To have more women scientists, get them while they're young

"When girls do science as kids, they can maintain interest," she says.

Villa-Komaroff fell in love with science in high school, when she attended a National Science Foundation Summer Science Training Program at Texas College in Tyler, Texas. She went on to earn a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - only the third Mexican-American woman to do so, the press service of the US Diplomatic Mission to Kazakhstan said.

Today, Villa-Komaroff is the chief scientific officer at a company whose machinery will sort cells and purify them so they won't be rejected by the body's immune system, as is often the case in bone marrow transplants.

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