00:03:33 Expand Your Horizons is a half day mini-conference for sixth grade girls.

00:03:37 The program has been offered at Chestnut Hill College annnually

00:03:40 As part of National Chemistry Week since 1994.

00:03:44 Due to popular demand the program was expanded in 2000 to include a spring session.

00:03:49 The program is funded by the American Chemical Society Philadelpha Section through a generous corporate donation.

00:03:55 The program is a collaboration of the American Chemical Society Philadelphia Section Women Chemists Committee, the American Association of University Women Northeast Montgomery County Branch

00:04:08 The Association of Women in Science in Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania's Women in Chemistry.

00:04:15 One hundred girls from the Philadelphia area participated each session.

00:04:18 There is no cost to the participants.

00:04:21 All that is asked is that the girls be dropped off and picked up at the college.

00:04:26 The day begins with a continental breakfast during registration.

00:04:30 After welcoming the girls they are treated to a keynote speaker.

00:04:34 This inspiring role model talks to the girls about her experiences as a woman in science.

00:04:39 A college professor, a patent attorney, an a company president have been the most recent guest speakers.

00:04:46 After finishing the question and answer session with the speaker the girls are given safety glasses and split into small groups.

00:04:52 The groups go up to the labs on the fifth floor where they will do three hands-on experiments with some of the twenty women scientists.

00:05:01 Each of these scientists brings their own experiments to share with the girls generally based on their own occupation.

00:05:08 The experiments range from slime to testing antacids, cleaning polluted water, making ice cream, blood chemistry, friction, silicon chemistry, pharmatography, and building models of viruses.

00:05:23 The day ends with a lunch and many, many giveaways of brochures, pens, books, and other novelty items.

00:05:41 Good morning.

00:05:46 Welcome to the seventh Expand Your Horizons mini-conference.

00:05:51 It is really my pleasure to be part of this program. My name is Doctor Cathy Rush

00:05:56 And I wear several hats here.

00:05:59 The sponsoring organizations with us today that we are really indebted to are the American Chemical Society, Women Chemists today in Philadelphia and I am the chair of that group.

00:06:10 And we also have a lot of ladies from the American Association of University Women Northeast Montgomery County Branch here today

00:06:19 And they're going to do jet arounds today and some of your scientists that will be doing experiments with you so we really want to

00:06:29 Thank those ladies for coming. We also started this project as part of National Chemistry Week

00:06:35 And National Chemistry Week is in November but because there have been so many of you girls who wanted to be part of this program

00:06:41 We partnered with other groups like AUW to be able to have this program twice a year.

00:06:48 So this is the first time that we're doing this in the spring.

00:06:50 It is my real pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker today.

00:06:53 Her name is Anne-Marie Corner. And one of the things that we try to do with our keynote speaker is to give you somebody who you can have fun with this morning.

00:07:04 And somebody who is a role model for you. You look for somebody who you can emulate and maybe be like someday.

00:07:13 And Anne-Marie's a real special person.

00:07:15 Does anybody know anybody who is president of a company?

00:07:20 We've got a couple folks.

00:07:22 Well Anne-Marie is the president of a company she helped to found, a company called Biosyn Corporate.

00:07:30 And its one of those hot new biotech companies that everybody hears about. And we're really excited to hear what she has to say about her company.

00:07:39 She does a lot of different things running the company. She is involved with doing the finance and dealing with the government with regulatory things, raising capital, she's raised twenty-five million dollars to this company.

00:07:55 So she's done an awful lot to get this company going. She's going to tell us a bit about her story.

00:08:01 And she, from an educational standpoint she started out with a degree in chemistry and biology from Manchester, England.

00:08:12 And she has an MBA from the Wharton School here at the University of Pennsylvania, so she's lived in various assorted places around the world. Maybe she can tell us some wonderful stories about that as well.

00:08:24 She lives very close to here and she's married and she has two daughters a little bit younger than here, so maybe in a few years her daughters will wind up being part of this program.

00:08:35 I've got a long list of awards here that she's been given.

00:08:41 She's a woman to watch and she's on the honor roll of business women in Philadelphia. She was given an award for emerging entrepreneur of the year.

00:08:50 I could spend all morning saying all these wonderful things, but let me go and let's give her a warm welcome.

00:09:00 And now it's a little bit about how I came to love science. And it started quite a long time ago and where I am now is quite a long way from where I grew up.

