by Andrew Seguin
You might say that Betty Noel ’99 has been plagued by a love of science.
She took every Upper School science elective she could while at Chapin and now, as a PhD candidate at Stony Brook University, studies the bubonic and pneumonic plagues.
Ms. Noel traces her passion for science back to Chapin’s Lower School. Surely that fact resonated with her audience when she spoke to Class 7 students about how an early interest has developed into a lifelong pursuit. Ms. Noel recalled for them one experiment from the lower grades that involved marine life: “I loved to set up the fish tanks and monitor the guppies and the snail,” she said. “Later on at Chapin, something about biology stood out for me,” she added.
Between her junior and senior years at Chapin, Ms. Noel completed a summer science internship at Rockefeller University. She then went on to Brooklyn College as a presidential scholar. She intended to major in English and pursue the pre-med track, but her love of pure biology won out. She soon switched her major to biology and spent time working in the college’s research lab, then completed a summer program at Yale, where she worked in the department of cell biology.
Ms. Noel’s time at Yale led her to realize that she was serious about studying microbiology. She applied to Stony Brook’s department of molecular genetics and microbiology for a PhD, which is where she started to work with Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of the aforementioned plague.
“Is it possible for you to get the plague from your work?” one of the Chapin students asked. It was a question on everyone’s mind, but Ms. Noel reassured the girls that, no, she couldn’t get the plague; she works with a strain of the virus that cannot infect humans.
“Are you looking for something in particular in your experiments?” another girl asked. “Some of our experiments deal with global bioterrorism,” Ms. Noel said. “You get to be creative about how you pursue research.”
That creativity is what she loves most about science. It provides her not only with a source of daily fascination, but also with the certainty that her future will be fascinating, too. After listing for the students a range of fields she could work in when she finishes her degree — from patent law to pharmaceutical research to academia — Ms. Noel left them with an unusual answer to a common question. “When people ask me, ‘What can you do with a science PhD?’ I say, anything!’”