• What is your job title?
  
• Please give a brief description of your job, specifying what you do each day.
  
• What have you been working on or teaching lately?
  
• What most interests you in your job?
  
• What do you like least about your job?
  
• What has been your career path?
  
• Was there any person who inspired you to do what you are doing today?
  
• What attracted you to this career when you were in high school?
  
• What careers in your field do you see as promising?
  
• What advice do you have for young women who want to work in your field?
  

Q: What is your job title?
A: I am the Director of Analytical Technology Development at a small Medical Device start up company called InfraReDx, Inc.
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Q: Please give a brief description of your job, specifying what you do each day.
A: Part of my job is planning what is needed in the area of analyzing the data that we obtain in order to developing a minimally invasive medical device. Since we are a small start up that also means that I am doing most of the data analysis myself. Our device is based upon a laser that we use to obtain spectroscopic information from the coronary artery wall. The laser is used to shine light through a very tiny optical fiber which is embedded in a tiny catheter and placed inside of a patient's coronary artery. Once inside the artery the light scatters off the blood flowing in the artery and the light that does not scatter is reflected off the walls of the coronary artery. The signal from those reflections is collected using a second optical fiber also embedded in the catheter and returned to our data collection system (computer at this time). From this signal we are attempting to differentiate between diseased and non-diseased lesions or plaques. The disease of interest is Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) wherein there is believed to be a plaque or lesion that is "vulnerable" to rupture causing clotting and closure of the artery leading to a myocardial infarction or heart attack. My specific job is to develop a computer model using ex-vivo data that can be used to predict which lesions are "vulnerable" during in-vivo examination of a patient's coronary artery tree.
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Q: What have you been working on or teaching lately?
A: Currently I am taking the spectral information that my colleague has obtained from human aortic post mortem tissue samples and combining it with statistical methods to create a computer model that provides me with information on how well I can distinguish between the diseased plaque and other plaques. It also provides us with information on how far away from the artery wall we need to be in order to detect a signal from the tissue.
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Q: What most interest you in your job?
A: I really enjoy being able to make a product that will help us prolong or save a life by applying mathematics and science to solve the problem. Math by itself may not be very interesting but if you can combine it with something that you are more familiar with (in this case it was the use of Near Infrared Spectroscopy applied to human tissue samples) to create a method that can solve difficult problems with an elegant method, it allows math and statistics to take on a whole new meaning.
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Q: What do you like the least about your job?
A: Since we are a start up I do not like the fact that if we are not successful in raising money each year, for the next year, I will be out of a job with very short notice.
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Q: What has your career path been?
A: My career path has been very atypical of a Ph.D. Chemist. My original background was with Solid State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance NMR (similar to Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI) that we were using as a spectroscopic tool to study catalyst within mineral structures called zeolites. I graduated from the University of Nebraska Lincoln in December of 1989 with a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry. After a year of post-doctoral work on solid state (heterogeneous) catalysts at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL), I took a research job for three years working on liquid state (homogeneous) catalysts that were used to convert methanol and carbon monoxide to acetic acid at Worcester Polytechnic University (Worcester, MA).

I wanted to stay in Massachusetts so I found a job writing computer programs for scientific applications for a company called Galactic Industries (Salem, NH). It was at this job that I learned how to combine spectroscopy and statistics to create mathematical models used for predicting chemical properties by analyzing the spectrum of the chemical of interest (called Chemometrics). Unfortunately this company decided to stop working on the scientific applications and look at web based search routines, which were not of interest to me. While I was interested in obtaining a job in the same area of Chemometrics, in 1997 there were not many companies that used this technique.

In 1997 I began work as a Senior Scientist at Whatman (Haverhill, MA), working on research and development for on-site high purity gas generators. I was promoted to Analytical Gas Systems (AGS) Research Manager within three months of hire and then became the AGS Product Development Manager one year later. I was responsible for the group that developed new products along with supporting all the products in the AGS line. My responsibilities were participating in multidisciplinary groups for creating new products, setting up Project timelines and maintaining them, project management and other support functions as needed.

By 2001 more companies in the New England area began using Chemometrics as a standard method of data analysis and more jobs were posted via Monster.com and in the major newspapers. I decided that now was my chance to get back to an area that I truly loved working with, Chemometrics, so I decided to apply for the current position I now hold, Director of Analytical Technology Development at InfraReDx, Inc. I am responsible for some aspects of Product Development that are related to spectral data analysis, providing the project timelines and either outsourcing the required work or providing the work myself.
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Q: Was there any person who inspired you to do what you're doing today?
A: Not really, other than the fact that when I was working on Chemometrics while at Galactic, my first boss made it very enjoyable to learn the technique and what it could do. I was just naturally drawn to it as the work that I had done at WPI would have benefited from the application of Chemometrics to solve the determination of the complex mixture's constituents.
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Q: What attracted you to this career when you were in high school?
A: I always liked math and science. We lived in a very small town that was not exposed to all the different career choices that you have in those fields, so one day our math teacher brought in an Engineer to talk to us abut his job. I was disappointed as he was unable to tell me what it was he actually did. After that I always tried to determine where the differences were.
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Q: What careers in your field do you see as promising for the future?
A: I have always felt that a career in Chemical or Mechanical Engineering is the most promising for the future. They are fields in which you learn how to take math and apply it to solve real world problems. You will have the opportunity to work in any field that you are interested in because the area is really that applicable. One area of particular promise at this time is the Health Care area such as medical devices and pharmaceuticals.
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Q: What advice do you have for young women who want to work in your field
someday?
A: Take science courses in both chemistry and biochemistry so that you can see where each field has its core competencies. I strongly advise you to take as many math courses as you can both in high school and in college. Go to an engineering school and take applied math courses, even if you do not plan on becoming an engineer. Once you understand the basics of applied math you can further progress to theoretical modeling if you are interested, or you can progress to basic research or to applied research.
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