A friend sums up Andrea Ippolito with "quirky, adventurous." A conversation with her bears that out, as she bubbles with enthusiasm about everything from biomedical research to organizing company visits to campus.

Robert Barker/University Photography

Andrea Ippolito, in the Plantations rhododendron garden.

The daughter of two engineers, she grew up "obsessed with science." Her father, a mechanical engineer, works in defense contracting, and her mother, Mary Valla '77, has designed spacesuits for NASA, including the first suit specifically designed for women.

In the summer after her sophomore year in the College of Engineering, Ippolito found a job in the tissue engineering lab at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, near her home in Burlington, Mass. She helped to grow human liver and kidney cells in culture, work that could eventually lead to artificial organs. Back at Cornell in the fall, she decided to major in chemical and biological engineering with a minor in biomedical engineering.

Her undergraduate research has paralleled her summer jobs. Working in the laboratory of Lawrence Bonassar, associate professor of biomedical engineering, she grew cells of the meniscus in the human knee. Perhaps some day doctors will replace damaged knee joints with material grown from the patient's own cells instead of pieces of plastic.

This year, Ippolito has been a co-president of the Cornell chapter of the Society of Women Engineers. Last year she was director of outreach and arranged for Cornell engineering students to visit local schools to describe engineering careers. "I was lucky with my parents," she explains. "A lot of students don't know about engineering." This year she concentrated on setting up company information sessions, bringing potential employers to campus.

In her junior year, Ippolito also was vice president of the Cornell student chapter of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering.

She is an active member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. Her mother, she reports, was also in a sorority, and "I always wanted to do it." While being a sorority member may not fit the stereotypical image of an engineer, Ippolito sees it as a place to meet other smart people in many fields and learn from them.

After a planned summer hitting six cities in Europe, Ippolito will be back at Cornell for a Master of Engineering degree, then it's probably on to industry. "I'd rather have a career than a job," she concludes. "I love what I do, and I'm passionate about it."