Inspiring West Virginians Story Archives - Page 6 of 6

Beckley Native a Bio Engineer and Inspiring West Virginian

Bio-safety-level-2 laboratories in the Bio5 Building at the University of Arizona Medical School is where Linda Powers has designed and built several…

Bio-safety-level-2 laboratories in the Bio5 Building at the University of Arizona Medical School is where Linda Powers has designed and built several impressive and important scientific instruments.

“Here we handle microbes that can make you sick, but generally not kill you,” said Powers on a recent tour.

But the 64-year-old Beckley native, now the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Professor of Bio-Engineering at the University of Arizona, does handle microbes that can kill you.

“Yes, that’s a BSL-3 Laboratory, and that is highly regulated by the CDC,” she explains.

Powers is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and a professor of bio-medical engineering.

She described one of her technologies, a handheld biosensor small enough to take in a backpack into the wilderness or the desert that can detect microbial contamination in real time.

“The light shines on the surface, like my hand here, and the light comes from these LEDs. And this is the detector, so the light captures the florescence – and you read it out here on this small computer,” said Powers.

“When I was in the Arctic we used a PDA – just a little handheld thing,” she added.

The microbes are visible instantly.

“We can’t tell you what species they are, but I can tell you there are microbes there and the microbial load,” she continued. “The reason that’s important is because microbes are communal, and if you have large communities, you will have pathogens living in there.”

The instruments that Powers has been building for the last 15 years are aimed at looking for life in extreme environments or life in places where it is very difficult to do the standard microbiological or biological testing.

She’s been designing instruments that can measure the tiniest amounts of microbial contamination on surfaces, including food preparation surfaces, the hospital operating theater, hospital surgical instruments, and in air, water, and other fluids.

Powers’ instruments have many applications.

They can test the quality of a city water supply or a well in an African village.

She also designs and builds instruments for the Department of Defense and NASA. Much of that work is secret, but one of her instruments can detect possible bio-terrorism; another, life on Mars.

Powers was a pioneer in the use of something called “synchrotron radiation” as well as “x-ray absorption spectroscopy”.

She says she’s always been a science “geek” and that she’s been interested in light since she was a kid in Beckley.

“That was 3^rd grade. I wanted a telescope for Christmas and I got a telescope, and I was hooked,” Powers said. “Then I got interested in chemistry, and then I got interested in light, and I got interested in explosives and I got interested in rockets.”

“It was there and it was a very strong force in my life.”

When she was in the 8^th grade at Beckley Junior High, Powers won first place at the West Virginia State Science Fair for a project using light.

It was one of many science fair awards.

“My mom in particular didn’t understand half of the things that got me excited but she would sit by the hour and listen to me rant and rave about it,” she recalled.

Powers’ father worked for Eastern Associated Coal and her mother was a stay-at-home mom.

“I came home one day from high school and said, ‘I want to go to college,’ and my father’s eyes got huge, but nobody said ‘no’.”

Up to then, no one in the Powers family had gone to college. To see if she was really interested, her parents suggested she take some courses at Marshall University the summer before her senior year of high school.

“I took courses in chemistry and I did some experiments that turned out far beyond what anybody could have anticipated,” said Powers. “I wrote it all up, and that was what I wrote to the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, which I won in my senior year in high school.”

Powers was among the top five science students in the nation. Westinghouse Science Talent Search awarded her a major academic scholarship.

After graduating from Virginia Tech, she got a PhD in biophysics from Harvard University. From there Powers was recruited to lead her own research group at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, which at the time was considered the finest research laboratory in the world.

Powers says throughout her years at Woodrow Wilson High School in Beckley, college and at Bell Labs, she had a series of teachers and mentors who encouraged her to reach for the sky.

“The sky is the limit. And in West Virginia, that sky is even closer!” said Powers. “There’s no reason for you (any student) to have any problem doing what you want to do. If you want it, do it!”

“Somebody will take notice along the way and help you,” she said. “They certainly did me, and this was back when girls didn’t do things like that.”

“Don’t let anybody stand in your way! You’ll be surprised at the people you’ll find who will support you, especially in West Virginia.”

Linda Powers is among those featured in the documentary Inspiring West Virginians, produced by Jean Snedegar with Senior Producer Suzanne Higgins.

