Aptitude Aplenty

Sherri was assigned to Lucille Lumley, a neuroscientist who, along with colleagues, had collected vast amounts of electroencephalograph data recording seizures in mice and rats. EEGs measure electrical signals from the brain and are often used by doctors to diagnose epilepsy. But there were no computer programs to analyze what Lumley and others had collected. The neuroscientists gave piles of this digital EEG data to Sherri, who also downloaded human seizure data from the Web, acquiring the raw material she needed to see if she could find a way around what had been a tedious manual process.

It was hard, plodding work. Sherri had a computer on a cart, and math books piled around her. She taught herself the ins and outs of linear algebra as she went along. At 5:30 p.m., she would leave for home, often burning data onto a CD so she could fool around with it a little longer at night.

It could be really frustrating, Sherri says, but she refused to give up. Her work was so good that Lumley took her to a medical conference in Washington and arranged for Sherri to present a paper on her progress. The organizers listed her as Dr. Sherri Geng, much to Lumley's amusement. "She just got her driver's license," Lumley laughs.

By the end of her second summer at Walter Reed, Sherri had accomplished what she wanted, developing a computerized detection algorithm based on principal and discriminate analyses. The paper that she submitted to the Intel competition was entitled: "Automated Seizure Detection Using Statistical Analysis of EEG Time-Domain Signals."

Abby's Intel research project, she says with some self-deprecation, came down to three squiggly lines. At the Carnegie Institution, she was put to work investigating a star called IRC+10216. A cloud of water, with an uneven distribution of vapor (the squiggly lines), had been discovered around the star, suggesting the presence of comets in the area. Carnegie astronomers hypothesized that the uneven distribution of comets could be caused by the gravitational pull of a planet the size of Jupiter. Abby's job was to run computer simulations that would show whether a planet could have that kind of effect.

"Could a planet make the system look the way we think it looks?" one of Abby's mentors, K.E. Saavik Ford, asked. Abby discovered that it could indeed.

In January, Abby presented her paper to the 205th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in San Diego, and she was grateful to Ford for spending hours with her, helping her edit it. "I learned a lot about what it takes to be a scientist," Abby says.

Many of the female scientists at Carnegie and Walter Reed watched Abby and Sherri work with a mixture of pride in their abilities and hope that the obstacles that had confronted earlier generations were disappearing.

Discrimination isn't overt, but it bubbles up, says Debra Yourick, a researcher in pharmacology and neuroscience at Walter Reed. It's persuasive enough that women don't like to draw attention to themselves as women. "You almost apologize for being pregnant," says Yourick, a mother of three girls ages 4 to 14, who has watched some colleagues return to work three weeks after giving birth. She says she still struggles to balance her work with her children, racing home to get to a soccer practice by 6. "I'm out of my mind," she says.

At Walter Reed, the female scientists all make their own coffee, so they won't be put in the position of having to make it for one of the men. Marti Jett, a research chemist and chief of the department of molecular pathology, goes a step further. "I don't drink it," she says, which allows her to say: "Coffee? Oh, I never drink coffee."

At Carnegie, Abby worked in the same building as Vera Rubin, a revered astronomer in the department of terrestrial magnetism who also happened to be one of the 12 Intel judges. The offices adjoining Abby's were filled with women with postdoctoral appointments, and to work among them would be to assume that being a female astronomer is completely unremarkable. That was not Vera Rubin's experience.

Rubin, 77, remembers being a lonely and uncomfortable girl in science class 60 years ago. "I certainly didn't like my high school physics class," she says. "My teacher didn't know how to treat a young woman." Rubin wanted to take mechanical drawing, but she didn't have the nerve to enter that male domain until she persuaded another girl to take the class with her.