Rommie AmaroJIM CORNFIELD
Rommie Amaro inherited a love of math from her math-teacher father. But after a freshman class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with chemist Don DeCoste, "I just really fell in love with chemistry," Amaro says. To combine her two passions, Amaro switched in 1996 to chemical engineering, and never looked back.
Her career path was further focused in her junior year, when she joined the lab of computational biophysicist Zaida Luthey-Schulten, who studied the folding of a protein involved in histidine biosynthesis. "I remember just looking forward to Saturdays," Amaro says. "Because on Saturdays I didn't have to worry about homework or anything—I would just go into the lab, and I would do research."
After spending months trying to understand the function and ...
