SANTA CLARA, California -- When Darlene Solomon thinks big, she also thinks about how to make things smaller.
She envisions a future where diabetics can monitor their glucose levels with a wristwatch-sized device or patients can monitor their own blood chemistry for cholesterol.
As director of Agilent's Life Science Technologies Lab, Solomon has been instrumental in advancing long-range, microscopic technologies that will affect the future of health care and pharmaceuticals.
Solomon will be inducted into the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame Thursday night as part of the 2001 Professional Women's Summit here.
Duy-Loan Le, one of the first women fellows at Texas Instruments, and Janet Perna, general manager of IBM's data management division and Big Blue's highest-ranking female software executive, will also be inducted into the hall for their contributions to the advancement of science and technology.
Past recipients have included a Nobel laureate, NASA astronaut, educators, scientific and technological pioneers, and top business and government leaders.
Solomon's interest in math and science began at an early age.
"I always liked understanding how things work and that you could explain things you see with something fundamental," she said. "But I didn't like computers that much."
Solomon graduated with a B.S. in chemistry from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She began her career at Hewlett-Packard in 1984, working as an R&D manager for the chemical and biological systems department and as a senior lab scientist. At the time, there weren't many other women in the lab.
"There were a couple (other women scientists), but there wasn't a critical mass," Solomon said.
"Because you were a woman and you were different, you always had to immediately establish the fact that you were credible," she said. "Whereas for men, that didn't exist. People would assume you were somebody who's there for a reason."
While at Hewlett-Packard, Solomon founded the HP Technical Women's Conference and the HP Labs Community Forum, both grass-roots organizations intended to foster opportunity in science and technology.
The HP Technical Women's Conference was initially envisioned as an internal forum, where women could talk about their work in a confidential manner.
"It was safe to talk about what you were working on and what the challenges were," Solomon said. "It meant that even if you don't see a lot of women when you walk down the hall, that there was a critical mass. You could start to see role models and identify networks."
Balancing work and family life has been a challenge for Solomon, who is married with two children. Events like the H-P Technical Women's Conference are a boon to women in the field seeking guidance from women in leadership positions, she said.
"I looked to other women role models and I looked to see whether a woman could be an executive at H-P or now Agilent to see if they could have two kids versus one," Solomon said.
What began as a grass-roots effort, with 400 women attendees, has evolved into international conferences for both H-P and Agilent.
Hewlett-Packard (HWP) spun off Agilent Technologies, a unit that develops measurement devices for electronic and communications devices, in an initial public offering in 1999.
Solomon's expertise spans an array of disciplines, from life sciences to biotechnology/pharmaceutical and chemical industries.
As director of Agilent's central research program for investments in support of its life sciences division, Solomon's job is to examine customers' needs and where technology is today and try to project 5-10 years from now to figure out the right investments.
One long-range technology she is trying to bring to market is DNA microarray technology, which lets scientists study thousands of genes at a time.
Researchers say the technology holds real promise to provide earlier, more accurate detection and treatment of diseases such as cancer, autoimmune disease, cardiovascular and inflammatory disease, and infectious disease.
While initially, DNA array technology was used to develop new drugs, it has also spurred the development of personalized medicine, allowing physicians to tailor treatment to a specific individual.
"(Personalized medicine) will ultimately help pharmaceutical and biotech companies to develop new therapeutics and drugs that are going to be much faster, lower the overall cost and be more efficient and also be more targeted at a particular disease or problem you're trying to solve," Solomon said.
"There's a molecular level of information that we're just now able to start to probe by developing the right tools. (Those measurement tools) will lead to the next generation of therapeutics and diagnostics."
Solomon is also helping to guide the future of nanobiotechnology, a new field that may sound like fodder for science fiction but is also shaping 21st-century science. She guides research into microscopic electronic motors and devices that are measured in billionths of a meter -- a fraction of the size of a human hair and comparable to a strand of DNA.
Using nanomaterials and biology, scientists would be able to define how a drug would interact with the body in a much more directed way than physicians can today.
"Targeted drug delivery is an area where nanobiotechnology might let us do things that are ... different from how we came about them today," Solomon said.
Solomon was recently elected to the Advisory Board of the Nanobiotechnology Center(NBTC) -- a new, $20 million facility funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
