Lydia Villa-Komaroff is a molecular biologist, an executive, and a diversity advocate. She is co-founder, board member, and former CEO and CSO of Cytonome/ST LLC, a company developing and manufacturing purpose-built cell sorters. Villa-Komaroff received her BA from Goucher College and her PhD in cell biology from MIT. As a postdoc, she was lead author of a landmark paper reporting the first synthesis of mammalian insulin in bacterial cells. During her career as a bench scientist, she focused on using the methods of recombinant DNA to address a number of fundamental questions in different fields in collaboration with neurologists, developmental biologists, endocrinologists, and cell biologists. She has held faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Children’s Hospital, Boston, and Harvard Medical School. She served as vice president for research at Northwestern University and vice president for research and chief operating officer of the Whitehead Institute (Cambridge). Villa-Komoraff currently serves on the boards of the Massachusetts Life Science Center (gubernatorial appointment); American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), an independent, private, nonprofit biological resource center and research organization; the Keck Graduate Institute; and the Boston-based Biomedical Careers Program. She is a member of the NSF Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering; the Advisory Council of the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences; and the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine, a joint committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She is a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS).