Interview
Featured Scientist: An Interview with Dr. Elizabeth Cates
Left to Right: BSS Faculty Sponsor Dr. Jonathan Bennett, Ivette Fernandez Diaz, Dr. Elizabeth Cates, Madeline Finnegan, Kavirath Jain. Photo Credit: Brian Faircloth Dr. Elizabeth Cates is a class of 1987 NCSSM graduate. After attending NCSSM, she attended NC State where she obtained a BS in Chemistry and then graduated from Penn State University with a PhD in Materials Chemistry. She has worked as Senior Development Chemist at Milliken and Co. and currently works as Vice President of Research and Development for Innegra Technologies, a plastics company. She now resides in the Greenville, South Carolina area. Below are excerpts from our interview with Dr. Cates. To read a full transcript of the interview, see the Broad Street Scienti website. As a 1987 NCSSM graduate, how did your high school experiences help shape your career path? Coming here was a wonderful exposure to so many different things. Part of my career I can attribute to my teacher, Bill Youngblood, because he walked into class and said, “I’m going to teach this at collegiate level knowing that you’re going to take it all again in college.” His approach to teaching was very application oriented. We would have organic problems but he would frame them in a real world scenario. In some ways that spoiled me because the classes in college where I was told to learn material without reason frustrated me. I always wanted to know why... So we were talking earlier, Madeline, that Dr. Warshaw’s first year here was my first year at NCSSM. He was my faculty advisor and I took a genetics class with him. I became absolutely mesmerized by genetics. I still am. The year after I graduated, the school had a DNA recombination unit donated to it. I was so jealous when I heard that. If I were a year later I would’ve been able to play with that. And I have no doubt in my mind that a year later my career path would’ve been completely different. Given your experience working in the R&D sector, can you talk a little bit about the integration of science and business in what you do? That’s a fun question. Science and business – there’s always more science than there is money for, so you have to pick and choose what you work on. Working in industry forces you to make decisions faster than if you were in a more academic setting. That’s the beauty of universities: the freedom to think about what one finds interesting and following Volume 3 | 2013-2014 | 95
Interview it wherever it goes because that can lead to beautiful things…In business you have to justify what you’re doing and it forces you to think a little further down the road…For example, the company that I work for makes a yarn based on polypropylene chains. The polymer chains are very highly oriented in the yarn, which makes it much stronger than normal polypropylene. It’s a very highly crystalline material and our sales team wants to sell it in colors. Now you can buy all kind of fiber products in colors - we dye them for our clothes all the time, but if you’re dying polymers, the places where the dye molecules go are where it’s not crystalline and our polymers are 80% crystalline, so that’s cut down the number of places dye molecules go by 50%... So, now we have the question: how can I create something that’s colored that inherently lacks color? If you can frame it like that, it forces you to look at the problem closely…So what really is the problem we’re trying to solve here? Sometimes people will come to you and say things like, “I need something that doesn’t burn,” but you need to talk to them to understand that I need something that doesn’t burn, smells like grapefruit, and floats on water, for example. You learn to ask a lot of questions to really understand the picture going forward. Going off of the previous question - If you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring young scientific entrepreneur, what would it be, and why? Pay attention to people. As scientists it’s easy to fall in love with science, but its people and how people interact with what you’re making that is the driving force. It is far easier to solve the problem that someone has than to create something and then make them want it. Now there are some people gifted at that. In fact, here at our ten year reunion one of my classmates showed up with a cool phone gadget (and remember this is back when cell phones were just phones), and he had this phone that had a keyboard that slid out of it and you could type on it. Later it became the HipTop that was sold to T-Mobile when you guys were about four years old. The human interaction factor on this thing was incredible. It anticipated a need that people had giving them the ability to bypass calling people and leave them messages, in an efficient manner. Understand people is the key…. If you make something that’s hard to get to or hard to fix, you’ve created a bad design. Think about the people and everything flows much easier and that is an often overlooked part of it because we love the science and technology so much. It’s one of the things that I have to remind myself when I talk to people…You have to find that point and say, “okay, what’s the key thing that I want you to know? How can I say this in plain English?” Could you give our readers a professional perspective on the importance of being skilled at reading, writing, and discussing scientific literature? Absolutely. If you cannot convey in simple plain English the point of what you’re doing to somebody else on the street, it’s a waste of time. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of being able to communicate clearly, both in writing and verbally, to people what you’re doing. And sometimes you have to go beyond the science and look for metaphors to help explain things…So being able to reduce it to a concept that everyone can relate to allows me to convey what I need to convey. The ability to communicate the importance of what you’re doing in a language that everyone can understand is so important because if you don’t have that ability, your work is useless. There will be three other nerds like you on the planet that will be able to appreciate your work. If you can explain things clearly in terms of the meaning of the work to the listeners, then it makes it very easy to make people to buy into whatever it is you want them to do.
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