Lori Klaman

For Lori Klaman, the fight against diabetes is a personal one. The scientist's grandmother died from the disease, and her father suffered from it as well. That family history, coupled with her driving intellectual curiosity, is what keeps Klaman working long days and weekends to help discover new drugs.

Klaman, a principal research scientist in the metabolic diseases area of Wyeth's discovery research operation, got her PhD in immunology at Tufts University and went on to do postdoctoral training at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital. It was during her postdoc work that she made her first major breakthrough, producing a colony of mice that lacked a protein important for shutting off the body's response to insulin. The mice, which also had a higher metabolic rate than their wild-type counterparts, were ideal for use by diabetes researchers.

"It was pretty exciting, because pharmaceutical companies were interested in [using the mouse] to study type 2 diabetes," Klaman remembers. Several firms licensed the mouse model from the hospital, resulting in royalties for Klaman.

That early success meant Klaman had no trouble finding a job in the pharmaceutical industry once she completed her postdoc. "The protein that I had worked on was actually a very hot topic at the time... so it was good timing and I had several offers," she says.

Klaman accepted a position as a staff scientist with Wyeth, and has been with the company for a little over three years, earning a promotion to her current position about a year and a half ago. Now 41, she oversees a research group of six scientists.

While it was a love of science that propelled Klaman into a pharmaceutical industry career, she also gets a great deal of satisfaction out of being a team leader. "I'm fairly demanding about having things done correctly, done a certain way, and I think my team has really come to respect that," she says. "They feel proud because we usually accomplish our goals, and that's a rewarding feeling for me."

The rewards have come at a cost, however. Klaman, who is based in Boston, lives apart from her husband, a professor at the University of Utah. Because of the distance between Massachusetts and Utah, and the fact that many weekends are spent working, visits can sometimes be frustratingly hard to arrange.

Still, Klaman says that, for her, there are no half measures when it comes to excelling as a scientist. "Even during my postdoc, I really put in extra hours, because I didn't just want to meet the minimum," she says. "I wanted to improve and go further than what was required or asked of me."

-- Kate Fodor