It’s difficult to find a unique linguistic form in which to capture the fundamental nature of Angela Belcher — though her passion for the innate workings of nature itself have catapulted her to a kind of rock star status among her peers.

Belcher, the John Chipman career development associate professor at MIT, is often referred to as “one of the world’s leading material scientists.” Co-founder of Cambrios Technologies, she’s also a successful entrepreneur.

Her research and work have been met with plenty of press, accolades, awards and grant money from around the globe. Most recently, Belcher was named a prestigious MacArthur Fellow and World Technology recipient. She has also been awarded a Packard Foundation Fellowship and Harvard University’s Wilson Prize in Chemistry.

The MacArthur Foundation noted Belcher’s “demonstrated proclivity for developing new techniques for manipulating systems that straddle the boundary of organic and inorganic chemistry at the molecular scale. In her most recent work, she has genetically modified viruses to interact with solutions or inorganic semiconductors, yielding self-assembling metal films and wires” with diameters only billionths of a meter across.

That work, Belcher said, stems from an early interest in how abalone create shells out of chalk and proteins in ocean temperatures and a curiosity as to whether the abalone would or could be made to create materials they otherwise wouldn’t.

The ability to control this “self-assembly process,” as Belcher calls it, may one day lead to the next generation of microelectronics or other nanoscale machines, the MacArthur Foundation observed in bestowing Belcher with what’s commonly known as a “genius grant” fellowship.

The next generation of applications may include things such as medical implants and tissue growth, energy-efficient batteries and lighting, faster and smaller computers, detectors for hazardous agents, and stronger armor for military craft.

In her “downtime,” Belcher co-founded Cambrios Technologies, a Cambridge-based startup focused on applying her work with natural biological systems to the manufacture and assembly of electronic, magnetic and other commercially important materials.

“It’s not a job, but a lifestyle and a passion,” Belcher said. “It pays pretty well (Belcher was named one of Fortune magazine’s 2003 “richest people under 40”), but you do it because it’s what you really love to be doing.”

Belcher said she’s proud of the company’s success to date, which includes a recent second round of funding, growing to 12 employees and expanding operations to San Jose.

“It’s been a pretty humbling experience,” Belcher said. “And I do foresee my lab coming up with more innovative ideas and pushing the envelope to come up with new approaches to solve important problems.”

As for establishing more companies, Belcher sees that in her future too.

While Belcher said her tendency to be busy consistently with so many projects may be a drawback in a way, she still enjoys less super-scientist types of things such as spending time with her husband, David Bebinger, a medical resident in the Boston area, and their two dogs: Bodhi, a rescued greyhound and Lukenbach, a whippet (like a greyhound, but smaller).

Belcher said the best advice she could give to young women pursuing a career in technology or the life sciences is to follow your passion.

“I feel a little strange saying that because I’ve been really lucky and never had to stray from my path,” Belcher said. “But I think the key to finding out what you are really interested in is throwing yourself in with both feet to see where it takes you.”

Belcher, who earned her B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara, said she is most inspired by her students.

“Being at MIT I have the most incredible students,” Belcher said. “One of the most rewarding aspects about that is getting to see the science through younger people’s ideas and looking at problems that need to be solved right now — things that are important to science and the country.”

Perhaps more so than any other Women to Watch honoree, it can be said that Margrit Betke is a woman of vision.

That’s computer vision, the primary area of research for Betke, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in Boston University’s computer science department. It’s a branch of artificial intelligence and image processing focused on computer processing of real-world images.

As she puts it, “The goal of computer vision is to build computer systems that analyze images automatically and determine what the computer ‘sees’ or ‘recognizes’.”

And Betke has done some building — perhaps most significantly as co-developer of a lung imaging system for cancer detection and the Camera Mouse, a system to provide computer access for users with severe disabilities.

Betke teamed with Boston College professor James Gips, who had worked with assistive technologies but not computer vision, to develop the system.

“Instead of having to use a regular computer mouse it can track a point on your face, say the tip of your nose, and track the coordinates on the screen,” she said. “It tracks the motion and converts it to motion on the screen.”

