Villa-Komaroff is the oldest of six children. She was born and raised in New Mexico; her parents were the first in their respective families to go to college. Her mother’s Spanish ancestors came to the New World with the Conquistadores and settled in Arizona. Her father’s family is from Mexico, descended from Spanish and indigenous Indian people. The Villa family moved several times within New Mexico when she was growing up, finally settling in Santa Fe when Lydia was nine. Her father was a violinist in the Santa Fe orchestra and a teacher of music, math and English at all pre-college levels. Her mother was a social worker for much of her career, but also worked for the state as a registrar.
Villa-Komaroff’s scientific interests have been many and varied: as a student she was involved with protein synthesis, particularly polio virus. At Harvard, she studied the eggshell protein of the silk worm. Her plan was to use the study of protein synthesis to learn more about the development of the silk worm. At Cold Spring Harbor, she tried to clone the silk moth genome. While this experiment failed, she learned techniques that enabled her to successfully clone insulin in bacteria when she returned to Harvard. When she set up her own lab, Villa-Komaroff studied insulin-related proteins in the brain. She found that “if insulin is made in the brain it is made at very low levels, while insulin growth factors one and two are made abundantly in the brain.” This led to the discovery that IGF2 is a factor in regulating the cell cycle and the advent of cell death in an animal. She also contributed to understanding of the neuropeptides somatostatin and vip. She is now CEO of Boston-based Cytonome.
Work, commute and extended family permitting, Villa-Komaroff is an amateur photographer. She hopes to broaden her longstanding portraiture to macro-photography. She is also an avid reader of mysteries: “it’s how I relax my mind.”
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