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Edna Matta-Camacho remembers being a very inquisitive girl who used to open radios or hair dryers with a screwdriver to find out how they worked. Occasionally, she would break things in the process, to the disappointment of her mother. “But at the same time, she supported my curiosity,” Matta-Camacho says.
Vitals
Hometown: Ibagué, Colombia
Education: BSc, chemistry, National University of Colombia, 2004; MSc, biochemistry and molecular biology, National Autonomous University of Mexico, 2006; PhD, biochemistry–chemical biology, McGill University, 2012
Current position: Senior assessment officer, Health Canada; cofounder and executive director, Fundación STEM sin Fronteras
Impactful book:Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shetterly. It tells the true story of Black women mathematicians who worked at NASA and overcame gender and racial barriers to make crucial contributions to space exploration.
A Life motto: There is no straight or perfect path to achieve your goals. Believe in yourself, overcome any obstacles, seize every opportunity that allows you to move forward, and help others whenever you can.
I am: Latina
Today, she’s just as curious. But instead of tinkering with household objects, Matta-Camacho is now a senior assessment officer at the Pharmaceutical Drugs Directorate of Health Canada, where she ensures that new drugs have fulfilled preclinical and clinical requirements of safety and efficacy to meet regulatory standards. She also created a foundation that aims to stimulate the scientific curiosity of girls and young women in rural Colombia, just like her mother did for her.
Matta-Camacho was first introduced to chemistry at the age of 14. “It was like love at first sight,” she recalls. She was captivated by the idea that everything in nature, including stones, glass, and table salt, could be defined in terms of chemical compounds and crystalline states.
Matta-Camacho went on to study chemistry at the National University of Colombia, in Bogotá, around 200 km from her hometown, Ibagué. She felt as if she’d entered her own molecular heaven. She especially enjoyed the classes that let her uncover the identity of a compound by analyzing its physical and chemical characteristics. “I liked putting all the pieces together to form the puzzle,” she says.
As she approached graduation, she knew she wanted to continue her education and get her PhD, but she hadn’t considered the possibility of doing so abroad. Her sister, who was doing a PhD program in parasitology in Brazil, encouraged her to look into those types of opportunities.
After exploring different options, Matta-Camacho chose to do a 6-month project at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) that looked at the production of antibodies that help regulate thyroid hormones in the blood. She wasn’t particularly familiar with biochemistry at the time, but she was attracted to the field because of a hormone deficiency she was diagnosed with at 16. Matta-Camacho didn’t know it at the time, but this project was the beginning of a journey into protein research that would last more than a decade.
Once Matta-Camacho got her BSc in Colombia, she went back to UNAM to pursue an MSc, then moved northward to McGill University for her PhD work, in which she studied the mechanisms that degrade dysfunctional and misfolded proteins. She says she grew enamored by the “profound connection” between chemistry and medical research—how understanding protein chemistry was fundamental to discovering new therapies.
But as a postdoctoral researcher at McGill, and later at the Scripps Research Institute, she realized that she wasn’t interested in doing all the administrative tasks that a principal investigator is expected to do, such as writing grants and managing budgets. So she decided to transition from academia to industry and joined the Canadian pharmaceutical firm Paraza Pharma. At Paraza, Matta-Camacho designed and tested modifications in small molecules to make them fit better within the active sites of proteins.
But she says she grew a bit restless in industry. “I was partly motivated by the desire to see immediate applications of my work.” So in 2019, Matta-Camacho left industry and became a regulatory chemist at Health Canada, working as a member of a multidisciplinary team that certifies that any drug released to market has followed all the laboratory, clinical, and manufacturing approval steps.
“The dynamic and evolving nature of the regulatory field also keeps me continually learning and engaged,” she says. Over the years, she has evaluated dozens of drugs, such as new oral contraceptives, antihypertensives, and antitumor drugs potentially taken by millions of Canadians. Her work ensures that clinical trial data prove that the drug is effective and minimizes side effects.
“It’s a great responsibility,” she says. Working as a scientist in the government often involves applying research and evidence to public policy, putting her team on the forefront of decisions that address many societal and medical challenges. For instance, making sure that treatments in obstetrics and gynecology work properly “tackles significant issues, such as birth control access and fertility options,” she says. “Ensuring the safety and efficacy of these products is crucial for improving patient outcomes and addressing these widespread health concerns.”
Educational institutions [in rural areas] had very precarious conditions.
Apart from her scientific work, Matta-Camacho also cofounded the Fundación STEM sin Fronteras (STEM without Borders Foundation), which aims for young minds in rural Colombia to “have equitable access to quality STEM education and opportunities,” Matta-Camacho says. She created the foundation in 2018, after her brother and sister-in-law, both educators in the rural and peri-urban areas of Tolima, Colombia, raised concerns about educational disparities in this part of the country.
Credit: Jess Deeks
Edna Matta-Camacho does a volcano demonstration in her backyard with her kids, Ivanna (left) and Noah (right).
“Like many other regions in the country, these rural areas were severely impacted by the [decades-long] armed conflict. And educational institutions there had very precarious conditions,” Matta-Camacho says. Early exposure to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields would become key to empowering children to realize their full potential, she believed.
Now the foundation provides educators in these regions with seminars and workshops aimed at building capacity in STEM topics. “We were a gathering of scared and inexpert female teachers. And [Matta-Camacho and the foundation] gave us moral and motivational support to generate science in rural areas without computers or TV and where parents don’t consider education to be a priority” because they expect children to work with the parents, says Anyi Zabala Hernández, who teaches 45 children in La Begonia, a small community in Tolima.
The Fundación STEM sin Fronteras also creates activities to spark students’ interest in STEM, encouraging girls and young women in the region to pursue education. “Edna is a very intelligent and empathic person, an excellent scientist. And although she lives abroad, she thinks all the time how to ensure that [Colombian] children have the same opportunities that life gave her,” says Liliana Rondón Salazar, a biologist who met Matta-Camacho in Mexico and now leads some programs at the foundation.
Matta-Camacho believes that a measure of success is the capacity to give back to society. In that regard, she considers herself quite successful, and she’s proud that her foundation can help support students who share the same curiosity she had as a child.
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