About Her Life

Dianne Gates-Anderson (born 1959) loved chemistry from her very first chemistry course in the 10th grade. Of the sciences, she found chemistry the most fascinating because you can use the principles of chemistry to explain so much about everything around you.

Dianne Gates, as she was then named, moved many times with her military family, which ultimately settled in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While she was growing up, she respected strong-willed, resilient women and found many examples in her own family, especially her mother and grandmothers. To this day, she continues in this admiration. Fulfilling her family’s expectation that she would go to college, she enrolled at Oklahoma State University (OSU) in Stillwater.

When she selected chemical engineering as her undergraduate major, she did not honestly know what chemical engineers do. What she did know was that she loved chemistry and that teachers and others had told her that she should be an engineer since she was equally strong in science and math. And she had heard that chemical engineering is the toughest of the engineering majors, and that challenge motivated her.

In her junior year she gave birth to a son. Her sister, who was also at OSU, her mother, and her engineering adviser, Danelle Mohanty, provided key support while Gates completed her bachelor’s degree as a single mother. She graduated from OSU in 1982 with a B.S. in chemical engineering. After graduation, she married her son’s father, and the family moved to El Paso, Texas, where they had another child, a baby girl. She and her husband divorced in 1985. For a while, she returned to Tulsa, where she took a job as a laboratory technician at Amoco Oil Company. She ultimately decided to go to graduate school because she felt that she could contribute more than was expected of her as a laboratory technician, and she realized having an advanced degree would enhance her career.

Gates applied for and received a prestigious GEM fellowship granted by the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Sciences, an alliance of graduate schools and industries dedicated to tapping underutilized sources of scientific talent. With her children now two and a half and five years old, Gates moved to California to attend the University of California, Berkeley. She was a single parent during her seven years of graduate school, but she did meet her future husband while in grad school.

Gates graduated with her doctorate in environmental engineering in 1991, the only African American in the program at the time. First she worked in the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee on how to treat hazardous wastes that had contaminated the soil and groundwater. In one project she and her research team focused on toxic chemicals found in many fuels and solvents that commonly permeate ground and groundwater at military bases, airports, and gas stations across the country. They developed systems that would oxidize and break down these chemicals. In another project, she investigated a chemical means of leaching mercury out of radioactive wastes.

She returned to California in 1996, in part to be with her new husband, Tikisa Anderson. At the Radioactive and Hazardous Waste Management Division of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, she invented the process highlighted above of sealing in laboratory and factory air filters and all their contaminants. The process is called IS*SAFE, for “in situ stabilization and filter encapsulation.” Still another project involved disposing depleted uranium waste. Recently Gates-Anderson has turned to dealing with pesticide spills and preparing in the event of dangerous chemicals purposely unleashed into the environment by terrorists.

As a concerned citizen and scientist, Gates-Anderson serves on the Human Relations Commission of Union City, California, and spends hours organizing and teaching workshops that encourage students to consider technical careers. Not all seriousness, Gates-Anderson enjoys hiking, cooking, watercolor painting, and driving her MINI Cooper on the road and on the track.

For Further Reading on the Web

Pioneer Women: Pushing the Frontiers of Science and Engineering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a publication of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Gates-Anderson’s early environmental projects are described on pp. 6–8.

“Whatever the Waste, New Facility Takes It On,” article describing IS*SAFE, in Science and Technology, July–August 2003, published by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.