medical technology under a combined program at Tennessee State University and Meharry Medical College, and then he earned a doctorate in veterinary medicine back home in Tuskegee. Then he earned a master’s degree in veterinary pathology at Iowa State University in 1986 in Ames, where he began working in the national USDA labs. He has stayed there, spending the last two decades ensuring the health of the nation’s food supply.
Professional Achievement – Industry
Sharon Haynie, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator, Biochemical Sciences & Engineering
E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co.
Sharon Haynie fell in love with molecules during her eighth grade chemistry class in the Baltimore public school system, and she has since spent her life developing ways to use them to improve people’s health.
She received her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and then earned a doctorate at MIT in 1981. After a short stint conducting research into polymer degradation at Bell Laboratories, she joined the E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co. as a principal investigator in biochemical sciences and engineering. And there she began putting molecules to work. Haynie was on the cutting edge of science, laying the foundation for practical applications.
There was, for example, the problem with synthetic materials used for hip and other bone replacements. Haynie’s research led to the identification of synthetic structures that laid the foundation for vein replacements when it was not possible to graft one of the patient’s own veins.
Haynie led DuPont’s research into antimicrobial materials, which would either repel or kill micro-organisms on contact. In this project, Dr. Haynie isolated a class of peptides with inherent antimicrobial properties, analyzed the way they worked, and found ways to develop synthetic molecules that could then be used in garments, catheters, and other items.
She is currently leading the company’s research into “green chemistry,” which one day could substitute polymers derived from renewable plants for polymers derived from petroleum in a wide range of synthetic materials.
Professionally, Dr. Haynie is active in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Chemical Society. In her spare time, she reads science textbooks for recordings for the blind and dyslexic.
Silvia King
Senior Principal Scientist
McCormick & Co. Inc.
In a world of myriad natural scents, textures, and tastes augmented by a synthetic array of imitators, how can a food company know what to put into its seasonings and precooked foods?
If the company is McCormick―which provides some of the staple seasonings in most American homes and provides ingredients and products for the nation’s top 200 food and food service companies―the sensible thing to do is ask Silvia King. Ms. King is the senior principal scientist at McCormick, and for nearly 20 years, she has led their sensory research into food science.
In a sense, this is a field for which she was born.. She grew up in an Italian family in Colombia, a household with European and Latin American cooking flavors and styles.
Her father, a food chemist, would conduct experiments by making pink or green bread and asking her to describe the taste. It was not surprising, then, that she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in food science, with a specialty in sensory evaluation at the University of Georgia. Her master’s thesis helped set standards for the shelf life of beer.
Since graduating, she has brought a scientific mind to the field of sensory evaluation, developing the standards that communicate whether our taco seasoning is mild, medium hot, or volcanic.
The scientific rigor of her evaluation methods has earned her leadership roles in both the Institute of Food Technologists and the American Society for Testing and Materials. She is also co-editor of a manual on cross-cultural techniques for conducting consumer testing.
For nearly a decade, she has taught sensory evaluation techniques at both Rutgers University and the University of Maryland. She is also a volunteer Spanish instructor for elementary school children in an after-school program.
Senior Investigator
Venkatesh Krishnan, Ph.D.
Research Advisor, Musculoskeletal
Eli Lilly & Co.
Dr. Krishnan, one of the foremost discoverers of molecular treatments for hormone-related conditions in the laboratories of Eli Lilly & Co., is a molecular biologist who has devoted his professional life to analyzing nuclear hormone receptors―particularly estrogen and androgen receptors―and the roles they play in maintaining muscle and bone mass, reproductive biology, and cancer development. It is this type of research that has led to treatments for osteoporosis, earned him nine patents, and provided valuable insights into the intricate workings of similar hormones.
“The estrogen hormone,” Dr. Krishnan says, “is crucial in maintaining bone mass and urogenital health and preventing Alzheimer’s disease. The bad part of that same hormone is that it can promote the risk for uterine cancer.”
“We have tried to engineer a synthetic molecule that will not have a negative function, such as promoting the risk for cancer, while maintaining bone and cardiovascular health.”
