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The couple left New York for the Midwest in 1956. "I used my last month's paycheck from Cornell to buy a microscope," Ferris says. It was difficult for women to obtain faculty positions, particularly in the conservative Midwest, so she set up a home lab and did research as a freelance consultant, first in Illinois and then in West Lafayette, when John joined the Purdue entomology faculty in 1958.
"Nematology was a young science," Ferris says. "I grew up right along with it." She worked tirelessly, conducting research, editing professional journals, lecturing and networking with other scientists. With their two children in tow, the Ferrises traveled extensively, collecting different species of nematodes, often processing soil samples in hotel bathrooms. She was already one of the foremost experts on nematodes when she was appointed to the Purdue Agriculture faculty in 1965.
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Plant molecular biologist Natalia Dudareva has discovered the pathways that plants follow to produce floral scent and attract pollinators like bees and butterflies. (Photo by Dave Umberger) |
Journey to success
When Natalia Dudareva came to Purdue in 1997, it was the culmination of a journey that started in the Soviet Union and ended halfway around the world.
The daughter of two physicists, Dudareva earned a Ph.D. in animal molecular biology. But science under communist rule came with its own set of challenges, including a lack of jobs in her chosen field. She made a life-changing decision to switch from animal to plant research in the early 1980s. She also wanted to make another change—to leave the Soviet Union for the West, which she believed would provide more opportunities for her research career to flourish.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had opened the doors of the country, but it wasn't always easy to walk through them. "It was possible to leave, but you needed to have a job offer first," says Dudareva, who also at the time was raising her two young children. Jobs were hard to come by, she explains, because few people in the West understood how science worked behind the Iron Curtain. "We weren't allowed to travel to international conferences, and we had to publish in Soviet journals before we could publish abroad." Translation alone could take more than a year.
But her research successes led to an invitation to present at a plant mitochondrial genome meeting in France; journal publications and fellowship offers soon followed. She accepted a fellowship in France and studied pollen-specific genes in sunflowers, research that would precipitate another move and another country—this time to the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.
Dudareva planned to remain in Canada after she completed her second Ph.D.— in plant molecular biology—and began applying for faculty positions. But during her job search, she discovered that most professors had either earned their Ph.D. or had done post-doctorate training in the United States. "It was clear to me that I needed this experience," she says.
She accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, which would prove to be another turning point in her career. She began biochemical studies of floral scent emissions and was a member of the research team that identified the first gene responsible for regulating floral scent.
After completing her fellowship, she decided to stay in the United States and accepted an offer from Purdue Agriculture's Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture . At Purdue, she started the second lab in the nation researching the biochemistry of floral scent.
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