By Shelley McKinley
With a humble spirit and a pattern of excelling, Kristala L. J. Prather has done it again! She is now the new head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This comes after having been promoted from associate professor to Arthur D. Little Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT in 2017. According to an August, 2017, article in the Longview News Journal, Prather credits her 11th-grade history teacher, Dianne Mears, for making the connection between math and science to engineering, and encouraging her to apply to MIT. Her application led to acceptance to the school and ultimately the career path and ground-breaking research that she conducts today. Prather was the first African American Valedictorian of Longview High School in 1990. the second would not occur until 2007. Her mother, Alvena Jones, affectionately recalled how her daughter set her goal to become the valedictorian of her class.
“Kris was always very focused and knew what she wanted to achieve. While at a school event during her freshman year, she was congratulated for having the highest g.p.a in her class. It was news to both of us. At that moment she decided that she would not make less than a 95 in any class. She set her mind to it and achieved it,” shared Jones. “In spite of all her accomplishments, she is very humble and reaches out to students from Texas that she encounters at MIT,” added Jones. Additionally, Prather uses her personal time to empower students beyond MIT and connect with the next generation.
While on sabbatical, she connected with future Black women scientists and engineers at Spelman College. She also has the Prather Research Group website which features her three main categories of research, training videos, resources, publications and more. Anyone interested in science or engineering can simply go to the site and start learning. According to the August 24, 2021, MIT Technology Review, Professor Prather made it practical to turn microbes into efficient producers of desired chemicals. She is also working to reduce dependence on petroleum. To date she has 72 publications, and has been cited by other researchers nearly 3000 times.
The article, “Dynamic regulation of metabolic ux in engineered bacteria using a pathway-independent quorum-sensing circuit,” (August, 2017) is an MIT Open Access article and considered a flagship paper. “Until you start talking about E.coli, you wouldn’t know how smart she is,” lovingly stated Jones, underscoring her daughter’s humbleness. Prather received her bachelor’s degree from MIT in 1994 and her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999. She joined the faculty at MIT in 2004. Prior to joining MIT, Prather spent four years working in bioprocess research and development at the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. She starts her new position effective Jan. 1, 2024.