When she’s not researching and developing, she’s teaching, although she says there’s not always a clear division between the two.

“When you’re at a research university it’s so tied in that it’s hard to say that you spend this much on class time or this much on research,” she said.

“You have students working on problems that haven’t been solved anywhere yet, and they’re able to explore something and discover great and wonderful things.”

Betke’s career began at the RFW University of Bonn (Germany), near where she grew up in the town of St. Augustin. Her master’s and Ph.D. work brought her overseas to MIT, where she worked with professors Berthold Horn and Ronald Rivest, moving from machine learning to the more specific area of computer vision.

After post-doctoral work at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, the newly married Betke moved back to Boston with husband and fellow MIT Ph.D. Nicholas Makris, who joined the ocean engineering department at MIT while she went to the computer science department at Boston College. In 2000, she moved to BU.

Last year she brought computer vision to a project focused on creatures with little vision: bats. BU biology professor Thomas Kunz, as part of a $2.5 million environmental impact study on bats in south central Texas, tapped her to provide imaging algorithms to count the creatures.

“One of the goals is knowing how many bats there are,” Kunz said. “There are some places with estimates of 20 million bats in a cave, and obviously you can’t count them one at a time.”

The system uses infrared thermal imaging of the massive swarms of bats, and Betke and her students continue to develop the algorithms to let the computer detect the bats and count them. The sheer numbers involved make it an incredibly difficult task.

“She’s been fantastic,” Kunz said. “She’s brought a lot of energy to the project, both her and her students. She has even come out in the field with us, which isn’t her area of expertise but she’s just very enthusiastic about it, to help set the cameras up and other equipment.”

And if all that isn’t enough to keep her busy, she also serves as a member of the Computing Research Association’s Distributed Mentor Project, which works to increase the number of women in graduate studies in computer science and engineering by matching undergrads with faculty mentors.

All in all, Betke says, “I am very busy, but it’s a productive busy-ness.”

There’s a sensibility in Anne Marie Biernacki’s flourishing approach to engineering, technology and business some close to her attribute at least in part to her ability to keep her eyes on the prize.

“It’s drive, but for her it’s also focus and many people are too easily distracted,” said Elizabeth Brown, herself a seasoned entrepreneur, and founder and president of Newton-based Softeach, a computer consulting and training organization.

Biernacki, as founder of and chief technology officer at Waltham-based The Digiticians, is focused at the moment on simplifying the “use of personal technology with software that automates tasks and reduces common problems — at a more affordable price” than what’s out there.

The company is making the transition from direct IT services firm to the early phases of a software and managed services company. “It’s an exciting time because the years of operating as a service-only company gave us perspective on what our target market needs,” Biernacki said. “So it’s an interesting challenge.”

Biernacki said Digiticians is poised to release PCCare Premium, a “fully automated PC maintenance and protection tool that integrates multiple tasks into one user-friendly management dashboard.” The vision, she said, is to be first out of the gate to offer enterprise-class home network solutions to residential and SOHO market, both directly and through local integrator partners.

Digiticians is the second successful startup in which Biernacki has been a key player. Biernacki previously served as vice president and chief technology officer for FuelSpot, an online business-to-business exchange and supply chain facilitator for the downstream petroleum market. That company was backed by such investors as IDG and Zero Stage Capital.

She is also a founding member of Avicenna/Care InSite, a pioneer online health services company she helped grow through startup and venture funding to an eventual acquisition that produced the popular and highly profitable WebMD.

A native of Dayton, Ohio, Biernacki earned her engineering bachelor’s degree with honors from the University of Dayton. She said her father and brother were already both engineers, so “from the beginning it was always a valid career choice.”

From Dayton, she trekked east to Boston in 1986 to attend graduate school at Tufts University, where she studied electro-optics and earned her master’s degree in electrical engineering. She was also a prestigious Draper Fellow at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories in Cambridge.

Biernacki is also a one-time counselor at the University of Dayton’s Women in Engineering summer camp program for high school girls. That experience, she said, set an early theme in her career. She continues to seek out opportunities to debunk women-in-science stereotypes by sharing personal engineering- and technology-related experiences she describes as both fun and intellectually satisfying.

