Kathryn Jo Otim Hewlett

Growing up in Gainesville, Fla., Kathryn Jo (Katie) Otim Hewlett was always interested in going to school and learning “cool stuff.” Living near the University of Florida helped.

“For me, it was important living in a university community,” Hewlett says. “I kept hearing stories about new scientific developments. I remember my mom reading me a story in the newspaper about spider silk, how scientists at UF were trying to come up with a synthetic version to mimic the high strength, adhesion, and other properties. It was fascinating to me that you could make something synthetic that might be helpful in the real world.”

Those inspiring stories led Hewlett to a Ph.D. degree in materials science and her current job as part of a team solving materials problems at Dow Chemical in Midland, Mich. But her path from Gainesville to Midland was not easy.

The first challenge was finding a way to pay for college. “My mother is an elementary school special education teacher and a single parent. Every little bit counted in her being able to afford to send me to college.”

Hewlett’s high school chemistry teacher mentioned the ACS Scholars Program to her. “I was fortunate to get accepted at Stanford, and it was a great opportunity to go there. The ACS scholarship I got put a huge dent in the funding required.”

At Stanford University, she explored the options available in the various science and engineering programs but stuck with her early interest in materials science. “There are so many different aspects to it—metals, plastics, and everything in between. The breadth really fascinated me, along with the ability to look at materials at a fundamental level to study how we might improve them or develop new materials.”

As an undergraduate, Hewlett spent several summers as an intern at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, where she focused on photolithography and dielectric materials. “That really sparked my interest in working on basic research in industry. I found it intriguing to go into a meeting with a group of people, where the problem might be the need for a certain molecule for an application, and someone could go make it. Then we could test it and perhaps tweak it to improve the performance.”

After graduating from Stanford in 2003, Hewlett took a couple of years off and worked in nonscience jobs, including at Google and as a Brazilian dance instructor, before deciding to go to graduate school. “I missed doing science. I couldn’t stay away,” she says. Hewlett applied to several programs before choosing to attend Northwestern University, joining Kenneth R. Shull’s group in materials science in 2006.

“I began studying how soft materials fracture and break, in particular the mechanical properties of polymer gels,” she notes. During her time at Northwestern, she received a National Physical Science Consortium fellowship partially funded by Sandia National Laboratories, which led to a summer internship at the lab’s facilities in New Mexico. “That gave me an opportunity to see how government research was conducted at a federal lab and to contrast that with my experience at IBM and in the university setting.”

During the final year of her Ph.D. work, Hewlett did a side project for Dow that involved characterizing how pharmaceutical tablets gel when exposed to water. That led to an invitation to participate in Dow’s Building Engineering & Science Talent Symposium, which brings in underrepresented minorities for a weekend to learn about careers at Dow, to tour facilities, and to give a presentation on their research. Hewlett was later offered a job and joined Dow’s cellulosics research group when she graduated from Northwestern in 2011.

Her Dow research team focused on developing water-soluble cellulosic materials for personal care products and batteries, among other applications. “It’s interesting that you can take one material and use it in so many different everyday products,” Hewlett says. “For example, these materials are included in the adhesive strip that attaches a roll of paper towels or toilet paper to the cardboard tube. Another example is in the lubricating strip on razors for shaving.”

After about 18 months at Dow, Hewlett moved into the company’s pharma and food solutions group, where she began work on pharmaceutical applications. “We’re still working on cellulosic materials, but for making capsules and tablets. It’s really fascinating how this all works—it’s the other half of drug development. I definitely don’t look at pills the same way.”

Hewlett is just now getting back to work after taking maternity leave after the birth of her son, Ellis. She and her husband, Sheldon, also a materials scientist, are looking forward to introducing the joys of science to their son. “I hope I can convey my excitement to him,” Hewlett says. “Working with cellulosic materials fulfills what I started thinking about back in high school about materials science. It’s what drew me to this field.”