Inspiring Her: Dr. Lucy Gildea | Texas Today

It is a pleasure to be here.

Yes, so I am originally from Frankfort, Kentucky. I went to graduate school at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. So I have a doctorate in cell and molecular biology with an emphasis on immunology and infectious disease.

Thank you. And I actually spent time in Cincinnati. I did a fellowship at the Children's Hospital prior to joining Procter and Gamble.

I didn't wake up and say I will be a scientist in a beauty company. Over time I built a foundation around just hypothesis-driven research. It's about developing that critical thinking, which is what you kind of learn throughout scientific training and graduate school. But I had the opportunity to start a role at Procter and Gamble in a very upstream biotechnology group. That is where you started to learn how to take that scientific thinking into a corporate environment. I got experience working in different business units, so I've worked in health care, oral care, beauty care, allergy and gut health. And just over time, I really started to learn how to kind of pull that together. And what better way to bring all that training to the culmination of a career at Mary Kay, right? It's about enriching women's lives.

What I love about my day job, it's different every day. Some days I am in executive meetings talking about company strategy. I have a very large, diverse, brilliant team of scientists and analysts and really thinking about mapping out the product portfolio in the pipeline.

Absolutely. So I value mentoring, first of all I think it is a very powerful tool. I like to be mentored and I like to mentor. And it's just whether it's formal or informal, it's such an important part of learning about yourself, kind of trying to figure out what motivates you. And I can tell you when I started, I didn't know as much about the variety of careers that could happen in science. One of the things I can do to pay it forward for our young women is to give them the opportunity to learn about the variety of careers and to think about it outside of a traditional school setting. And then encourage the young woman to be curious and encourage them if they see an opportunity to bring an unmet need together and create a role. Like that's the beauty of the world we're in today. Is you can create those opportunities. And our founder, Mary Kay Ash, she was a trailblazer; in fact, she was ahead of her time, breaking down and defying gender biases at a time she started the company in 1963.

We actually have a STEM grants for young women. By the end of this year we will have funded 18 grants. And these encompass and support many different disciplines. We have funded women in physics, astronomy, cancer research, engineering, biological sciences. And we've done this not only locally, but around the world. Remember, we have a global footprint. And you know, we speak at forums, we have workshops. We sponsored with the Irma Rangel Young Women's Leadership School and had them come in and tour our brand new state-of-the-art R&D and manufacturing facility. They spent a day with our young women scientists and leaders learning about what we do and how we try to bring the magic together for our women entrepreneurs.

One of my first pieces of advice is don't get in your own way. You know, sometimes we can become our biggest critic. You know, there's enough obstacles along the way in any path that you take. Don't let yourself be that obstacle. Get rid of self-doubt. Have the confidence. It's not going to be easy and you are going to have to be driven and you are going to have to persevere. But just make sure that you have that confidence within yourself. And another thing, most folks don't realize in science, particularly in science, 95% of what you do is actually proving your hypothesis wrong. You get more negative data and information. So you've got to design that next experiment and that next hypothesis to try to get to the right answer. And so you've got to be curious. And you've got to be resilient. And I just live by the philosophy of don't let the misgivings of today impact your tomorrow. I absolutely love what I do. But despite how hard and challenging it can be in a given moment, I just can't wait to get up and start it over again the next day.

Thank you so much. Such a pleasure to be here.