Jessica Winter Named to "Forty Under 40" List
Jessica Winter was selected as one of Business First's "Forty Under 40" honorees this year. Honorees were chosen from a pool of over 350 nominations.
The 2015 Class of Forty Under 40 gathered with their friends, family and associates at the Hollywood Casino on May 28 to celebrate their accomplishment in a unique way: honorees were asked to pick a word that described them, and worked with artist Anna Sokol to create a montage of panels highlighting the word. A storify was also created.
Winter's chosen word was "Gladiator."
Winter elaborated: "Most people know me as a cancer researcher who also battled and survived cancer at a young age. Obviously, I had my personal battle with the disease. But academic research can be characterized as a gladiator sport. I get in the ring every day and fight to learn more about cancer. How to find it, how to treat it, and how to prevent it in the first place. It’s a competitive, tough job. My life is never boring. A great focus of my work has been translation. How do I take things from the lab all the way to the clinic and actually impact real patients? That’s hard. Most of the money in academic research is for first discovery, not implementation, and companies don’t want to invest until you have an actual working product. There is a 'valley of death' in the middle between these two extremes where I find much of my work taking place."
Wither her mother being a chemist and her father a physicist, Winter described her career in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) field as a "foregone conclusion."
"After my bachelor’s degree, I went into industry as a process engineer. I was bored out of my mind. I vowed to choose a career that would (a) never be boring, (b) allowed me to tackle the most difficult problem I could find, and (c) with potential to impact society in a meaningful way. I went back to school to get my PhD and became a researcher in medicine, and more specifically brain cancer. The brain cancer that I study is nearly uniformly fatal in less than two years. You can’t get a more rewarding or difficult problem to work on," she said.
Everyone gets a little help along the way, however, and Winter is no different.
"I have had a number of fantastic mentors throughout my career so it is difficult to pick just one," Winter said. However, one of the most influential people in my career has been Dr. Jeffrey Chalmers, another researcher in the William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Jeff has helped me navigate the murky political waters of doing cancer research without an MD, learning to interact with physicians, and also has substantial commercialization experience, which was invaluable as I started my company."
Winter is one of 25 chemical engineering faculty, research professors and clinical faculty at Ohio State, which is based in Columbus, Ohio. When asked what she would change about Columbus, Winter said, "I would love to see renewed support for innovation from both the city and state, particularly in technology. Engineers create nearly 90 percent of the jobs in this country through their discoveries. For example, the development of the automobile led to jobs in steel, plastics and manufacturing at all levels. We need to continue to invest in technology innovation through programs like Third Frontier and TechColumbus (now Rev1Ventures) so that we can capture those jobs in Columbus and in Ohio."
Winter, 39, is from Fort Worth, Texas and studied chemical engineering at Northwestern University and the University of Texas at Austin, where she obtained her master's and Ph.D. in chemical engineering.
Her community involvement includes working as a scientific advisor for Edheads and serving as a volunteer in a community kitchen. She is also a review board member for Pelotonia, an annual cancer fundraising event.
