“I grew up in a very big family in a very small house,” says Lydia Villa-Komaroff. That house was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where few Mexican-American kids like herself were lucky to even finish high school. But Villa-Komaroff knew from a young age that she wanted to become a scientist. She remembers when she was nine, hearing her uncle talking about his work as a chemist and deciding that this sounded like the career for her. “All children are scientists, but… I think it gets lost because people forget about the excitement and the joy of discovery,” she says. “I wanted to continue to explore things, take them apart, put them back together.”