I did all sorts of things that you wouldn't normally find on an engineer's docket, but it made an educated person out of me.

Instead of studying what biology has already made, we have to imagine what biology could make. You can say, 'Oh, I want a cure for cancer,' but that doesn't tell you what evolutionary pathway will take you from here to there. What are the intermediate steps?

I was very head-strong, and this was the Vietnam War era - You did not listen to your parents or other authority figures. You didn't share their values. No one did in my circle. It was OK to rebel.

We share deep admiration for evolution, a force of Nature that has led to the finest chemistry of all time, and to all living things on this planet.

So many things in my life have gone awry.

Someone asked me 'What's the funniest thing or what's the best thing that you've ever done?' It's always what I'm doing now.

I can't imagine not being able to read and write, or make these connections from literature and philosophy that have helped inform my understanding of evolution.

All my projects are about sustainability, bioremediation, making things in a cleaner fashion.

No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.

I was employed at the Solar Energy Research Institute in the late '70s when Carter was president, and as a country, we had a goal of renewable energy development.

Nature is solving all sorts of problems that we throw at her - how to degrade plastic bottles, how to degrade pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics. She creates new enzymes in response to that all the time, in real time.

I was the first female cab driver in the city of Pittsburgh.

When I started engineering proteins I didn't know how hard it would be.

Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?

I get called lots of things - a biochemist, a molecular biologist, a chemical engineer - and I guess I am all of those. I identify most as human!

I'm an engineer by training.

You never know what will happen tomorrow.

I think of what I do as copying nature's design process.

I see a future in which nature gives us a helping hand. Instead of destroying the natural world, why can't we use it to solve the kinds of problems that we are facing?

We've been modifying the biological world at the level of DNA for thousands of years. Somehow there is this new fear of what we already have been doing and that fear has limited our ability to provide real solutions.

My feeling is that if a human being can coax life to build bonds between silicon and carbon, nature can do it too.

Life is not a piece of cake, and it certainly is not for many of the people I know.

What we need is a strong education system that allows creativity to grow and encourages students to be interested in science and technology.

I studied mechanical engineering at Princeton and worked on solar energy after graduation.