Scientist's Career Is Going Swimmingly -- A Conversation With Usha Varanasi

POSITION: Director of the Seattle-based Northwest Fisheries Science Center. The center provides scientific and technical support to National Marine Fisheries Service and its parent organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

AGE: 53

EMPLOYEES: 300.

BACKGROUND: Varanasi joined the Northwest Fisheries Science Center 19 years ago as a research chemist and, in 1987, became director of the environmental conservation division. In March, she was named the center's director. She is the first woman to head one of the service's nine major field installations.

A soft-spoken woman who often wears colorful saris under her suit jackets, Usha Varanasi doesn't look, at first glance, like a woman who crossed continents for a challenge and spent much of her career knee-deep in the science of fish gallbladders and whale body tissue.

Yet, her curiosity and interest in science has driven her many times to places she didn't think she'd be.

A native of Burma, Varanasi came to the U.S. in 1961 on a challenge, she said.

Some boys in her graduating class at Bombay University in India were planning to go abroad to study, and Varanasi told her father, "I can go, too." It was unusual for a young, unmarried Burmese woman to travel abroad, but her father said if she could get a scholarship to pay for it, he would let her go.

She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Bombay in 1961 and got her ticket to the U.S. The California Institute of Technology accepted her into its master's program in organic chemistry and gave her the needed scholarship.

While at Cal Tech, Varanasi met a young student from India, Rao Varanasi, and fell in love. Shortly after graduating in 1963, she entered the doctorate program in organic chemistry at the University of Washington. Rao Varanasi, now an engineer at The Boeing Co., was studying there to become an aeronautical engineer.

When she graduated in 1968, very few chemistry jobs were available in the Seattle area. So she changed her focus: When a fellowship to study marine mammals came open, she took it. She had no experience in biological chemistry, but she learned.

"I was always interested in different things," said Varanasi. "I think the thinking process is the same in the application of a problem whatever science you are in."

Building on this conviction later as director of the environmental conservation division of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Varanasi built a diverse team of scientists from many different backgrounds.

This 80-person team documented reproductive problems, liver disease and retarded growth in fish inhabiting Puget Sound urban waterways. The methods the team developed were used in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and are now used for marine pollution monitoring around the country.

Last October, the U.S. Department of Commerce awarded Varanasi with its gold medal, its highest honor, for her work in coastal pollution.

Varanasi believes her team's wide scope of knowledge enabled it to look at problems from many different angles and thus solve them.

One of her goals is to see that diversity in the science field grows. She sets up internships for UW and Seattle University students, especially encouraging women and minority students to enter the field.

Teaching is important to Varanasi, who is an affiliate professor at the UW and a professor at Seattle University.

"I came into this country as a student," she said. "I progressed and got breaks from my mentors, so I feel that's one thing I want to do for them."