Those distinctions are crucial in developing medicines for an aging populace.
Dr. Krishnan, received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biochemistry at the University of Bombay in his native India, and he earned a doctorate in the field from Texas A&M in 1994. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Baylor College of Medicine until 1998, when he joined Eli Lilly.
Michael Smith
Director, Edgewood R&D Operations
ITT Industries Inc.
For more than 20 years, Michael J. Smith has either led or participated in trailblazing research that has changed the way medical personnel perform life-saving surgeries, identify and react to biological and chemical threats, and protect the military.
Smith received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985 and began working with the U.S. Department of Defense on medical applications of laser technology. This was actually a spin-off of the Star-Wars program, and the notion was new.
“As a general rule,” he says, “physicists didn’t have a lot of experience with the biological side of lasers. But the goal was to use free electron lasers since they were tunable. You could move between different wavelengths and study the interaction. I always thought that was interesting.”
It turned out to be of more than passing interest. He worked in conjunction with medical centers across the country on ways to deliver laser power to precise spots, with precise temperatures, within the human body. “The key was to calculate how much energy to deliver so you only got the level of penetration you were looking for,” Smith explains. Too much power, of course, would shoot a laser bolt through a person.
To facilitate precision, Smith developed a fiber optic delivery system that enabled cancer researchers to focus precisely tuned laser energy on a liver cancer mass. In 1990, the first human trial of laser surgery for cancer was conducted at Walter Reed Army Hospital. His team was also working on ophthalmic surgical techniques, paving the way for today’s common laser eye surgery.
Smith moved on to head the Edgewood research and development operations of ITT Industries, where he runs a $500-million program with 23 subcontractors. Along the way, Smith developed a system for laser spectral analysis of moisture droplets in clouds to detect biological or chemical agents. The system greatly expands protection against military or terrorist attacks with these agents.
Senior Technology Fellow
Jack C. Roberts, Ph.D.
Research Professor
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Theoretically, titanium makes a great replacement for smashed bones. Unfortunately, the body doesn’t really like it.
“Metals like titanium have a stiffness that is much higher than real bone,” explains Dr. Jack Roberts, “and this difference causes a problem at the interface between the implant and the connecting bone. The real bone grows away from the implant, which then loosens, and you have to have new surgery to replace it.”
That problem intrigued Dr. Roberts, principal investigator in the Technical Services Department of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. His research has led to a class of glass fiber composites that would have at least the strength of normal bone, without the repulsive qualities that have bedeviled previous bone implants.
Dr. Roberts is an expert in structural analysis, composite materials, biomaterials, and biomechanics. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan and worked as a researcher in dental materials until 1977. Then, Roberts, a Native American, pursued a doctorate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which he earned in 1980 while researching problems with composite materials in hip replacements.
He came to Johns Hopkins in 1994, where he worked on improving body armor for combat soldiers. The standard test at that time was to put body armor on a model or animal and shoot it. The armor passed the test if the bullet got no further than 44 millimeters―a depth that could cause a lot of damage to the human body.
Roberts developed surrogate models using pressure sensors in the area of organs so there could be a better understanding of the shock of bullet impacts.
Herren Wu, Ph.D.
Senior Director, Antibody Discovery
MedImmune Inc.
Herren Wu is on a quest to improve the body’s defenses in the war on disease.
As senior director of antibody discovery and protein engineering for MedImmune Inc., Dr. Wu leads teams of researchers probing the human genome for specific genes capable of producing better antibodies for specific diseases. In a sense, it is a quest for the body’s magic bullet for some of society’s most intractable diseases.
“Humans have one billion antibodies,” Wu explains. “If you have a common cold, you get sick, the body generates antibodies, and that is why you recover. But if you have a seriously infectious disease, before the body creates antibodies, you can become too sick to survive.
“What we do is harvest all the antibody genes, put them in test tubes, then screen them to find the antibody that can neutralize a disease. Then, through protein engineering, we try to improve the function of the gene to make it more potent than what your body can generate on its own.”
Dr. Wu has already garnered 22 patents for his super genes and the process of making them.
