Guinness may not have a world record for closing sales while breastfeeding, but if it did, Jill Becker is pretty sure she’d own that honor.

Becker founded her business in 2003 after receiving her Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University and discovering that her passion – researching and building nanometer-scale thin films – was in need of a technology to help other researchers and corporations do their work faster, cheaper and easier.

In 2007, Becker decided to turn her three-person company, Cambridge NanoTech Inc., into a growth business – and so began the ramp-up that led her to make sales calls while nursing her children, who are now 1 and 3 years old. The dual roles of mother and entrepreneur aren’t new for Becker – she hand-assembled the first 13 units her Kendall Square-based company sold, and at times, an infant was right alongside her.

“It turns out, a drill is a soothing sound to an infant,” says Becker, who is now 36.

What Becker was building, the company’s “atomic layer deposition” (ALD) systems, are not unlike specialized ovens that deposit layers on specialized surfaces: semiconductors, thin-film luminescent displays and even drill bits, razors or medical devices. She founded Cambridge NanoTech, she says, because nobody else wanted to sell systems like hers, which are much smaller than typical R&D systems and range in price from $118,000 to $750,000.

The technology – and her initial vendors and customers – grew straight out of her work at Harvard’s Gordon Lab, headed by renowned professor Roy Gordon. Several of the scientific reactions that Becker discovered while in his lab are not only used every day in his lab to this day, but are used all around the world, Gordon said. In all, Becker has published more than 25 technical papers on ALD and holds five patents.

“I’m walking that fine line between being a scientist and running a business,” says Becker.

And her business is, in fact, running – she expects to go from 15 employees now to 20 by the end of this year. Cambridge Nanotech was profitable from the beginning, she said, and finished 2008 with global sales of just over $6 million. “Since I was a little girl, I wanted to have an international company,” said Becker, who grew up in Germany, Belgium and Canada, and was inspired to pursue science by her older brother, Leif.

But the line between science and commerce isn’t the only tightrope Becker balances: Before her children were born, she volunteered her time at several Cambridge charities. As the children were born, she walked that other line: the one between work and life. “I actually think (motherhood) makes me a better businessperson,” Becker said. “One gives you a break from the other. … It gave me a lot more patience.”

And when she was pregnant, she said, she was so concerned about losing business momentum while on maternity, she would work extra hard.

“I love it when she’s pregnant,” said Ray Ritter, chief operations officer of Cambridge NanoTech. “She knocks the ball out of the park.”

Boston native Sangeeta Bhatia is the ultimate multi-tasker: a professor of health sciences and technology in the joint Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a co-founder of Hepregen Corp.

While her concentration as both a researcher and entrepreneur is on biomedical engineering and tissue engineering, Bhatia, 40, is also working on research to use nanoparticles to help imaging technology find tumors long before traditional methods can find them.

It seems fated that Bhatia would be involved in innovation. Her father, Narain Bhatia, was an engineer, and the apple did not fall far from the tree. “As a child, I was always tinkering, always taking apart the telephone and figuring out how things work,” Bhatia said. “In high school, my dad, who was an engineer, said, ‘I think you would make a good engineer.’ He was my first mentor.”

Her father took Bhatia to visit a lab at MIT, and she was hooked. Once she graduated from Lexington High School, Bhatia was off to Brown University, where she majored in biomedical engineering. Before long, Bhatia had an apartment in Providence, but no income, and fate reappeared in her life.

“I walked by a lab door (of professor Moses Goddard at Brown) that I had walked by often, which was working on artificial organs, and I got to hounding them for a summer job,” Bhatia said.

That job was Bhatia’s first exposure to the creation of living tissue through artificial means, and it put her on the path that led to Hepregen, which makes tiny liver tissues to help improve drug development. After Brown, Bhatia applied to the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program.

“They didn’t accept me at HST the first time. So I went to a different program at MIT, until I could transfer,” Bhatia said.