The message? “Don’t fall into assumptions, your own or other people’s, that restrict your future opportunities or create artificial limitations,” Biernacki said. “Approach life thinking out of the box, no matter what you do. … allow yourself to be surprised.”

That thinking-out-of-the-box mentality, Biernacki said, has roots in her love for the arts. She’s a board member of the Cambridge Art Association. She also enjoys Scottish folk, country and ballroom dancing, sailing, hiking, gourmet cooking, and regular rounds of golf with a group of women with different backgrounds and ages spanning 25 years.

“She’s very open to new concepts,” said Brown, who is also one of her golf buddies. “But she knows what the ultimate goal is and if she says she is going to do something, she will do it. It makes it great for those of us around her, even on a social level.”

Biernacki said she, in turn, finds a great deal of personal inspiration from these women, along with the independent women she’s known in her own family and the relationships she’s established through organizations such as The Commonwealth Institute.

“My participation over the past two years with (The Commonwealth Institute) has been critical in expanding my network and my perspectives,” Biernacki said. “I look forward to finding ways to ‘give back’ by sharing my perspectives with others who are on their way up their own career ladders.”

It’s a rare software developer who can see past the 0s and 1s to the greater good. Vicki Ann Frawley, one of 10 Mass High Tech Women to Watch awardees for 2005, is that developer.

She’s found a home at Target Software Inc., a Cambridge-based maker of software for non-profit fund-raising, where she’s worked for 12 years.

“Unlike many developers, Vicki understood from the start that the ultimate purpose of her software was to enable users to accomplish their jobs,” wrote her boss and mentor, Target CEO Chuck Longfield, in nominating Frawley for the award.

Said Frawley, “In a very tangible way, I can see how what I do everyday helps these organizations further their missions.”

Frawley knew early on she wasn’t going to be a typical software developer.

“When I was starting programming, I missed talking to people,” she said. “The client-oriented view was always a fit for me.”

Frawley, whose maiden name is Rinaldi, started her college career at Georgetown as an Italian major.

“After my first semester I knew I’d picked the wrong major to study,” she said. “I was trying to decide if I should be a math or Italian major. Math was always one of my better subjects. I love algebra; I actually liked word problems.”

And while Italian wasn’t spoken at home, math was. Her father, Michael, holds a Ph.D. in math from MIT. Her mother, Mary, is a math teacher. A brother is a civil engineer.

Her father “brought his daughter up to believe that she not only can be whatever she wants to be, but that she can do so in science and mathematics, fields that have traditionally been dominated by men,” Longfield noted in his nomination.

The nice thing about studying math at Georgetown she said, is it’s “a really small department, so you have very, very direct access. And it’s closely related with the computer science department.”

That intimacy was echoed in her first — and so far only — software job, at Target. She was there at the beginning.

“Thinking back, I am amazed that she accepted a position with us,” said Longfield. “At the time, we were a three-person start-up operating out of an apartment outside of Harvard Square.”

She learned using Oracle’s software development tools, and “became a very competent developer,” Longfield said. But the lure of the “people” side of things won out.

“I think part of the draw for me for working at Target was the idea of using technology to help non-profits,” she said.

Her innate people and communication skills have been honed by more than a decade at work as the person who could glide easily between the geeky world of programming and the board rooms of some of the nation’s biggest non-profit organizations.

“I think it puts me in a pretty unique position,” she said of her status as a manager who can write code. For example, she said, “if I get told that such and such a project will take so many hours, or can’t be done in three months, I have enough of the understanding to say ‘are you sure?’ or ‘you’re underestimating these 10 things.’

“Knowing the thought process that goes into that part of the work helps me go to clients and explain.”

It’s also opened her eyes to some of the gender-related challenges women face in technology.

“I’ve been very, very lucky,” she said. “Fund-raising is a female dominated field. We’re dealing usually with men on IT side, women on the fund-raising side. There’s been sort of a balance struck. And if you make sense … they’ll listen to you.”

