Laurie Parker
I’m not your typical Solver, I represent a different side of the InnoCentive demographic. While many of the successful Solvers on the site have years of experience and expertise, and labs of their own to try out ideas, I have been growing up in science along with InnoCentive. I first heard about it when it launched and I was an undergraduate chemistry student at the University of St. Thomas. My research mentor, Dr. Tom Ippoliti, showed me the site and said “Look at this, isn’t it cool?” We’d been doing a lot of custom synthesis to supplement our research budget were always looking for interesting synthetic problems to solve. As an undergraduate, I found that most of the Challenges were over my head. The only solutions I came up with turned out to be the ones that were already in place, or specifically mentioned as not suitable. Which in some ways was encouraging—it was reassuring to know that at least I was learning to think along the right track.