Fate waved a flag at Bhatia again, when her graduate adviser at HST suggested she take a faculty position. “I had always assumed I was going into industry. Then I got a job offer from UC San Diego.”

After a few years, Bhatia, now married, came back to the East Coast – to a faculty role at HST, the very school that had initially turned her down as a student.

A mother of two girls, Bhatia has long been concerned with the scarcity of women in science and technology. “Since college I have been paying close attention to the lack of women in my field, in engineering in particular,” she said.

Research showed Bhatia that the stage at which the biggest disparity occurs is in middle school, so while still in grad school she helped found KEYs (Keys to Empowering Youth) focusing on workshops for girls ages 11-13 that both teaches them about empowerment and exposes them to the very cool world of technology and science.

Bhatia still participates in the KEYs workshops, and brought her 5-year-old daughter to the most recent event. Of course, it didn’t have quite the same effect as it might have on a 13 year old.

“The thing she loved is the darkroom. Or looking in the microscope and seeing the rainbows.”

In technology, some people pull together the molecules, bits’ or nuts and bolts to create new substances or machines. Then there are people who find new and better uses for those technologies. Amy Cueva and Mad*Pow Media Solutions LLC fall into the latter group.

Mad*Pow, in Portsmouth, N.H., focuses on user experiences for corporate systems, customer-facing applications, websites and interactive media. Cueva, chief experience officer, founded the firm with Will Powley in 2000. From that beginning, the company’s current and past client list reads as a who’s who: Aetna, Fidelity, Autodesk, Monster, Starwood Hotels and others.

At first impression, Cueva, 31, is soft spoken and laid back. But a confidence emerges as she talks about how the 19-employe firm goes after the biggest clients: “It‘s a bit of aggression and bullheadness, and also optimism. Believing that we can do great things for them … and being confident in my abilities and the abilities of this organization.”

Mad*Pow’s work with a new site or application starts with client interviews and mapping out how a user is likely to use the new system at each point in a transaction.

Cueva’s path into user experience began with what some would consider an odd mix of interests, majoring in art and calculus at the University of Hartford, highlighting both creative and analytical talents.

Working for Sun Microsystems Inc. in her hometown of Burlington, Cueva started “sprucing up the look of their website.” There, Cueva got to watch one of her role models, her sister, developer Ann Wollrath. “I was able to witness her in the workplace and was inspired that she could hold her own in a community of men,” said Cueva.

She learned the value of customer satisfaction from another role model, her mother, Claire Putnicki. “My mom was a florist, so she was a business owner herself. Growing up, I saw her bring clients into the house, interview them on their needs, what they wanted in their flowers, and deliver high quality, and her business grew through word of mouth. She did good work and built relationships,” said Cueva.

At Mad*Pow such relationships have led to past clients bringing in new business through new employers.

Powley said that what drives Cueva is an “insatiable appetite for knowledge in our industry” and a desire to leverage that knowledge to help their clients.

The firm is also active in the nonprofit sector, whether raising funds for charity or helping nonprofits build out their websites.

Cueva learned her craft by doing it, having left college after two years.

She deals with the challenge of the work/life balance as the mother of three children, ages four to 11. “Having kids gave me the drive to want to constantly provide for them, aggressively, in partnership with my husband (Arturo),” she said.

Yet, she also feels a responsibility to take care of her employees. “I work hard every day to make sure our clients are happy, and to keep the people here employed. We want to get through this economic storm together, and I think people might look up to you for that, working very hard.”

While other 16-year-olds were experiencing the joys of the open road, Heather De Jesus was spending her summer reassembling the engine of a 1972 Volkswagen Beetle.

It was a project her father insisted she complete before she could take driver’s education. He didn’t want her to be a girl who only drove a car and didn’t know how it worked. “It was literally laying all over the floor,” De Jesus recalls. “He gave me the user’s manual and the tools, and said, ‘Figure out what you can do.’ ”

One year later, the car started.