There has been progress, she said.

“Probably, if I were 10 years older, I’d have a completely different experience,” said Frawley, who is 33. “I think about stories you hear from in women in fund-raising side, about when they try to break in and advance in their careers.”

Her perspective is informed by her involvement in Kappa Delta Psi, a charitable sorority that operates a consignment shop in Melrose, and whose members average over 50 years old.

“It’s like having a whole bunch of grandmas,” she said. “In the 1940s, 50s, 60s, most women didn’t work. This is what they did.”

Frawley and her husband, Bill, have a 2-year-old son, with whom she’s started with the math already. “Since the day he was born, we’ve counted the stairs. There are 12,” she said, deadpan.

But she’s serious about starting math and science education early.

“To reach women and interest them in math, it’s almost too late in college. To have some kind of influence you need to be getting to them at the elementary school level.”

It’s a long way from building a Heathkit television in the cellar to designing software that guides spacecraft.

For Heidi Perry, one of 10 Mass High Tech Women to Watch for 2005, it’s all a big puzzle. A big puzzle with no “Easy” button.

Perry, principal member of the technical staff and software engineering division leader at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc. in Cambridge, credits her father for her start in engineering.

“My dad is an electrical engineer; he’s retired,” Perry said. “Growing up, I asked him what he did, and he said, ‘I invent things.’ So I wanted to go to the basement and invent things too.”

And she did, using blocks of wood, nails, wires and other raw materials, ingredients that would give way later to algorithms, code and compilers.

“My dad would say, ‘Hey that’s pretty good. Look what you can do.’ He never said, ‘You can’t do that as a girl.’

“The common theme was, math was in the background to all of this,” she said. “Everything was just a big puzzle.”

When she applied to study physics at Cornell, she says, her high school physics teacher pulled her aside and said, “That’s hard.”

“I said it wouldn’t be any fun if it were easy. And it is hard. But easy puzzles are stupid.”

At Cornell, Perry was one of about 10 women out of 180 engineering majors. She wasn’t daunted; she was determined.

“I knew I wanted to be an engineer,” she said, “and the way to get through this was to be friends with folks and figure things out.”

Upon graduation Perry deviated from the choice of entry-level job versus graduate school. Instead she signed up for a six-month leadership training program offered by her sorority, Alpha Phi, putting off a job that awaited at General Electric.

She traveled to Alpha Phi chapters nationwide, consulting and training members on leadership.

“It provided really good insight on teams, how people play together, how to motivate and set goals,” Perry said. “When you get past the equations and math, you have to work people into that puzzle. You have to consider personalities, leadership styles.

“It was a very safe environment to try out ways to work with people.”

That dual role has served her well at Draper, a not-for-profit laboratory that takes customers’ ideas and turns them into working prototypes.

At Draper, Perry provides technical leadership for 75 staff engineers and four group leaders as well as handling new business development and proposal support. Much of her work at Draper has been in GNC — guidance, navigation and control — for the military. She’s been in the cockpit with pilots as the software systems she helped design were tested — sometimes at 200 feet above the ground.

“Every project I’ve run has been interesting or different. We are a prototype lab, so a customer comes to us with a problem and says, ‘Can you help me solve this?’ We truly go out in field and test something. We take the customer’s wish to an actual running artifact. I love it!”

Perry’s husband, Duncan, is the chief financial officer at a Cambridge technology company. She enjoys time with her three children, a boy and two girls ages 6, 5 and 3. Besides “hanging out with the kids and building Lego robots,” Perry’s loves include photography — “a phenomenal hobby if you’re math-oriented” — and sailing.

Women may face obstacles in the male-dominated engineering world, but Perry’s message is simple: Deal with it.

“If it’s there, I don’t let it bother me,” she said. “The good part about engineering is if you are capable and develop quality results, that is what’s most valued.”

Besides, she adds, Draper is a “sink-or-swim kind of place. That’s what I’ve really found to be the case. It all comes down to attitude.”

Perry is the Draper representative and a key player in working with the faculty of MIT’s Aeronautics and Astronautics Department to identify and teach software that meets the specific needs of the students of the department.

