Lydia Villa-Komaroff

Lydia Villa-Komaroff, a Ph.D. in Cell Biology, is currently CEO of Cytonome, a company building the first optical cell sorter capable of supporting rapid, sterile sorting of human cells for therapeutic use.

Lydia was born on August 7, 1947, and grew up in Sante Fe, New Mexico. As the eldest of six children, she developed teamwork- and consensus-building skills out of necessity; these skills would later serve her well in the lab and the workplace.

>>  I’ll be speaking with Lydia about her growing up years and how they shaped her.

Taking cues from those above her, Lydia had many relatives who served as strong role models. Her mother worked as a teacher and social worker. Lydia’s paternal grandmother had been a curandera, or a healer, and her maternal grandmother, a lone breadwinner with three children, had sold chemical toilets on horseback up in the mountains.

Lydia knew by age nine that she wanted to be a scientist. While still in high school, she won a minority scholarship from the National Science Foundation to attend a summer lab program at a college in Texas. In 1965, she enrolled as a chemistry major at the University of Washington in Seattle. After an advisor told Lydia that women did not belong in chemistry, she switched majors, finally settling on biology.

>>  How did Lydia react to being detracted from certain science fields initially?  And then later?

Commenting on her parents’ whole-hearted backing of her budding resolve, Lydia noted, “In the Mexican American family, what papa says goes, so it’s clear that his support made a difference in my life. What’s also amazing is that my parents fully accepted and supported my decision to go far away to college…. In the southwestern Chicano culture that I came from, many parents, consciously or unconsciously, discourage children from pursuing higher education because they are afraid that education will change their children or that the children will be lost to them. I think it’s incumbent on people like me to convince parents that they won’t lose their child to education, but that it will enrich the child and thus the family.”

She began her research career under the tutelage of David Baltimore and Harvey Lodish at MIT, and received a Ph.D. in Cell Biology in 1975.  As a postdoctoral fellow in Walter Gilbert’s laboratory, she was lead author of a landmark paper reporting the first synthesis of mammalian insulin in bacterial cells.  Her professional life includes research positions at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Cold Spring Harbor, Children’s Hospital in Boston, and Cytonome, Inc.

>>  How did Lydia choose her research subjects, and what did she learn?

During the discovery phase of her career, she published over 70 research articles and reviews. In 1996 she moved to full time administration; from 1998 to 2003 she was Vice President for Research at Northwestern University in Illinois and from 2003 to 2005 she served as Vice President for Research and Chief Operating Officer of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge.

In 2003 she was appointed to the Board of Directors of Transkaryotic Therapies, Inc (TKT), a biopharmaceutical company that developed products for the treatment of rare diseases.  She became non-executive Chair of the Board in January 2005.  She joined Cytonome, Inc as Chief Scientific Officer in 2005 and became CEO in 2006.

>> What were the pros and cons of being in an academic setting?  Of being in a company setting?

She is a member of the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Hall of Fame and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and of the Association for Women in Science.  She has served on review committees for the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.

Lydia was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Assessing the System for Protecting Human Research Subjects, the National Research Council Committee on the Structure of NIH, the congressionally mandated National Science Foundation Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering, as well as the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for the Biology Directorate, which she chaired from 1997 to 1998.

She was a member of the National Advisory Neurological Disorders and Stroke Council from 2000 to 2004 and was elected to a four year term on the Board of Directors of AAAS in 2001.  Lydia is a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science and has been both a board member and vice president of the organization.

>>  What has Lydia learned from sitting on the various committees, and during her various involvements?

She is currently the Chair of the Board of Trustees for Pine Manor College and is serving on the National Academies of Science and National Academy of Engineering Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine, the National Research Council Committee on Underrepresented Groups and the Expansion of the Science and Engineering Workforce Pipeline.

In 2008, Lydia was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center by Governor Duvall Patrick, was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by Hispanic Business Magazine, and was named Hispanic Scientist of the Year by the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, Florida.