He’s Keeping the Wild in West Virginia

Fifty-four-year-old Rodney Bartgis, state director of the West Virginia Nature Conservancy, stood atop Cave Mountain in Pendleton County, an elevation of…

Fifty-four-year-old Rodney Bartgis, state director of the West Virginia Nature Conservancy, stood atop Cave Mountain in Pendleton County, an elevation of 2,777 feet.

“It almost looks like the Rocky Mountains,” said Bartgis. “This is the biggest uplift of limestone in the eastern mountains of the United States, and a lot of the rare plants and animals in this canyon are associated with this limestone,” he said.

The 200-acre mountaintop property on which Bartgis stood had been owned by the Puffenberger family since 1965. But last year they agreed to a conservation easement, negotiated by Bartgis, which protects it from development.

Perhaps more than any other person alive, Bartgis has helped to keep the “wild” in West Virginia.

He can point out several plants found nowhere else in eastern North America – Prairie Flax, the Death Camus lily, Indian Grass, Sideoats Grama and Big Bluestem.

Bartgis was the first person to identify these unusual species in West Virginia, among dozens of botanical discoveries he’s made in the state since he was a boy in Berkeley County.

He grew up on a small, 10-acre farm near Hedgesville, with cattle, hogs, gardens and a lot of work.

“Growing up in the country, which is now pretty much suburbia, gave me a chance to not only explore the countryside, but to tap into the knowledge of people that had grown up and been there for decades,” said Bartgis.

“So I could learn from my dad and my uncles and my granddad.”

Bartgis’ family has been farming in Berkeley County for ten generations. They’ve always felt close to the land.

“My paternal grandfather, who never made it past 8^th grade, while dirt poor made his living from trapping and a little bit of dirt farming and from gathering herbs,” explained Bartgis. “He could show me in the woods, or along the creeks or in the fields, how certain plants grew in certain places.”

“If you’re looking for goldenseal, you’d look in one type of woods. If you’re looking for ginseng, in another, and so forth across the whole spectrum of plants that he would dig and sell.”

While still in high school Bartgis discovered the first White Showy Orchid in West Virginia.

It was a time when the Washington, DC suburbs were beginning to encroach further and further into the Eastern Panhandle.

“As a result, a lot of the places that I grew up hiking, botanizing and bird-watching on, were being chopped up and turned into houses,” said Bartgis. “So I also got interested in conservation.”

Bartgis went to Shepherd University to study biology, and then finished his Masters in plant ecology at West Virginia University.

Just after that The Nature Conservancy hired him to find unique and unusual places in the state that might be important to protect.

Those early years with The Nature Conservancy gave Bartgis the opportunity to explore most of the state – on foot – looking for rare plants, special habitats and unique natural areas.

A colleague at The Nature Conservancy, Andrea Brandon, echoes what many people say about Rodney’s encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world of West Virginia.

“You could blindfold Rodney Bartgis and put him on any mountaintop in the state and when you took off that blindfold, not only could Rodney identify every bird in the sky and every single plant and tree that’s growing on the ground, he could tell you by looking at his surroundings exactly where he’s at,” said Brandon.

West Virginia Division of Natural Resources vegetation ecologist, Elizabeth Byers, says most don’t know that West Virginia is a national hotspot of biodiversity.

“So protecting this is incredibly important,” said Byers.

“Among scientists, Rodney is universally respected. He is the person we go to when we have exhausted other resources, because he will very likely know the answer,” she said.

Along with colleagues at The Nature Conservancy, Bartgis has helped protect some of West Virginia’s most unique wild places, including areas in the New River Gorge, Canaan Valley, the Smoke Hole Canyon, Cheat Mountain, Cranberry Glades, Bear Rocks on the Dolly Sods, Panther Knob, and Pike Knob.

The Nature Conservancy works to preserve natural areas for many uses – biology, ecology, hunting, fishing, hiking and other recreational activities.

It takes the cooperation of land owners, donors, local, state and federal government and others to make it happen.

“We’ve protected about 120,000 acres of West Virginia over the 50 years,” said Bartgis of The Nature Conservancy. “That sounds like a lot, but in every decade there will probably be 300,000 or more acres of West Virginia converted from natural habitat to something else.”

Byers said Bartgis’ legacy will be a vast amount of protected area throughout the state.

“He’ll be leaving behind hundreds of species, thousands of acres of just sheer beauty, mystery, and wonder,” said Byers.

“He has an unbelievable legacy – most of it will be unsung, but it’s huge what he will leave.”