“I find Heidi to be an extremely enthusiastic, dedicated and well- rounded person,” wrote Paul Motyka, director of algorithms and software at Draper, in nominating Perry for the Women To Watch award. “She is a pleasure to work with and she has the respect of everyone that interfaces with her.”

Perry has some advice for young women considering a career in engineering:

“The most important thing is, find someone who believes in you,” she said, “Then you can do things, anything set your mind to. Then when you doubt yourself, they’ll say, ‘Come on, you can do this.’”

Call her a reluctant math nerd with a nose for good people.

But for Elizabeth Ricci, vice president of engineering for Authoria Inc., a successful career in technology almost never happened because of a desire to hang out with the cool kids.

Ricci says she knew in high school that she had a natural ability in math. “It came very easy to me,” Ricci said. “I was almost to the point of being bored with the usual algebra and trigonometry.”

Noticing, however, that it was not cool on the means streets of New Jersey to be a nerd, Ricci dropped the math courses.

Her math skills were not to be ignored, and Ricci soon found herself helping the mostly male students in the advanced math courses with their homework. This information didn’t take long to get back to the female head of the school’s math department, who called Ricci into the office.

“She told me I was wasting a gift for mathematics and said, ‘Straighten up and use your gift and don’t worry about being shunned by the cool kids,’” Ricci recalled.

“Miss Leenheer took me under her wing and said, ‘I am going to help you get into a college and see if you can make something out of that gift.’”

True to her word, that early mentor got Ricci to apply for a full state scholarship to Rutgers University, which she landed with ease.

When she got her B.A. in mathematics from Douglass College at Rutgers, Ricci went to work for Bell Labs, which immediately chose her as one of 50 people nationwide to go into a new three-year advanced program design training course.

Shortly after the completion of the three-year course, which put Ricci squarely in the world of programming, her husband landed a job with a NASA lab in Cambridge, and they moved to the Bay State.

That launched a path for Ricci that ran through some of the biggest names in New England technology — Sylvania Electronic Systems, Compugraphic, Wang Laboratories and Digital Equipment Corp. At Wang, Ricci won patents for some of her software creations, and she says that she learned her most valuable lessons in best practices in software design at DEC.

Ricci left DEC before the company’s collapse, mainly because “of the size of the bureaucracy” and moved on to FTP Software. “I wanted to take what I learned at Digital and apply that to much smaller companies,” Ricci said.

It was at FTP Software that Ricci got her first chance to pay back Anita Leenheer for her mentoring and establish herself as a good judge of talent and ability.

When Ricci was up for a promotion, she had identified a young woman whom she approached to take Ricci’s position as a group manager. The woman was hesitant, and the senior management had already picked the person they wanted.

“So I had to fight both management and (this person),” Ricci said. Eventually the woman in question gave in and, to her own surprise but not Ricci’s, excelled at the job.

“She eventually left and went to another company and became a vice president of engineering,” Ricci said with pride.

At Authoria, Ricci oversees all the design and engineering of Authoria’s web-based human resources management products. While the company isn’t a corporate behemoth like DEC or Wang in the day, it has a stable and expanding roster of customers, including Pepsi, Coke, McDonald’s and Burger King.

And her personal encouragement- style of mentoring has followed her to Authoria, along with a good number of former employees from her previous positions whose ability and talent have caught Ricci’s eye.

That style of encouragement is important to Ricci, who, had she not received it late in her high school years, would not have had the kind of success she enjoys.

“I think about my own three daughters, who are all highly successful, and they didn’t grow up the way I did. They grew up with all the support they needed,” Ricci said. “I grew up the hard way, and maybe I brought some of the strength from that.”

With a career path devoted to strong software development and the encouragement of those with great potential, the irony of Ricci having arrived at a software company whose sole focus is on human capital management is not lost on her.

“It’s interesting as to where I landed because this is just a natural thing for me,” Ricci said.

Like most of us, Hollie Schmidt loves her friends. Unlike many of us, she also loves science and math.

