Dr. Wilma Olson
An Outstanding Woman in Science

By: Courtney Turner

    Dr. Wilma Olson is a biochemist as well as a professor of chemistry at Rutgers University, Douglass Campus.  She also had the opportunity to participate in the historic Human Genome Project.
    While in high school, Dr. Olson only took one biology class because she disliked labs.  However, she was always interested in chemistry.
    After graduation, she attended the University of Delaware as a chemistry major.  Dr. Olson pursued her graduate degree at  Stanford University and studied physical chemistry.  In her graduate classes she seemed to always be the minority in a science world of men. Thirty four of the thirty five students in one of her classes were men.  While earning her PhD, she worked with polynucleotides.  Dr. Olson completed her post-doc at Colombia University.
   In her early career, Dr. Olson was a student teacher at Brandywine High School.  She also made a primitive form of computer graphics in the 1970's; which consisted of producing one graphic a night.  This was difficult for her because her foundation in Bioinformatics was not firm.  However, she learned as she lived.  She took one computer class at Rutgers and learned computer programming at Stanford from her peers.
    Presently, as a professor at Douglass, Dr. Olson trains people to get their PhD's. She also helped establish the school's protein databank.  The projects she works on now are closely tied to the database.  From a professional aspect, Dr. Olson works with post-docs from all around the world and teaches molecular biophysics, graduate classes, and computational biology and physics.  Her work right now is focused on trying to understand and extract codes for DNA. 
    Dr. Wilma's view on Bioinformatics is one of a true scientist.  She says that people look at it literally, while she looks at it in a code.