Growing up in Gainesville, Ga., Sonya Summerour Clemmons could have easily made excuses not to attend college. Although she excelled as a student and made A's in math, no one in the school system seemed to harbor any expectations for her future, until Carleton "Cab" Jackson started as a high school counselor during her junior year.

Jackson told her about a summer program at Tennessee Tech in Cookeville in 1988, designed to expose underrepresented minorities to the field of engineering. "Until I met him, no one had ever said to me, 'They have these summer programs in science and engineering; they're all paid for. Would you like to go?'" recalls the now 35-year-old bioengineer. He also told her about a dual-degree engineering program at Spelman College and Georgia Tech, both in Atlanta, an opportunity that otherwise might have escaped her.

Clemmons' career as a scientist and entrepreneur has since taken off, earning her a spot on Black Enterprise magazine's 2003 list of the "Best and Brightest Under 40." Currently, she directs business development at MediVas, a San Diego-based maker of biodegradable polymers. She also runs her own business, SSC Enterprises, a consultancy for small start-up biotechs.

"If you're a change agent, and I firmly believe that Sonya is, ... one of the costs of being a change agent means that you are a person who is articulating what is wrong with the status quo and what needs to be changed or what needs to be paid attention to," observes Donna J. Dean, senior science advisor with Lewis-Burke Associates, a government-relations firm in Washington, DC. Dean is also president of the Association of Women in Science, where Clemmons serves on the board of directors. Clemmons clearly relishes this "change agent" role. "My mother always said, 'Be independent, and you've got to have gumption.'"

Clemmons earned graduate and doctorate degrees in bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego, in 1996 and 1999. She conducted undergraduate and graduate research in cardiac mechanics, physics, and tissue engineering. For her PhD thesis, she studied the responses of cardiac fibroblasts to mechanical stimuli. "My thesis helped to prove the fact that cardiac fibroblasts contribute to heart function in different disease states, just as cardiac myocytes do," she says.

In December 1999 Clemmons defended her thesis, married, and moved to Philadelphia to start her postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Six months later she launched her consulting business, starting out by working with small biotechs willing to give her a chance fresh out of graduate school. She also signed on as a principal research bioengineer with VitaGen, a now-defunct biotech in La Jolla, Calif. She joined MediVas in 2004 and added an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management to her resume the following year.

Today, Clemmons serves as a corporate "rainmaker" and spokesperson for MediVas' core technology. Her fulltime duties include strategic marketing and striking up partnerships and alliances with other companies. When asked whether her future is in industry or academia, Clemmons says she wants to do both, which might require her to take some sort of commercialization post at an academic university. Longer term, though, she imagines retiring into a college presidency.

By that time, she says, she'll have nothing to prove, she'll know how to raise money, and she'll be in a position to influence diversity strategies for other young women of color. "I want to change institutions so that they realize we're not just here to bring students in and get them a job," she says. "We're here to open doors and access opportunity."