The two loves came together when multiple sclerosis was diagnosed in a close friend. After he left the corporate world to found a non-profit devoted to finding a cure for MS, he asked Schmidt to come on board to head up scientific operations.

A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Schmidt has science and math in her blood. Her mother holds a Ph.D. in math and her father was an electrical engineer working for Bell Helicopter Co. When college was on the horizon, MIT seemed like the best choice.

“I wanted to live somewhere other than Texas for a while,” Schmidt said, ldquo;and the East Coast seemed attractive.”

Schmidt met the people who would have the strongest influence on her life at MIT — her husband, Peter Schmidt, and friends Art Mellor and John Reardon.

Bitten by the New England bug, the Schmidts decided to stay in the area. “It also helps that this is a center for high tech,” Schmidt said.

After the Schmidts received their master’s degrees from the MIT Sloan School of Management, they were approached by Mellor about starting their own company, and with the addition of Reardon as a founder, the four college chums launched Midnight Networks Inc. in 1991, using Peter Schmidt’s and Mellor’s experience at places such as BBN to get in on the ground floor of network consulting.

In 1996 the founders sold the company to Teradyne and went their separate ways, all the while remaining in touch. The Schmidts founded and were well into their own technology consulting practice, Lifting Mind Inc., when Mellor called.

“After he sold Midnight Networks to Teradyne, Art was working at another company for a while when he started noticing some strange neurological disorders,” Schmidt said. “After seeing some specialists he found he had MS.”

Mellor decided that he needed to leave the corporate world but, according to Schmidt, was not the sort to let the world find a solution to his problem.

“He started talking about what he could do with his neurologist, and he decided to use his talents to start a non-profit that would do something that would help accelerate the search for a cure for MS,” Schmidt said.

Mellor asked Schmidt to help with the startup non-profit on a consulting basis. That was how the Boston Cure Project for MS was born.

Once it was determined that the best course the new organization could take would be one that helped other entities — both non-profit and corporate — get better access to the science and scientific tools out there, Mellor asked Schmidt to become a full-time employee as vice president of scientific operations.

Right out of the gate, Schmidt realized that to go forward the MS research community had to know where it had been.

“I developed a framework of categories to describe how things go wrong with genes that cause people to get sick, which became part of the Cure Map,” Schmidt said.

The Cure Map is a collection of the research done to date showing the possible causes of MS, and it led to the Road Map — a guide to the future of MS research.

One of the things Schmidt discovered in developing the Cure Map is that there is precious little physical material on which researchers can conduct their studies. So one of the current projects occupying her time is developing a large repository of blood and tissue samples from people with MS and control subjects without MS to be made available to researchers.

The greater the cooperation among researchers, the faster solutions for MS can be found, Schmidt maintains.

“I love talking to scientists who have the same orientation that we do — a lot of scientists are coming to the same conclusion that we have — that we need to be more multidisciplinary in our approach,” Schmidt said.

“Rather than trying to solve everything yourself, find other groups and other people who can help.”

After all, helping others is what led her to the Boston Cure Project in the first place.

When Paula Soteropoulos was a teen-ager, she was a bit abashed to acknowledge that she was an outstanding science student.

“Even my friends didn’t know that I had an interest, and inclination for, math and science,” recalls Soteropoulos, 37, a native of Peabody who attended the Pingree School.

“And when I went to college, I started out as a liberal arts major.”

By her sophomore year at Tufts University, however, she had wised up. She began taking courses in biology and chemistry, and she began feeling better about herself and her future.

She earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s from Tufts in chemical engineering in four and a half years and was able to use summer jobs at Genzyme Corp. to guide her toward a career in the life sciences.

Paula is currently vice president, program management and strategic development, for Genzyme’s renal division. In her 13 years at Genzyme, she has been a senior project manager, associate director facility maintenance, a director of capital project management and a senior director, Renagel operations. Renagel is prescribed for the control of serum phosphorus in patients with chronic kidney disease on hemodialysis.

She has been tabbed for larger and more prominent roles in part because she has been able to meld her engineering background with the skills necessary to produce and market medicinal products.

