Lydia Villa-Komaroff

Lydia Villa-Komaroff is an award winning researcher who has surpassed racial and gender barriers. Her family is native to Mexico, but she was born in New Mexico. At a young age she began to fall in love with science. She started her collegiate journey as a chemistry major but soon changed to biology. After moving to Washington D.C with her soon-to-be husband, she was denied acceptance into Johns Hopkins University to finish her undergraduate degree because female students were not being accepted. Despite this set back, she finished her degree at a different college and later continued on to graduate school at MIT. This is where she began her work in the field of molecular biology and gained her PhD in cell biology.
 
Dr. Villa-Komaroff was apart of a research team the worked on cloning insulin in 1977. She was successfully apart of the group that conducted the first synthesis of mammalian insulin in bacterial cells with the use of recombinant DNA. Her research also includes the discovery of a molecule associated with Alzheimer's disease causes degeneration of neurons in the brain. This molecule is known as amyloid beta, and before her research it was not very clear if this molecule produced the degeneration or was a byproduct of the degeneration of the neurons. This discovery led to further research on treating Alzheimer's by targeting the amyloid beta molecule.

If her groundbreaking research wasn't amazing enough, Dr. Villa-Komaroff has attained numerous awards and honors. A number of her awards have been in regards for Hispanics or women in science. This just goes to show that she was able to break through the barriers she faced in her early scientific career.

Here is an article on her:
http://www.unhny.org/programs-and-issues/stem-spotlight-lydia
Here is her article regarding her research on cloning insulin:
http://www.pnas.org/content/75/8/3727.full.pdf