In elementary school, teachers discouraged her interest in science, the beginning of a trend that De Jesus would constantly face and resist. Motivated by those experiences, she now serves as a Girl Scout Troop mentor for math and science and a volunteer with the National Engineers Week Foundation.

“I don’t want any child or any other woman to feel the way I did,” De Jesus said.

She ignored the naysayers, and in 1995 she enrolled at the University of South Carolina, majoring in mechanical engineering. While still an undergrad, she was employed by Carolina Power & Light at a nuclear power plant, the only female engineer and the youngest by nine years.

Later, as a flight-test engineer for the U.S. Navy, she was given an underfunded project that was six months behind schedule. She re-evaluated the budget, removed extraneous items and negotiated with the maintenance crew on work schedules.

Under her leadership, the project was completed within budget and on time. When she was ready for a new challenge, she joined Lang-Mekra North America LLC in South Carolina, and designed a shake table to simulate 500,000 miles on a truck, to observe why the company’s mirrors were cracking.

At Lang-Mekra, De Jesus, whose maiden name is Stone, met network administrator David De Jesus, whom she later married. After the birth of their daughter, they returned to New England, where both had grown up – she in Brunswick, Maine, and he in Worcester. She took a job as the director of program management at Azima DLI, a reliability services company in Woburn.

“It was a scary move for us because it was a startup,” she said.

In five years, the company has grown from seven to 100 employees. De Jesus has led by building trust with others instead of making demands. Despite her soft voice, the 32-year-old can walk into a room filled with middle-aged male executives and engineers and stand toe-to-toe with any of them, according to Dawn Harn, a technical writer at Azima DLI. “She’s extremely intelligent and extremely friendly,” said Harn. “She knows her stuff backward and forward.”

With all her responsibilities, De Jesus is diligent about saying, “This is family time and family time only.” In fact, balancing her responsibilities at work with her role as a wife and mother is a feat she considers her greatest accomplishment.

Terrafugia Inc. COO Anna Mracek Dietrich has wanted to create flying machines since she was a kindergartener in St. Louis.

Mracek Dietrich’s grandfather designed aircraft for McDonnell Douglas for about 40 years – he was the principal designer on the F4 fighter jet and worked on the Harpoon and Sparrow missiles, as well as the Mars lander.

“We always had really fun stuff in the basement,” she said.

Mracek Dietrich, 27, said anyone who knew her when she was growing up wouldn’t be surprised to find that she’s the COO of a company developing a flying car – or “roadable aircraft,” as Terrafugia calls its “Transition” vehicle. Her high school yearbook superlative was something like “Most Likely to be Writing a Novel on Mars,” she said.

New acquaintances find her job exciting, though they need some time to process the information. Typical reactions range from surprise that such a company is real to assuming it’s developing a “Jetsons”-like car that can take off from your driveway. “I usually don’t tell people what I do exactly,” she said.

Mracek Dietrich and the company’s two other founders – her husband and Terrafugia CEO, Carl Dietrich, and the vice president of engineering, Samuel Schweighart – were all members of the MIT Rocket Team as grad students. Ultimately, half of Terrafugia’s 10-person staff would end up being ex-Rocket Teamers.

“Inadvertently, we were recruiting for our future company,” she said.

While in grad school, Mracek Dietrich would ride the Red Line for half an hour and a bus for 45 minutes to Hanscom Air Force Base two or three times a week to get her pilot’s license, though she doesn’t have to time to fly regularly.

“It’s my dream to fly something I helped design and build,” she said.

Mracek Dietrich, an engineer by training, said she reluctantly agreed to take control of the startup’s operations and has been surprised to find she enjoys it. A week after joining the Rocket Team, she was voted president – but that was because she was the only one asking scheduling questions, she said. In the early days of Terrafugia (in 2005), she was the one asking questions about funding and the possible market for the company’s product. “It might have been one of my more annoying early contributions,” she said.

Mracek Dietrich misses getting her hands dirty on the engineering end, but still participates in design reviews. The company is still small enough that she gets to help out with engineering from time to time, she said.