00:09:12 Which is actually about three and a half thousand miles, because you can hear from my accent that I was born and raised in Britain.

00:09:18 And I'm speaking figuratively, not literally.

00:09:21 When I was a little girl in school, the boys were were the ones who did science.

00:09:26 And the girls in my school, when I was six and seven and eight years old had nothing to do with anything vaguely biological. In fact, we were only taught to study needlework and cookery.

00:09:38 And in those days back in Britain this was called home economics, how to make your house a happy one.

00:09:44 And there I may have stayed, sewing and cooking for the rest of my life, if it wasn't for two very fortunate things.

00:09:50 First of all I had a father who absolutely loved science and encouraged me to love it too.

00:09:57 He started me off with astronomy. He had a passion for looking at the stars. He had a large telescope he would set up in our back garden.

00:10:05 And on Sunday mornings after church, if the weather was sunny we could go out to the garden and we would look at sun spots, solar flares, on the sun. And I was probably younger than most of you sitting here today.

00:10:18 But the best thing about all this was, when I had birthday parties we didn't go to Chuck E. Cheese or we didn't have sleepovers, we used to have stargazing parties.

00:10:26 And we would set up a telescope in the back garden after we had a sort of early dinner and we would look at the rings of Saturn, the craters on the moon, and very occasionally we'd look at Sputnik flying overhead.

00:10:37 Do any of you know what Sputnik is? Yeah.

00:10:42 That's right. One of the first satellites to go up. And when I was a young girl, Sputnik would sometimes fly overhead and we would be able to see it.

00:10:51 From there we moved on to, do you have a question? No.

00:10:55 From there we moved on to a different part of science. I'd always had an interest in Egyptology.

00:11:01 Looking at ancient Egyptians, and understanding what they did. Looking at the pyramids and how they were built, who built them. Which I guess is another area of science, more like engineering as opposed to chemistry.

00:11:12 And my father took me off to London one day to see the artifacts from King Tutankhamun's tomb.

00:11:17 I remember thinking they were so clever all those years ago to make all the things they actually did.

00:11:23 From that I used to watch my older brother study biology. And he and I both loved to study life: plants, animals, things they did, why they did it.

00:11:33 So for my eleventh birthday I got a microscope. And with that I used to look at everything ranging from ladybird wings to ice crystals.

00:11:42 And the net result of all this was fairly keen interest in science. Now I don't want to leave my mother out. I've talked about my father. She always encouraged every one of us five children to do anything we wanted to.

00:11:55 And she used to say to us, leave no stone unturned. You can do anything you want. You can be anything you want.

00:12:01 And coming as a little girl who had been told the boys did science and the girls did cookery, it was very good to hear those words. And she in fact was the person who encouraged me to follow my heart and go into science when I was a young adult.

00:12:15 Now, the other fortunate thing that happened to me, I mentioned there were two, was that I went to an all girls school. And in this school the girls could do anything and they did everything, including science.

00:12:26 But I want to just clarify this. This wasn't sort of a picture perfect school. This was seven years ago. The school I went to was your typical, old English school, which was very strict, very imposing.

00:12:39 In fact my high school was almost like something from the Dark Ages, that you might see on a TV show.

00:12:44 We did get to do science, and boy did we ever do science. We studied physics, chemistry, biology, pure mathematics, applied mathematics, astronomy, and economics. Only this time it wasn't home economics, it was global economics.

00:12:59 And for that, it was a changing experience in my life. Now within my school there are certain people who I am eternally grateful for giving me the start in my career that I have.

00:13:10 My chemistry teacher was named Miss Jenkins. And she was one of these teachers who no one was allowed to say a word in her class.

00:13:20 You couldn't even raise your hand and ask a question. Her way of teaching chemistry was to start on this side of the board and cover the entire board with information, from the left hand side to the right, from the top to the bottom.

00:13:31 And you just had to furiously write it down as fast as you could. And when she was done writing, she went to the board, wiped it all off whether you'd got it down or not, and started over again.

00:13:40 My physics teacher we nicknamed Hairy Mary on account of the fact she had this wild, out of control, unbrushed hair. But she did allow us to talk, she did allow us to inquire and ask questions.

00:13:52 But the problem was with her, her experiments always went wrong. So we were left with physics trying to figure out well, what were we supposed to see here? Instead of actually seeing it.