“I have been lucky to work with key individuals who have taken risks on me by providing new possibilities that may have been outside of my direct experience,” she said. She said mentors have included Genzyme’s Frank Ollington and John Butler.

“The other factor (in advancement) has been my tendencies toward seeking new challenges and remaining open to opportunities.”

She said her husband, Taki Soteropoulos, also has been a key to her success, especially in the early stages of her educational and professional career.

“He helped me reevaluate what I wanted to do with my life rather than what I thought others wanted me to do,” she said.

The position she holds now is multi-faceted, but much of her work involves supervision of the renal division. Company officials say she led the planning and startup of three separate manufacturing facilities for its Renagel product.

And she was instrumental in the decision to bring manufacturing of it in-house, thereby ensuring that the company can meet market demand while having control of the production process.

Renagel has been a major seller for Genzyme, and one of Paula’s most recent responsibilities includes managing the strategic relationship with the company’s marketing partner in Asia.

That gives her “profit-and-loss” accountability for Japan and the Pacific Rim for the renal division.

“One thing I like about Genzyme is many managers are willing to take risks on an individual in terms of giving them new tasks and responsibilities,” she said.

Butler, manager of Genzyme’s renal business unit, said of Soteropoulos, “Through her experiences she has demonstrated great leadership skills, the ability to think outside the box and the ability to make good decisions and deliver results.

“Her work ethic and focus make her a role model to the women, and men, within the organization.”

Genzyme is among the Boston market’s largest employers, with close to 5,300 employees worldwide.

The company’s product portfolio is focused on rare genetic disorders, renal disease, osteoarthritis and immune-mediated diseases, and includes an industry-leading array of diagnostic products and services.

This company is growing steadily, which makes this former liberal arts major a believer in her future in science.

“At one time I considered leaving Genzyme for another opportunity,” said Paula, ldquo;but things are going well, and I like getting more involved in the commercial side because it enables you to get closer to helping patients at the bedside.

“I’ve stayed at Genzyme because the people have such a passion about their products, and I look forward to the future there.”

If you’re one of those people for whom the PalmOne or Blackberry has become a critical tool for managing day-to-day life, you may want to thank Lorraine Wheeler.

It was Wheeler who co-founded Andover startup Actual Software and helped create MultiMail, one of the first e-mail programs for Palm handhelds. At a time when PDAs were essentially high tech notepads, it was a revolutionary development — and a bold risk for Wheeler and co-founder Mark Lussier.

“We were thinking that the handheld market was really going to take off,” said Wheeler, an MIT alumna with degrees in computer science and management. “When you looked at a Palm Pilot the most logical thing you thought was, ‘Give me a cell phone and let me communicate.’ Even though e-mail wasn’t big then, we thought it would be, and we wanted to create the best thing, the best product in that area.”

Wheeler and Lussier were aiming high: Palm, Wheeler says, had already said it would never do e-mail. Moreover, the pair were hardly household names.

But when MultiMail was released in 1998, enabling users to send and receive e-mail on the road, the gamble paid off. The free version of MultiMail saw 1,000 downloads an hour, while the only competing product, Lussier said, cost $80. Ultimately, the paid version became successful enough that Palm — the company that didn’t want e-mail — paid $4 million to acquire Actual Software in June 2000.

By then a successful entrepreneur, Wheeler wasn’t that far removed from Orono High School in Orono, Maine, her home before heading south to Cambridge and then, after graduation, to GE Medical Systems in Waukesha, Wis. Later she pursued a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Illinois.

“From Waukesha, it didn’t seem that far away to go to Illinois,” she said. “And I had kind of crossed MIT off my list because I had done undergrad there and I wanted a different experience.”

But the winds of the Prairie State can wear out even the hardiest of New Englanders, so with master’s degree in hand she came back for a stint at Hewlett-Packard’s medical division and later at Sanga, a Java startup co-founded by Lussier. When Sanga closed down, the door was opened for Actual and Multimail.

“It was a good experience to be involved with a startup even though it ultimately wasn’t successful and I wasn’t in a leadership position,” Wheeler said. “It gave me a good feel for what a startup was like, and that was where I met my business partner (Lussier).”

