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

You never know what will happen tomorrow.

I'm an engineer by training.

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!

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

So many things in my life have gone awry.

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.

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.

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 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.

We've been tinkering with nature for tens of thousands of years - look at a poodle! So we've created all sorts of organisms and biological things that wouldn't be here were it not for us.

Only by ignorance is science threatened.

I realized that the way most people were going about protein engineering was doomed failure.

I was lucky to be passionate about a field that was full of opportunity.

I feel a responsibility to encourage everyone to excel in science.

I don't sit around feeling sorry for myself. There's always somebody who's a lot worse off than you.

I wanted to develop a career where I could use my engineering background to have a positive effect on society.

There's nothing like evolution for engineering beautiful organisms.

In the lab, we're discovering that nature can do chemistry we never dreamed was possible.

I get these students who come in and say, I want to help people. I say, people get plenty of help. Why don't you help the planet?

There are lot of brilliant women in chemistry, a little later than some of the men, but they are amazing.

We are going to see a steady stream, I predict, of Nobel prizes coming out of chemistry and given to women.

I've been called pushy and aggressive and all the negative words that are rarely applied to men with the same traits. But it doesn't bother me.

I'm not a gentleman and I'm not a scientist.

I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.

In academics, it's getting your voice out that's important. It's getting somebody to listen to you. I had no problem with that. People were always curious about what I had to say.

There's plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.

I am a student of evolution and adaptation.

I've done that my whole life - I've taken the way people think and turned it on its head.

I had to grow up, reach a certain age where I see people do have something to show me.

I do something to make things nature never made but which is useful to humans.

I care about this beautiful planet that we all share. This is a home that we have to leave in good shape for the next generations.

Nature's made much more dangerous things than I ever will.

Pittsburgh was a wonderful place to grow up - diverse and complex, one could go from one culture to a completely different one in just a few blocks. It was a whole world in one city.

I learned how to navigate the world, and life's potholes, in Pittsburgh.

I meet so many young people who want to plan out their lives and want a recipe. They want me to tell them how to succeed. I didn't follow a recipe. I followed my instincts.

Most innovative things are not obvious to other people at the time. You have to believe in yourself. If you've got a good idea, follow it even though others tell you it's not.

Doing science at the highest level is hard for anyone. It's hard for women, and it's hard for the men. And we need to have supportive mentors and role models we can look up to.

For me, I was always the only woman in my cohort, first as a mechanical engineering undergraduate student, then as a chemical engineering graduate student. There were very few women getting degrees in those fields at the time. My role models were men - great men role models.

What I want to do is demonstrate that biology can learn how to make a vast array of molecules that people thought were outside the realm of biology.

My feeling is that we can genetically encode almost any kind of chemistry. We just have to learn how to do that.

Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.