A native of Taiwan, Dr. Wu received his bachelor’s in chemistry from the National Taiwan University in 1986, his doctorate in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and completed his postdoctoral training at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California in 1995. He then worked as associate director of antibody engineering and discovery at Eli Lily & Co. and in a similar position with Tanox Inc. before joining MedImmune in 2002.
Student Leadership
Jonathan Abraham
Student Trainee
National Institutes of Health
Jonathan Abraham grew up in New York City, but his parents immigrated to Canada from Haiti and then came to Springfield Gardens, in the Queens section of New York. Abraham was keenly aware that diseases such as Ebola and HIV had far greater impact on populations in less developed countries than they did in North America, and on low income communities within the United States. Through science, he hopes to change that.
“My high school, where at least one-fourth of the students were Haitian, was nicknamed ‘AIDS-field’ because of this huge misconception that Haitians were responsible for the spread of AIDS in the United States,” he says.
He attended Harvard on New York Times and National Institutes of Health (NIH) scholarships, and he soon began researching two of the world’s most lethal viruses.
“I was always interested in infectious diseases,” Abraham says. “They predominantly affect people in impoverished nations, and my ultimate goal is to give back to those populations through research.”
“HIV is a big problem in the Caribbean right now, and influenza, HIV, and Ebola all enter cells through fusion machinery that is an attractive target for therapeutic treatment. If you can prevent it from entering the cell, you can stop it before it causes harm,” he says.
Abraham began focusing on ways to prevent these viruses from entering the cell as a junior at Harvard. This was a departure from the prevailing approach, which targeted infected cells and sought to disrupt or reduce their ability to replicate. His approach piqued the interest of the Vaccine Research Center at the NIH in Bethesda, and Abraham began working there after graduating from Harvard in 2005.
“I want to use science to have an impact on human health,” he says.
By all indications, Abraham is on his way to doing just that.
Rejanah Steward
IGERT Research Fellow
University of Tennessee
Rejanah Steward has always been fascinated by structures. In high school, that meant viewing structures as an art form and an interest in architecture. As a mechanical engineering major at Mississippi State, however, that meant an interest in how to build structures and what makes them fall down.
She received her master’s degree in materials science and engineering from Auburn University in 1999 and has pursued her doctorate through course work at the Georgia Institute of Technology and research at the University of Tennessee.
In the decade since graduating from Mississippi State, she has specialized in the failure analysis of structural materials, particularly super-alloy nickel-based metals at low operating temperatures. Her research has brought her to the attention of the energy and chemical industries, whose extensive piping suffers from corrosion and fatigue due to the nature of the business. After defending her dissertation in August, Dr. Steward will continue her research at the operational level with the oilfield giant, Slumber J.
Steward’s life has not been singularly devoted to academics, however. She was a student recruiter and mentor at Mississippi State, a member of student government, president of the campus chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, and a tutor for students in AutoCAD, calculus, and chemistry.
As a graduate student, she worked in outreach programs for the Tennessee Lewis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, the Society of Women engineers, and the National Society of Black Engineers. In addition, she serves food in a homeless ministry and is director of nursery, toddler, and preschool ministries at her church.
How does she find time for it all? “I’m guided by the Lord,” Steward says. “I have the opportunity to do outreach services because He helps me maximize my time during the day.”
Special Recognition
Erica Doczy
Associate Biomedical Engineer
Air Force Research Laboratory
Dharmendra Jani
Senior Principal Scientist
Bausch & Lomb
Sujanto Widjaja, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Corning Inc.
JoAnn Edlow
Director, Quality Systems
Dade Behring Inc.
Anil Duggal, Ph.D.
Advanced Technology Leader
GE Global Research Center
Alfonzo Jordan, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist
Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development
Ke Liu, Ph.D.
Project Leader
GE Global Research Center
Jorge Bouzas, Ph.D.
Senior Director, International Product Devevelopment
The Hershey Company
Ruth Cheng, Ph.D.
Research Computer Scientist
U.S. Army Engineer Research & Development Center
Daphne Mobley, D.V.M.
Vice President, Corporate Diversity
Wyeth Research
