One day in high school, Emily Balskus was summoned by her chemistry teacher. To Balskus’s surprise, the teacher praised her chemistry prowess before offering the teenager an after-school job in the chemistry lab. Balskus would help her teacher set up and break down experiments and test new lesson ideas for the lab.
“This was a turning point and made me realize that I should push myself to work hard, and that I could focus on science as a potential career,” Balskus says.
As an undergrad at Williams College in Massachusetts, Balskus became fascinated with synthetic organic chemistry. She took the first steps towards synthesizing hennoxazole A, a complex antiviral compound produced by a marine sponge, and published her first research paper. Her work set the stage for completion of the total synthesis of the molecule a few years later, and Balskus published two more papers, coauthored with her chemistry professor ...