Growing up, Mracek Dietrich had no female engineering role models. When she got to MIT, she was happy to find about 40 percent of the aerospace engineering students were women, almost three times the national average. After graduation, she said, when she started at both at Boeing Co. and General Electric Co., she was the only nonsecretarial employee in the building – but it never presented a problem, she said.

“Hopefully by the time I have a daughter it will seem silly to have a (Women to Watch) award,” she said.

Sandra Glucksmann wears plenty of hats: She’s a mother, a wife, and a senior vice president at a local biotech, a role that has multiple subordinate jobs, such as overseeing finance, human resources and strategy.

The fact that she’s succeeding at all these various tasks is her greatest accomplishment, she said. “I’ve been happily married for 26 years, I’ve got two great kids, and a profession.” The secret: “Learning how to prioritize things,” Glucksman, 50, said. You can have it all, she claims, but don’t think it can all be had at once.

Glucksmann is senior vice president of research and business operations at Cerulean Pharma Inc., a Cambridge-based biopharmaceutical company founded in 2006. Prior to that, she worked 13 years at Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc., holding a variety of posts, including that of vice president of all platform technology groups. As one of its first scientists, she helped the company evolve from being a genomics-research firm to becoming a fully integrated pharmaceuticals company. Her division played a key role in collaborations with large pharmaceuticals.

Originally from Argentina, she said that her hero was her own mother. Her mother had aspired to be a chemist, but regrettably never took a degree in it or practiced it. It was different with Glucksmann. “I was very supported by my parents,” she said. “I never felt any limitation to what I could accomplish.”

Her career choice sprang from her personality. “My love of nature and the outside and the impact we had on it led me to be very interested in science. And I always wanted to help people. Basic science is a way to contribute to mankind.” In the same vein as her love of nature, her favorite hobby is gardening. “It’s menial work, but doing it creates something beautiful.”

She does try act as a role model for other women. Glucksmann, for example, is chair of the board for Women Entrepreneurs in Science and Technology.

“As a senior woman in your profession, you realize people are watching you.” And she has a piece of advice for other women looking to rise in the field: Create a network. “Women don’t do as well as men in creating a strong network. Reach out to others.”

Her effect is clear in her current company. “Sandra is an invaluable leader at Cerulean, whom I admire immensely,” said Cissy Young, director of strategy and business development at the company.

And feelings of loyalty aren’t just inspired by her female colleagues. “I worked for Sandra previously, when we were both at Millennium, and the fact that I would work for her again speaks to my great respect and admiration for her as a boss, mentor and colleague,” said Scott Eliasof, senior director of research at Cerulean. “She cares deeply about the success of each of her employees and strives continually to ensure everyone’s personal development and that everyone is pushing themselves as hard as they can.”

Despite being the founder of a startup on the verge of breaking into a multi-billion dollar industry, Susan Leschine lives in a very small world – the world of microbes.

In fact, Leschine never intended to become an icon in the business world. For 30 years she was a researcher, scientist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, studying the vast yet tiny world of living organisms responsible for everything from the breaking down of organic matter to the onset of diseases. She was happy there, and even since the founding of her company, Qteros Inc., she has returned to teaching at the university.

But in 1996 her life in academia changed with a walk around the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts. There, while looking for microbes that break down plant life, she and her team uncovered a previously unrecognized microbe they named clostridium phytofermentans.

The organism now goes by the name of Q Microbe, and is the foundation on which Qteros is built. The organism possesses a voracious appetite for all types of cellulose and can quickly devour organic material and convert it directly into ethanol. An environmentalist with a knowledge of the budding need for an alternative to fossil fuel, even in 1996, Leschine knew she has something special on her hands, something that drove her career in a new direction.

“When I realized I had something that could be very useful and solve a lot of problems, I knew I had to commercialize it,” she said. “I never intended to get into the business side, but I wanted to see this get out of my lab and into the world.”

