Lydia Villa-Komaroff

In 1996, Villa-Komaroff left laboratory research, and was recruited to Northwestern University where she served as vice president for Research of the university. In 2003 she returned to Boston, where she became the Vice President for Research and Chief Operating Officer of Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an affiliated research institute of MIT. Since 2005, she has served as a senior executive and board member of several biotechnology companies. She also continues to serve on the boards and committees of several major public and private institutions.

Later in the same year, she joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS), where she was a professor for six years before being granted tenure. The following year, she left for a position at Harvard Medical School with a lighter teaching workload and more research opportunities including her research on transforming growth factor- α and epidermal growth factor during fetal and neonatal development published in 1992 and 1993. There, she continued to establish her name in molecular biology, and in 1995 a television documentary called "DNA Detective" featured her work on insulin-related growth factors. The segment ran as part of a six-part PBS series on women in science, under the umbrella title "Discovering Women."

Villa-Komaroff felt that these failures aided in her biggest victory: six months after she was able to return to Harvard (once the ban on recombinant DNA experiments was lifted in 1977), she became a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Walter Gilbert. Within 6 months, she was the first author of the landmark report from the Gilbert laboratory showing that bacteria could be induced to make proinsulin– the first time a mammalian hormone was synthesized by bacteria. The research was a milestone in the birth of the biotechnology industry.

She completed her PhD at MIT in cell biology in 1975. She then went to Harvard to conduct her postdoctoral research for three years, focusing on recombinant DNA technology, under the supervision of Fotis Kafatos and Tom Maniatis. When Cambridge banned such experiments in 1976, citing worries about public safety and the chance of unintentionally creating a new disease, Villa-Komaroff moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. While at Cold Spring Harbor, she experienced repeated failures of her experiments; however, these disappointments taught her that “most experiments fail, and that scientists must accept failure as a part of the process”.

In 1973, while still a graduate student at MIT, she became a founding member of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS).

In 1970, Villa-Komaroff enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for graduate work in molecular biology. Her PhD dissertation, under the supervision of Harvey Lodish and Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, focused on how proteins are produced from RNA in poliovirus. She dedicated her thesis to her colleagues David Rekosh and David Housman, who she says "taught me to walk," and her advisors who "taught me what it might be like to fly."

In 1965, she entered the University of Washington in Seattle as a chemistry major. When an advisor told her that "women do not belong in chemistry" she switched majors, settling on biology. In 1967, she transferred to Goucher College in Maryland, when her boyfriend moved to the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area to work at the National Institutes of Health. It is believed that she applied to Johns Hopkins University, but was not accepted because they were not accepting women at that time. In 1970, she married her boyfriend, Dr. Anthony L. Komaroff, and the couple moved to Boston.

Lydia Villa-Komaroff (born August 7, 1947) is a molecular and cellular biologist who has been an academic laboratory scientist, a university administrator, and a business woman. She was the third Mexican-American woman in the United States to receive a doctorate degree in the sciences (1975) and is a co-founding member of The Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). Her most notable discovery was in 1978 during her post-doctoral research, when she was part of a team that discovered how bacterial cells could be used to generate insulin.

Lydia Villa-Komaroff was born on August 7, 1947, and grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was the eldest of six children; her father, John, was a teacher and musician and her mother, Drucilla, was a social worker. By the age of nine, Villa-Komaroff knew that she wanted to be a scientist, influenced in part by her uncle, a chemist. She was also inspired due to her mother's and grandmother's love for both nature and plants.