As the daughter of cotton farmers in rural Alabama, Dr. Juliette Bell didn’t comprehend exactly what scientific researchers were until she was a college undergraduate. Since then, she has become a renowned researcher, professor and administrator who has recruited, trained and mentored another generation of women and minorities in the sciences.
Bell doesn’t plan to stop or even slow down now that she’s president of the 4,400-student University of Maryland Eastern Shore. If anything, she expects student and faculty opportunities there in science, technology, engineering and math to expand.
“My joining this campus was not coincidence,” says Bell, who assumed the presidency last summer. She notes that the top job “felt very attractive because this university is an emerging, potential powerhouse in STEM fields.”
During 2011-’12, UMES awarded a record 166 bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in STEM disciplines combined, exceeding the previous year’s total by 42 percent. This spring, the university will graduate its charter class of doctoral pharmacy students, too. And, in recent weeks, the National Science Foundation awarded the university a $220,000 grant to support its minority women faculty and undergraduate curriculum in STEM subjects.
“I’ve been very impressed so far with the overall commitment to STEM,” Bell says, referring to UMES.
A biochemist, an expert on molecular genetics and a veteran of historically Black universities, Bell was most recently provost and vice president for academic affairs at Central State University in Ohio. Her research, focused on DNA synthesis and mutagenesis, has significant implications in understanding diseases like cancer as well as genetic disorders.
Bell has studied an enzyme responsible for linking together the billions of building blocks that make up DNA, the genetic code. Among other accomplishments, she has identified ways to manipulate that enzyme to measure the enzyme’s ability to make DNA accurately under a variety of natural and experimental conditions.