Leschine incorporated Qteros, then called SunEthanol Inc., in 2006, and her newly discovered business acumen has been almost as impressive as her skill in the lab. Even before the company added a full-time CEO last June, Leschine and her advisers raised $3.5 million in a first round of funding and got the young company placed among three other ethanol firms as part of a $114 million Department of Energy program aimed at developing pilot-stage biorefineries.

Earlier this year, with Leschine in the chief scientist role, Qteros landed another $25 million in private funding.

As Qteros moves toward commercialization of its technology, Leschine has remained, proudly, an academic, returning to teaching after a sabbatical to launch the company. She said her business experience has helped her become a better teacher, giving her a perspective she can pass along to students, particularly young women.

“I grew up at a time when girls didn’t grow up to be scientists. I didn’t even know science was a career, but I knew I was interested in it,” she said. She was the first in her family to go to college, though her younger brother followed. “So now I try to be a mentor and role model as much as I can. Being on the business side, I can bring those experiences to students and help mentor them along.

Ronnie Maffa is a “force of nature,” according to Bill Hume, her mentor.

Maffa, now the director of social software product development at IBM, started with the company in 1998, working as a developer on the Lotus Notes messaging platform. In 2002, Hume and Maffa worked to deliver Notes 6.0. On a project in which hundreds of developers were working overtime, Hume recalled how Maffa led by example.

“Ronnie’s the person to stand up and say, ‘I’ll take the responsibility here. I’ll be the leader.’ What that means is doing whatever it takes to lead,” he said.

Today, Maffa is directing the development of IBM Lotus Connection, a social enterprise software product designed to track every e-mail, note, correspondence and contact associated with a project, then condense those into best practices.

Maffa, 44, said she learned her work ethic and her “opportunistic” approach to her career from her parents, who brought Maffa, her two brothers and her sister to Boston from Hong Kong when she was 12. Maffa’s mother and father ran a clothes factory that her father, a farmer with a knack for mechanics, built up from a handful of aging sewing machines, she said. “We were taught if you want something, you work for it. And we do.”

On arrival in Boston’s Chinatown, Maffa changed her given name, Siu Yin, adopting a western first name. After graduating from Boston Latin School and Brown University, she worked at Digital Equipment Corp., coding the back end for PC-based local-area networks, and eventually being promoted to team leadership and management roles. “I really did enjoy the nuts and bolts. Maybe I’m naturally shy. I’m just not a person who spends a lot of time talking,” she said.

Maffa has received numerous awards for her management excellence and contributions for teaming with colleagues.

But far from the prototypical introverted high-tech manager, Maffa has made an impact on the careers of many. When Hema Srikanth was contemplating a move to a new position in Boston from an IBM facility in Raleigh, N.C., Maffa was her mentor. “What was lacking in me was a level of confidence,” Srikanth said. “She has instilled that in me over the past few months.”

Maffa said that mentoring has helped her to be a better manager. “There are so many things as a manager you don’t hear in a direct line from your subordinates,” she said. “I learned a lot from (mentorships) and try to apply that back to my group.”

Srikanth’s choice – to move to something new or stick with the familiar – was a known quantity for Maffa, who had passed up leading-edge projects to stay on Lotus Notes after the birth of her second child. Every parent, man or woman, has to make a choice between pushing a career forward quickly or devoting time to child care, she said.

She said, “I have explicitly taken a slower pace, but I never looked back and said I’m sorry for what I did, because I wouldn’t be happy otherwise.”

Mondira Pant has a résumé that would make even the most successful woman feel like a slouch: She has worked her way up to becoming the lead technologist for on-chip power delivery at Intel Corp.’s Massachusetts Microprocessor Design Center and is leading the way toward developing more efficient chips. But she doesn’t consider any of her professional achievements as important as bringing her two children into the world, she said.

“My children inspire me to be my best,” Pant said. “Growing up, my inspiration was my dad. He was the wind beneath my wings, and I hope to inspire my children as well.”

