Born in England to Venezuelan parents, Janet moved to Venezuela as a child, where she completed her school years and developed a passion for chemistry. She earned a Chemistry degree in Venezuela and a PhD in Canada. Upon completing her degree, she worked at a gold mine in USA, where she applied her knowledge to find ways to better extract gold from ores. She has since worked in various regions of Canada and USA, contributing her expertise to two of the world’s largest gold mining companies.

What inspired you to explore STEM when you were young?

My first introduction to STEM came from my father, also a Chemist, he was always explaining how everything works and I loved that. He encouraged me to enter a science fair and I had so much fun designing a solar grill and coming up with experiments and I started learning about chemical elements and reactions and I found it fascinating.

What do you enjoy most about what you do in your STEM career?

I get to work with a great group of people from diverse backgrounds on generating ideas to improve processes and coming up with solution to different challenges. We get to test a whole variety of reactions and analyze data to understand how metals behave in different systems.

What is a fun, bizarre or insightful STEM fact about your field?

Metallurgy is a cross-disciplinary field involving a range of scientific principles, where we get to combine chemistry, physics, engineering, and technological innovations to extract metals that we utilize on our daily lives.