Actual Software launched in 1998 and was sold in 2000 to Palm, where Wheeler and Lussier worked until deciding it was time for a break.

“It’s a tough transition going from working for yourself and being in charge to being part of a big company,” Wheeler said. “We got the project out that we had been working on and then took some time off.”

The time off gave Wheeler more time to devote to the MIT Enterprise Forum, on whose board she has served for two and a half years, and give birth to a son. Lussier said they while they had had no definitive plans, they had discussed the possibility of another startup together. “We’re the type that are always thinking, what’s next, what’s next, what’s next,” he said.

In 2002, she and Lussier launched Botzam Inc. as a “lifestyle company” that would require less of a time investment than Actual Software had.

“It’s really more of a family-oriented company,” he said. “Back in the late ’90s in the dot-com era it was all gung ho, big money, big-time, people sleeping under their desks. The whole industry has gotten away from that now, so we’re not putting into it what we did back then.”

The company’s first product, Botzam Backup, now in its second version, provides handheld users with extra backup and security protection, backing up data and applications onto secure digital cards. That was followed by Botzam MIDIplay, which enables PalmOS handhelds to store and play MIDI files.

Just a year after Botzam launched, Wheeler was named to the TR100 list of top young innovators by Technology Review, MIT’s Magazine of Innovation, and she summarized her motivation as follows: “I’m interested in pure innovation. I follow the market wherever it moves.”

It’s said that timing is everything.

But there is one level better: timing and luck.

Lijun Wu, executive director of the cardiovascular division at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research Inc. in Cambridge, might be an example as a life science professional who has risen to the top of her field with the help of timing and luck.

She would tell you the same thing, though of course intelligence and competence also have characterized her professional profile.

“The most important development in my professional life was the chance to study,” said Wu, a 41-year-old native of China.

“In the mid-’80s, our country opened the door to education after years of not permitting people to study or travel. They offered scholarships, and people of my age who were accepted could go anywhere.

“The timing was such that I was just entering my college years. And I was very lucky to have been chosen, at that time, to get an education after many years when young people were not permitted educational opportunity.”

Wu, the oldest of four children, was the daughter of a math teacher (mother) and a mid-level manager. Her parents encouraged her to attend college, and she was accepted at Sichuan University in Chengdu.

This was in a period when the Cultural Revolution was coming to a close, and she was one of just three students from her village who qualified to go to college.

Upon graduation, a professor told her of state scholarships that would permit her to attend graduate school abroad. The professor knew people at Northwestern University, and Wu chose that school. She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry there in 1990.

Showing both a desire and ability in biology and chemistry, she earned a post-doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1993.

“The government supported my studying, but I owe my education to my parents,” she said. “They always encouraged me.”

From there she went to work for a startup in Cambridge called LeukoSite Inc., which was eventually purchased by Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc.

In 2003, she joined Novartis.

“Millennium had been going through a period of downsizing and reorganization,” Wu recalled.

“I had heard good things about Novartis and decided to look into opportunities. Since joining, I have really enjoyed it.”

In her role as department head of atherosclerosis research for the company’s U.S. cardiovascular unit, she is responsible for overseeing a team of scientists that is focused on developing new approaches for treating atherosclerosis.

Atherosclerosis is a form of arteriosclerosis characterized by the deposition of plaques containing cholesterol and lipids on the innermost layer of the walls of large and medium-sized arteries, and is a major factor in congestive heart failure.

Novartis, which employs 918 in Cambridge, has an employment goal of 1,100. Wu says the company has been supportive in paying attention to the needs of women in science.

“They have made an effort to offer training programs and other opportunities,” she said. “Several months ago there was a formal program about how to develop leadership in women.

“There are individual relationships, too, and I work with several younger women as they plan their careers.”

Wu says that most of her “spare time” is spent in activities with her family, which includes her two young children.

A statement from Novartis said, “We are very fortunate to have a leader on our team of Lijun’s caliber, and believe she is one of the ‘women to watch’ both within Novartis and in the region’s life-sciences community.”