Rodney Bartgis is featured with others in the documentary Inspiring West Virginians, produced by Jean Snedegar with Senior Producer Suzanne Higgins.

Still a Beautiful Mind – and an Inspiring West Virginian

Editor’s note: Nobel-prize winning mathematician John Nash and his wife were killed in a traffic accident May 23, 2015. This profile from 2013 is part of our series, “Inspiring West Virginians.”

The 9^th floor of Fine Hall, the math building at Princeton University, is a place some people call the mathematical center of the universe.

Here you’ll find the office of 84-year-old John Forbes Nash, Jr., one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20^th century.

One whole bookshelf in Nash’s office is lined with photos of his hometown, Bluefield, West Virginia. Nash left the state more than 60 years ago, but clearly it’s still important to him.

“This is my high school in Bluefield,” he said, sharing the picture of his 50^th high school class reunion. “I’m in the corner here.”

Over his lifetime, Nash has sought and solved some of mathematics’ most difficult problems, in ways that have amazed other mathematicians, all while overcoming great trials.

In 2001 Ron Howard made a film about Nash called “A Beautiful Mind” starring Russell Crowe. It won the Oscar for Best Picture. The film and the book on which the film is based tell the story of Nash’s meteoric rise in the mathematical world, his early career teaching at MIT, his sudden descent into severe mental illness, and his ultimate recovery.

John Nash’s story begins in Mercer County.

“My mother had been born there, and she had sisters,” Nash explained. “I had only one sibling – my sister – and that’s a special relationship.”

Martha Nash Legg remembers Bluefield as a lovely place to grow up, and she describes her brother as studious.

“I guess today we’d call him nerdy!” she said. “His friends were also bright. He liked science fiction.”

“And he was musical. He is musical – to the extent that he can whistle Bach!” laughed Legg.

Nash says he was quite aware that he wasn’t close to people other than relatives.

“I guess I’m a little like an Asperger’s type,” he said. “I didn’t have very strong friendship relations generally. I wasn’t just a buddy of the group.”

Even as a little boy, Johnny, as his family called him, was drawn to mathematics.

“I did have a taste for numbers. In school I liked to work with larger numbers than we were taught to use, 5 digits rather than 2 or 3,” Nash remembered.

He points to Men of Mathematics, by E.T. Bell as a book he read as a child that really influenced him.

“He’s an American,” said Nash. “The book was inspiring in the way it talked about the mathematical discoveries and what these people had done.”

Nash was particularly intrigued by the 17^th Century French mathematician, Pierre de Fermat. As a 14-year-old, Nash succeeded in proving Fermat’s Theorem.

After high school he went to Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh. In just three years he earned a bachelors and masters in mathematics. One of his teachers recognized Nash was a mathematical genius, and encouraged him to go to Princeton University for a PhD.

At Princeton Nash’s dissertation was in a field called game theory. At the time it was a relatively new concept that explains human behavior.

His main contribution to game theory – which later became known as the Nash Equilibrium – has been used in a wide variety of fields, from economics, to foreign policy, information technology, and evolutionary biology.

Nash also solved a few very, very difficult problems in pure mathematics.

And he did it in a way that still inspires young mathematicians, including Dejan Slepčev, associate professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

“Nash’s papers are very brief and have many ideas in them,” said Slepčev. “It’s not just one idea that solves everything but at every step there is a new idea and yet there is the whole picture of how everything fits together.”

“So that is the beauty of the thing,” he said. “So if you speak about the beautiful mind, then it must be the mind which is able to store so many new ideas together at the same time.”

At the height of this brilliant young mathematician’s career, John Nash developed paranoid schizophrenia, a severe mental illness.

For more than 25 years he had delusions about who he was, who other people were and messages he believed he was receiving.

He wandered the campus of Princeton University, writing on blackboards and whistling Bach to himself. He became known as “The Phantom of Fine Hall.”

And then, without medication, he started to get better.

One morning in 1994, a few years after Nash returned to what he calls rational thinking, Legg says an amazing thing happened.

“The radio was on in the bedroom. And I heard them say something about a Nobel Prize Award in Economics, and I thought they said, ‘John Nash in game theory,’” Legg recalled.

“And it brought tears to my eyes thinking how much my parents would have loved to have heard that.”

The Nobel Prize changed John Nash’s life. Princeton University gave him a job, and he received further awards and honors.

