About Her Life

Melissa Sherman (born 1971) didn't spend much time thinking about science when she was growing up in Wisconsin. In fact, it wasn't until she was almost finished with college that chemistry first really captured her imagination. She was majoring in chemistry, and in the summer between her junior and senior years she worked as an intern at the chemical corporation 3M. Industrial research was a very different world from the college science classroom. At 3M science was practical. Everything she could see and touch was the product of chemistry. While the science of her classrooms had been abstract and removed from the real world, industrial science had an immediate impact on the world outside the lab. This fascinated her, and she knew this was the kind of chemistry she wanted to do. She wanted to go into a store and see her discoveries for sale on the shelves, she later recalled.

At 3M she also learned about polymers, giant molecules containing thousands of atoms joined together in long chains. Since polymers are used to make so many things around us—like rubber, plastics, and fabrics—polymer chemistry was the perfect field for Sherman. After she earned her doctorate in polymer chemistry from the University of Akron in Ohio, she went to work for DuPont. There she has played an important part in developing space-age fabrics.

Sherman has done a lot of work developing non-woven fabrics. Woven fabrics are materials like denim or T-shirt cloth that are made by weaving together thread or yarn in a very orderly manner. Non-woven fabrics are materials like felt, which is made of fibers matted together instead of woven. All fabrics, woven and non-woven, natural and synthetic, are made from polymers. Sherman's work involves making non-woven fabric from a very unlikely material called polyethylene, the same plastic used to make grocery bags and garbage cans.

These days Sherman doesn't work in the laboratory anymore. Her main job at DuPont is helping fashion designers communicate with chemists. Fashion designers tell her what they need from a fabric, and then she asks the lab chemists to figure out just how to make it happen. Meanwhile, she helps the designers, who may not know much about chemistry, to understand just what the lab scientists can do as well as what might not be feasible. In short, she serves as a translator between these different worlds.

Talking to Sherman you might think that she regrets that she didn't learn sooner just how practical chemistry is. She still feels that high school science classes don't stress the practical side of science nearly enough. She also thinks that schools don't let students know just how many different careers there are in science. She told an interviewer about her graduate school experience saying, "Pure science is taught. But I still think there is room for improvement around . . . [explaining] how you could use those tools in non-traditional science applications." Sherman's career seems to illustrate this untaught lesson quite well.