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HEATHER SCHAFROTH: THE JOURNEY OF A MIND AT HOME WITH ITSELF
 

Call her childhood “peripatetic” and Heather Schafroth (BSChE ’96) might not disagree: after all, her father’s work took her to twelve schools in five states and two countries before she even came to Iowa State in 1991.

Yet, Schafroth might remind you, “Peripatetic” referred originally to the philosophical school established in the 4th century BC by Aristotle, who would lecture his students as he ambled about the Lyceum in Athens. In fact, she might well engage you in a discussion of that ancient Greek, considered by many to be a father of modern science (and, by extension, engineering).

Oh. And while she’s at it, she just might engage you in ancient Greek.

Antiquity, after all, is one place Schafroth has called “home” wherever her academic career has taken her. Indeed, this week her passion for that world brings Schafroth home to Iowa State, where this Friday she will receive the Classical Studies Alumni Achievement Award by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Schafroth’s academic career has been nothing if not Aristotelian in its breadth of scholarly inquiry. After receiving bachelor’s degrees in both chemical engineering and classical studies from Iowa State in 1996—her honors thesis examined ancient and modern perceptions of engineering—she enrolled in graduate school at Princeton, earning her MS and PhD in chemical engineering, followed by a two-year post doc at Cornell.

Yet Schafroth’s intense focus on science and engineering was anything but narrow. More than an arid intellectual exercise, her immersion in classical studies had nourished in the young woman a sense of service and obligation born of the connections between knowledge and its ultimate object: in short, a material respect for the “human” in the humanities that translated effortlessly to her engineering education.

“I thought chemical engineering would allow me to really contribute,” Schafroth says. “I wanted to do something that was practical in a way that I could help people and do work that mattered. It was clear to me that in engineering you could accomplish things; you could solve problems and address issues.”

Accomplish things Schafroth did: at Princeton on a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, she worked under Christodoulos A. Floudas, a world-renowned authority in mathematical modeling and optimization of complex systems, to develop computational methods for predicting how peptides bind to various molecules in the immune system, with applications in vaccine and autoimmune disease research.

Schafroth’s work at Cornell, conducted under a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship, examined new computational methods for predicting quaternary protein structures, protein folding, and protein–protein interactions. Her research has been published in journals such as Proteins: Structure, Function & Bioinformatics and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and she has twice presented research seminars at AIChE national meetings.

Yet despite that record of achievement—or perhaps because of it—today Schafroth finds herself a member of the class of 2008 at Harvard Law School, an institution nearly as storied as the ancient Lyceum itself. Harvard Law is not, she argues, a symptom of intellectual wanderlust on her part; to the contrary, Schafroth feels it reflects nothing less than the same unifying impulse that has informed her intellectual journey for years.

“Throughout my undergraduate, graduate, and post doc,” Schafroth observes, “I was always trying to view things in a broader context, to see how science and engineering connected to other fields—to ethics, to politics, to law. And I started to see that a lot of the problems most interesting to me required either legal knowledge or the tools you would acquire in law school to start framing the issues.

“It’s not just the specific discipline, but the way of thinking,” Schafroth continues. “Science and law could both benefit from talking more to each other. There’s a lack of understanding, and not too many people who speak both languages.”

Ethics, politics, law—and science: anyone familiar with ancient scholarship would easily recognize the full catalogue of Aristotelian inquiry in Schafroth’s wide-ranging pursuits, as well as the comprehensive intelligence underlying them. For Schafroth, though, thought ultimately comes to more than an academic exercise cloistered from the needs of the world.

“My professors at Iowa State,” she recalls, “encouraged me to use my career to make positive differences.”