| At events, and through letters, phone calls, e-mails, and class notes, we learn of unusual experiences and proud achievements of au alumni. We created class notables so you too can catch up with people you knew at AU.
Lydia Thomas, CAS ’71
Photo by Jeff Watts |
Want to know how the weatherman knows when it’s going to rain, how the government defines pollution, or how to stop terrorists from bringing a dirty bomb into the country? Just ask Lydia Thomas. As the CEO of a scientific research nonprofit and a presidential appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, her answer wouldn’t just be based on theory. It would come from experience. In her three decades at MITRE and Mitretek Systems, Thomas has helped provide the science behind the EPA’s air-quality standards, contributed to the instrumentation onboard many of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather satellites, and overseen technology projects for agencies wrestling with health-care, energy, and national security issues. Despite her résumé Thomas never envisioned her career path when she earned her master’s degree in microbiology from AU in 1971. “I thought I would be a research biologist to my dying day,” Thomas confesses. “When I got the opportunity at MITRE, I thought, OK, I’ll do this for a few years . . . and then move on. Well, that was 1973.” Not only did she not move on; she flourished there. So much so in fact, that when the nonprofit split its environmental, energy, and health-care services from its defense contracts in 1996, Thomas, who also holds a PhD in cytology from Howard University, became president and CEO of the newly formed Mitretek Systems. But it wasn’t success alone that kept Thomas away from academia. The same thirst for learning that drew her toward an academic career kept her at MITRE. “I’m just a sucker for learning,” she explains. “Every day has been a new opportunity to learn in this environment. There were new programs all the time, new fields to learn about . . . In some ways it’s actually been like being at a research university—but without the ivy on the walls.” The daughter of a principal and a guidance counselor, Thomas valued education early and gravitated toward scientific study before she entered the Portsmouth, Va., high school where her parents worked. “I did my first experiment when I was 10,” she recalls. “I stuffed flowers and alcohol into test-tubes, but not much happened, so I thought, I wonder what would happen if I added some heat. I nearly burned down my mother’s kitchen.” Though she’s come a long way from that kitchen, that curiosity has continued to define Thomas’s scientific career. From finding the strength to earn her master’s degree and PhD while a divorced mother of two, to tackling engineering problems without the benefit of an engineering background in her early days at MITRE, Thomas’s drive to learn something new has helped her through many challenges. Today, as she serves on the Homeland Security Advisory Council, providing advice to the secretary of Homeland Security, curiosity still guides Thomas’s approach. In her role as cochair of a task-force on preventing weapons of mass destruction from entering the country, for instance, Thomas understands that despite her vast technology experience, what she knows may not be as important as what she can learn. “Of course there’s a big place for science and technology here,” she explains. “There are detection technologies, biometrics . . . but there’s no silver bullet. It’s going to take intelligence, foreign relations, information sharing . . . There’s a seat at this table for almost everything.” —MATT GETTY continued next page top |
