“Success comes from being excited about what you do and having a passion for doing it,” said Dorothy Bowers (BS ’69), winner of the department’s R.W. Moulton 2009 Distinguished Alumna Award.
Bowers turned her passion for science into a career developing standards to reduce the impact of chemical processes from industry on the environment.
Bowers grew up in a tiny New York town of 300 people, two taverns and a general store. “I don’t remember ever thinking I would do anything but some kind of science,” said Bowers. “But there were no scientists, no doctors, not really any professionals, so I had few chances to learn about opportunities in the sciences.”
Bowers chose chemistry as a major at the University of Buffalo without “really knowing what it might lead to.” After earning her bachelor’s degree at 19 and working for a chemical company, she moved with her husband and two sons to Vancouver B.C. to work for a pulp and paper mill consulting company. “All the professionals were male and engineers,” Bowers said. “Being ‘only’ a chemist, my job was to publish a quarterly journal on breaking technology and business issues.”
Working in the pulp and paper industry in the 1960s exposed Bowers to a variety of emerging environmental issues. “I could clearly read the future in two areas,” Bowers said. “Attention to the environment was about to explode, and I would never get any respect from engineers unless I had an engineering degree.”
When Bowers’ husband took a state job in Olympia, she decided on the UW because it had an excellent engineering school and was “only 50 miles each way.”
Howard Gardner, a professor who taught pulp and paper technology, agreed to be Bowers’ advisor. “He was not afraid of a challenge,” she said. Since she’d already completed her non-engineering coursework, she was required to take only engineering classes and earned her second bachelor’s degree in just four quarters.
Bowers would leave from the UW in time to pick up her two sons from grade school and the three would do homework together while her husband, a psychologist, made dinner. “Chemical engineering was much harder than I had anticipated,” Bowers said. “Fortunately, my family was very supportive.”
The week she graduated from the UW, Congress cancelled a B-1 bomber contract with Boeing and the company laid off more than 1,500 scientists and engineers.
“All of the ‘we’ll get back to you in a week with a job offer’ prospects suddenly had a glut of experienced talent,” Bowers said. The family moved to New Jersey, where she got a job designing pollution control equipment for a large automobile paint company.
“After three years, I realized that solvent-based auto finishes would be eliminated in a few years, yet the company insisted on doing business as usual,” Bowers said. “It was time to look for a more enlightened organization.”
Bowers joined Merck & Co., then the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, in 1974. As an engineer in the company’s fledgling, two-person environmental department, she helped create one of the first strategic environmental plans in U.S. industry to reduce pollution from chemical processes. She worked for the company for 25 years and retired as vice president of a worldwide group of more than 200 that won several awards from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
When Bowers retired from Merck & Co. around 2000, Christine Todd Whitman, the head of the EPA, asked her to chair the National Advisory Council on Environmental Policy and Technology. Between birdwatching adventures she still provides guidance in environmental management internationally.
Bowers encourages the current generation of students to keep an open mind about their career direction. “The path I ultimately pursued bears little resemblance to what I thought would be the path of my chemical engineering career,” she said. “The likelihood is great that any science student in school now could end up in a career that does not even exist today.”