Carolina Alumni Review - May/June 2008

STEVE EXUM ’ 92

when heated. In the biomedical field, Pierce says, the potential benefits of such a material are enormous. If an organ or similarly large object were made from it, it could be implanted in a body via a small incision. Or the material could be used to coat a medical device with tiny “features” — as one example, tiny grappling hooks of sorts that would allow a defibrillator to cling to tissue until the hooks are heated up and “erased.”

“Valerie’s strategy is about being different,” DeSimone says. “She is very clever about meeting needs in the medical device space.”

Pierce describes Ashby’s lab as a creative and supportive environment, where initiative, new ideas and experimentation are rewarded.

“We make stuff all the time,” Pierce says. “That’s the part that excites us the most. Sometimes the materials surprise us.”

Love in the classroom — and outside

Imagine the surprise of Ashby’s organic chemistry students when they got their first exam back in February. Seventy-two honors students who collectively had probably got-

ten only a handful of Cs in their lives, and she handed them 40s, 50s, 60s. Their second exam is next week — another reason why they’re hanging on her every word today.

Ashby knows that many of them are scared about their grades. She also knows what they need to hear. “Her gift is finding out exactly where students are in their understanding of chemistry and knowing intuitively what their next steps are,” says Harold Woodard, associate dean of student academic counseling, who has sent Ashby a handful of struggling students for tutoring.

Today, it’s simple: Her students need some tough love.

An hour into the class, she takes a break from teaching chemistry. Instead, she reads her class a letter of recommendation that she wrote for a former student who was applying to Harvard Medical School. In the letter, she praises the student’s intellectual gifts and academic achievements. But she dedicates one paragraph — and this is the paragraph she wants her class to pay attention to today — to how the student responded to pressure and adversity.

“You are all going to look alike except

Ben Pierce is a graduate student working in Ashby’s lab, creating polymers that are able to deform and then return to their original shapes when heated. This machine tests the overall strength of a tiny sample of a shape-memory polymer intended for potential biomedical uses.

for that one paragraph that says, ‘When the going gets tough, this is how you respond,’” she tells her students. Ashby is shifting effortlessly into another role. Her movements and gestures gather energy, her speech gathers rhythm and, at times, an almost poetic flow.

“Call your mama — cry,” she says, referring to their bad exam grades.

“Come see me — cry.

“But if you are in the place where you still need to be crying, I need you to get over it.

“She’s special, but so are you. Stop crying.”

The students are transfixed. For a few minutes, their professor, the scientist, sounds like a minister — teaching them a moral lesson, exhorting them to rise above their troubles. Now, they can see hints of Ashby’s other side — the woman of faith.

Here again, the roots flow back to family. Her father, the teacher, also was a minister. One of her brothers is a minister in Nashville, N.C. Her husband is an associate minister at Union Baptist Church in Durham, where she teaches Sunday school.