00:14:02 And that's probably the reason why to this day physics is not my best subject.

00:14:07 And lastly, the head of our science program was someone named Teddy Evans, so named beacuse she had a mop of golden, fluffy hair and a body that sort of resembled a bear.

00:14:19 In spite of all these characters, or perhaps beacuse of them, I realized that science isn't as tough as everyone used to make out, and it's certainly not just for boys.

00:14:27 And from that, for me, a scientist was born. After graduation I started Biosyn.

00:14:34 And Biosyn has really been the thing for me, has been the greatest joy in my whole life.

00:14:40 I started the company right after graduate school and I knew absolutely nothing.

00:14:46 I didn't even know how to get the technology I needed to start the company, but undaunted I pressed on.

00:14:52 This time I didn't have my father to help point the telescope in the right direction and help me find what I needed to know. I didn't have my mother saying go for it, you can do it.

00:15:02 I didn't even have Miss Jenkins writing it all down on the blackboard for me to figure out. So with a lot of muddling through, the company got started.

00:15:11 And I think you can forget a good scientific mind can work its way through most things.

00:15:14 Although I still can't get my email working at home, but other than that.

00:15:20 Slowly but surely we were able to build up a company. The company is now ten years old and we've had a lot of ups and downs going through building a company.

00:15:30 It's almost like having a baby in some ways. You start with this thing that's very small and you really don't know what to do with it and all of a sudden one day you wake up and realize this thing you have has actually grown up, is quite mature

00:15:40 It functions all by itself and it just cruises right along and you don't have to worry about it quite so much.

00:15:46 First of all I was never the best scientist in my class, but I think that's not important. I think if you truly love what you're doing, you can do very, very well at it.

00:15:56 I encourage you not to be put off by some of the complexities of scientific fields. Just go out and do the very best that you can.

00:16:03 If you choose a career in science, it can take you anywhere, be it around the globe or to the depths of the Earth and the ocean

00:16:10 Up in the clouds or even into space.

00:16:13 You can be a geologist, a pharmacist, a biologist or a physicist. You can seek out the furthest galaxies or you can insert the tiniest genes into tiny cells.

00:16:24 And it's all there within your own minds, your own hands, and your own heart.

00:16:30 So I encourage you to go out and enjoy today. You've got a great opportunity to do a wonderful, a bunch of wonderful things up in the labs here.

00:16:40 Enjoy your day, but most of all enjoy your life. Because science can truly give you so many great things.

00:16:52 I'm sure you've got lots of great questions.

00:16:56 Why don't we entertain your questions?

00:17:00 How old was I?

00:17:02 I was 21.

00:17:04 I just graduated from college.

00:17:06 I was 21 years old.

00:17:08 And that in and of itself sort of scared me to be honest.

00:17:12 I don't like that way that people look at me.

00:17:16 Yeah?

00:17:18 Can you say that again?

00:17:20 Do you have your telescope now?

00:17:22 No, I don't.

00:17:24 My father still has it.

00:17:26 Like I said, he's nearly 80 now.

00:17:28 And he actually can't carry that.

00:17:30 He has his neighbor come over and help him set it up.

00:17:34 Because it's quite big.

00:17:36 But whenever I'm home, we all grab it.

00:17:38 And in fact, my mother says that it will kill him one day.

00:17:42 Because he still insists on putting it in the car and driving to the top of the mountains.

00:17:46 And she says, one day you will not come home.

00:17:50 And you will be dead staring at the stars through your telescope.

00:17:52 That's scary.

00:17:54 You got something else?

00:17:56 No.

00:17:58 But at least you'd be happy, right?

00:18:00 Yeah.

00:18:02 With your career, do you have time for children?

00:18:04 That's a very good question.

00:18:06 Because I think that's one of the hardest things for girls and women to figure out today.

00:18:12 How to find those two things.

00:18:14 I do have a family.

00:18:16 I have two little girls.

00:18:18 They are 7 and 5.

00:18:20 And one of the best things about my career is that I've always had time to be a mom.

00:18:24 And when I was a researcher at Penn, I didn't have children.

00:18:28 And it was only after I got through graduate school and started a company that I became confident to have children.

00:18:34 And what I decided was, I'm going to do something that I love.

00:18:38 And I love my girls.

00:18:40 And I want to make time for them.

00:18:42 And so I wrote my schedule so that I could be around to spend more time with them.

00:18:48 Thank you.