L’Oréal is more than just color cosmetics and skincare. Of course you’ve seen their vibrant hair colors, highly pigmented eyeshadows and other products but what you may not have seen is the company’s efforts to empower women beyond the aesthetics of beauty. In 2003, L’Oréal USA launched the L’Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science program. Through this initiative, L’Oréal USA annually recognizes and rewards up to $60,000 each to five U.S. based women researchers who are pursuing careers in the life and physical/material sciences as well as mathematics, engineering and computer science.
L’Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science program aims to:
- Raise awareness of the contribution of women to the sciences
- Identify exceptional female researchers in the U.S. to serve as role models for younger generations
On Thursday, September 13, 2012 at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, the five women listed below were formally awarded L’Oréal USA Fellowship for Women in Science.
Christina Agapakis, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, synthetic biologist. The L’Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science award will help her focus on engineering new relationships between microorganisms that usually would not find each other in nature. Her research includes attention to how bacteria can work together in natural ecosystems and how those relationships can be useful in biotechnology, which typically uses only isolated organisms one at a time.
Lilian Childress, Yale University, New Haven, CT, physicist in quantum optics. The L’Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science award will allow Childress to develop a new optomechanical device based on a potentially dissipationless mechanical material: superfluid helium. Combining excellent optical properties with superfluid flow and novel excitations, this system could drastically reduce optical and mechanical losses and provide a window into many-body physics.
Joanna Lynne Kelley, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, geneticist interested in biological diversity. The L’Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science award will provide her with an opportunity to explore the genomic basis of adaptation to environments containing high levels of hydrogen sulfide. She will use sulfide spring populations of the fish Poecilia from three river drainages to study adaptive trait divergence, differentiation in gene sequences, and gene expression patterns.
Erin Marie Williams, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, paleoanthropologist in a biomechanics laboratory. The L’Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science award will help Williams investigate the decision-making processes and abilities of our early human ancestors as evidenced through their selection of raw materials for the production and use of Early Stone Age technologies.
Jaclyn Winter, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, biochemist interested in chemical diversity of biologically active natural products. The L’Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science award will enable her to interrogate the biosynthetic strategies that nature uses for assembling small molecules in fungi and investigate how their biosynthetic systems can be engineered to generate novel metabolites or otherwise inaccessible derivatives for testing in biological assays.
In addition to receiving the grants, the fellows will receive professional development workshops facilitated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science ( AAAS) and help from accomplished female leaders in corporate, academic, government, and scientific fields to build networks.
To date, 45 women have received the L’Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science.
For more on L’Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science, please visit the programs official webpage.
