Lyndon Mitnaul
Research Fellow, Division of Cardiovascular Diseases, Merck Research Laboratories
COURTESY OF LYNDON MITNAUL

Lyndon Mitnaul remembers falling in love. "Around tenth grade I took my first chemistry class," he says, "and I fell in love with science."

Mitnaul is the youngest of seven children, the son of an African-American father and a Japanese mother. After his high school romance with chemistry, he studied the subject at Benedict College, a historically black school in Columbia, SC, and went on to earn a PhD in biological chemistry from Pennsylvania State University. Today he is a research fellow in the division of cardiovascular diseases at Merck Research Laboratories.
"Science is very broad and very dynamic, and we really need a lot of different talents. If we can get more diverse thoughts into a laboratory, we'll advance science and improve everyday life."
Though his path through academia and into industry sounds relatively...

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