Lydia Villa-Komaroff

Lydia Villa_Komaroff (http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/ _client/images/influentials/LydiaVilla.jpg)

A hero has to have the right qualites, the right views of life, liberty, and happiness. A hero is different to all different kinds of people; The Dictionary defines hero as "In mythology and legend, a man, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his bold exploits, and favored by the gods." But what is a hero; do any of us really know? I believe that Lydia Villa-Komaroff expresses a hero, or as close to one as it's going to get.

Lydia (www.witi.com)

Lydia Villa-Komaroff spent more than twenty years of her life studying genes, cell development and growth mutations. Lydia's character expresses strength, stability, endurance and hope. She was born on August 7th, 1947 in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Becoming a scientist was not unexpected. Having a grandmother and mother who loved nature and plants, and a uncle who was a chemist, science was a natural for her.

Lydia knew she wanted to be a scientist at the age of nine. While still in high school, she won a minority scholarship to attend a summer lab program at a college in Texas. School life for Lydia wasn't always good. She indeed made it into college in spite of the socially isolated years of high school where she actually flunked organic chemistry. But discipline, hard work, and getting help when needed, helped her pass with an "A" the second time around.

Lydia ( http://www.ascb.org/news/ vol24no1/ie/january-01_4_1.jpg)

She was the third Mexican-American woman in the U.S. to receive a doctorate in the sciences. A doctorate is an academic degree of the highest level and it made her a powerful woman. After college, Lydia became Associate Vice President for Research at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Lydia is also a professor of neurology at Northwestern University Medical School; but before these high career jobs, she was a research scientist for twenty years. Lydia had the privilege and the pleasure of planning experiments that provided information of how living things work.

During Lydia's experiments, she got the underlying question of how a single-celled organism becomes a complex creature. As she got older, though, her job changed to one of helping other scientists have a healthy, easier environment to get the job done. She still hasn't left science, but yet she is less active. Lydia Villa-Komaroff is still alive to this day, still pondering the many questions of science, but forever will she be down in our books as a hero.