Pant’s father came from humble beginnings, but earned his Ph.D. and headed a technical team for the army in India, their home country. “He taught me to always believe in yourself, that dreams can come true with dedication, hard work and sincerity. With his actions, he inspired me, and where I am today, I owe to him,” said Pant, 35.

Today, she has filed several patents and leads a team of engineers at Intel who are trying to solve power efficiency challenges for high-performance processors. Building power efficiency into CPUs compromises performance, so creating an efficient chip that also performs at optimal levels is an enormous challenge that Pant hopes to one day solve.

“I love to be challenged. If everything is easily solved, life gets boring,” Pant said with a laugh. She has co-authored over 30 technical papers and has grown into an inspiring speaker – she won the best speaker award at a 2008 Intel technical conference.

“I get a feeling of euphoria after giving a talk that inspires students, because I love getting them talking about and thinking about challenges,” Pant said.

While Pant’s work has advanced CPU power design, she doesn’t feel she has done nearly enough, and strives to do much more. “We have achieved a little so far, but we have not achieved enough. We take very small steps, and there is always more we can do,” Pant said.

“My goal is to solve the (CPU) power challenges. Everyone wants to create a green environment, and I want to help companies get there – and help save the planet as well,” she said.

Bill Bowhill, an engineer at Intel, is one of Pant’s mentors. “She is a very accomplished engineer resulting from her great technical expertise combined with her exceptional team leadership skills,” Bowhill said. “She is a great team player and is always looking for opportunities to collaborate.”

She combines time with her children with her own hobbies to balance her life. “I have always been passionate about dancing. I gave my first dance performance at age 3. Now I spend time with my daughters and I get to pursue my hobby and spend time with my daughters at the same time,” Pant said.

Although she leads an education curriculum program that could change grade-school teaching of technology in the United States, Yvonne Spicer is still a student herself: She’s enrolled in a belly-dance class and just concluded a Mandarin Chinese language course. And in her own technical education career, Spicer’s learning appears like a set of ascending stairs.

“Every challenge is there (for you) to grow in some way,” Spicer said.

Today Spicer, 46, serves as vice president of advocacy and educational partnership for the National Center for Technological Literacy at the Museum of Science Boston. Her role is to develop a curriculum that will strengthen STEM education in Massachusetts and replicate it throughout the U.S. It’s intended to find out how and why kids are “not connecting the ‘T’ and ‘E’ in STEM,” she said, referring to the lack of technology and engineering education in elementary science and math learning.

The work combines two passions, teaching and technology, but perseverance helped launch her to the position.

As an African-American woman with few role models in technology and teaching, she counted on her family’s emphasis on education, along with the white male teachers who served as mentors growing up.

At 23 years old and looking for a job, Spicer left New York to visit a friend in Boston for the weekend in 1985, with plans to interview for a technical teaching position in Framingham. She had just two stipulations – she wanted to work with high school students in any technical field other than woodworking. What she got, however, was a middle school woodworking job that started the next day. Noticing the obstacle ahead of her, Spicer got this advice from her mother: “If woodworking is your Achilles’ heel, get in there and master it.”

So she did. Her upbeat embrace of challenges ultimately led Spicer from early days of teaching kids how to work a bandsaw to a later role showing the Newton Public Schools how to work an engineering curriculum.

“She can make a table, as well as talk about how you make a table,” said Carolyn Wyatt, former assistant superintendent in the Newton Public Schools and former colleague of Spicer.

For five years, Spicer served as director of career and technical education – a supervisory role for the Newton school system’s technology and vocational education. In 2006, the call came from Ioannis Miaoulis, president of the Museum of Science, asking her to lead his brainchild program, the NCTL.

“I’ve always had people that came into my life at the right time for the right reason,” Spicer said.

Once again faced with a challenge, Spicer saw opportunity – to spread her technology curriculum to a national level. This new challenge, and new learning experience, from the NCTL includes the adoption of engineering and technology in all U.S. grade schools by 2015.