The man who was almost forgotten was invited to lecture at universities throughout the world.

Today Nash continues to tackle difficult problems in mathematics and economics at Princeton University.

“Well, it’s not unusual to work to 70, maybe 75, but now I’m 84. I could go to 90!”

John Nash, who rarely gives interviews, is featured with others in the West Virginia Public Radio documentary Inspiring West Virginians, produced by Jean Snedegar with Senior Producer Suzanne Higgins.

She’s Small Business Person of the Year – and an Inspiring West Virginian

Action Facilities Management – or AFM – overlooks I-79 near Morgantown and employs more than 300 people in nine states. “In Fairmont we work for the West

Action Facilities Management – or AFM – overlooks I-79 near Morgantown and employs more than 300 people in nine states.

“In Fairmont we work for the West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation and we do the security, maintenance and janitorial for all these facilities here,” said founder, president and CEO Diane Lewis. “It’s one of our commercial clients.”

Listen

Listening…

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Diane Lewis visits with Jean Snedegar.

AFM provides building, maintenance and grounds services for numerous government agencies as well, including Homeland Security, the FBI, the U.S. Dept. of Defense, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the GSA, FAA, FEMA, CDC, and the U.S. Navy, among many others.

It’s an impressive array of customers given that Lewis started the company in her basement a little more than 10 years ago, with her then teenage son as her only employee.

“I told my son, I said, ‘you’re going to have to be my secretary,’ and he’s like, ‘I don’t want to be a secretary!’” “And I said, ‘yes, you are!’”

“So we started slowly, and I actually got our first contract in 2004,” said Lewis, West Virginia’s 2013 Small Business Person of the Year.

Diane Lewis

Credit Jean Snedegar

Lewis grew up in Clarksburg and graduated from Fairmont State College with a degree in accounting and another in banking.

“From there I started working, and I haven’t stopped,” said Lewis.

In the 1990s she worked for a company in Morgantown owned by Kenny Jackson. In 2001, when Jackson was winding down his company, he encouraged Lewis to start her own.

Today Lewis’ son, Don Hill, manages the company’s Washington, DC offices and her daughter, Stephanie, works for the FBI.

After Lewis raised her kids on her own, she married Jackson, the man who years before had encouraged her to start her own business. Today Jackson is a consultant for AFM.

This successful businesswoman comes from humble, hardworking roots. She was the youngest of 7 children raised in a 3-bedroom home.

“I didn’t even realize how poor we were at the time,” said Lewis. “It was really crowded. I slept at the bottom of my parents’ bed for the first 7 or 8 years that I can remember.”

Lewis’ dad was quite bright, skipping a grade in elementary school, but ultimately dropped out to help support his younger siblings. Her mother was born in Gilmer County, one of 16 children.

Lewis describes Clarksburg as a booming town during the years of her childhood. A glass factory close to her home employed between 200-300 people.

“There were filling stations, bakeries, barbershops,” she said. “There were all kinds of businesses around that area. There was a playground and everybody looked out for you.”

Lewis’ dad, who had a wooden leg, worked for Union Carbide for 33 years and obviously had a huge impact on Lewis’ life.

“He always taught me never to be late. You always tell the truth, no matter what – good or bad – you tell the truth and you have integrity about what you do.”

Today Lewis and her husband run a non-profit organization called Members of Diversity, helping youth from minority groups develop the skills needed to find jobs.

As an African American, she knows from experience the hurdles that must be overcome to make it in business, or anything else.

“I’ve been on walk-throughs where I actually had a gentleman, a white gentleman say to me, ‘Well take good notes for your boss, I’m sure he’ll need ‘em,’” recalled Lewis.

“He automatically assumed I could not own the company. And then after I won, he called me up and asked if he could do anything to help me?”

“It happens,” she said. “But I don’t know if it’s a disadvantage sometimes, or more of an advantage, because they underestimate me a lot of times.”

Lewis is a director of Teaming to Win, one of the largest and most successful events in the state for small businesses. She also serves on the Board of Governors of West Virginia University.

“She’s an amazing leader and entrepreneur,” said James Clements, President of West Virginia University. “I can’t think of many people who are as inspiring as Diane.”

“She’s one of those good, quiet people just making a difference every day.”

Diane Lewis is featured along with others in the documentary Inspiring West Virginians, produced by Jean Snedegar with Senior Producer Suzanne Higgins.