As a grade-schooler in 1960s Prince George’s County, Maryland, Diane Thompkins, MS, BS ’76, RN, aspired to a career in computers. Then, teaching history like her next-door neighbor felt like a calling. The dark computer labs of that era fizzled that aspiration as quickly as the landscape of high school classrooms soured her on stepping into one as a teacher. A love for science and teaching, though, would stay with her, woven together with patient care she observed as a teen candy striper at the local hospital where her mother was a medical secretary.