Founder and Chair of the Board, Dr. Baskin is a career scientist and business entrepreneur who founded and served as CEO for two successful biotechnology companies – ViroMed Laboratories, Inc. and AppTec Laboratory Services, Inc. – which she led to acquisitions by larger public corporations.

In 1981, Baskin was a single mom with a Ph.D. in microbiology. She quit her job in a university lab because her employer wouldn’t accommodate a flexible work schedule she needed to raise two kids. She then started ViroMed, a virus testing service that she built into the leading clinical lab in the country and sold nearly twenty years later for $40 million. Next, she formed AppTec, a testing and medical manufacturing company she sold six years later for $163 million. After retiring to Johnson City, Baskin and her husband Robert P. Elde, a neuroscientist, got the idea to transform the abandoned mill in the center of town to a cutting-edge tech-based laboratory for kids. “We’d been lamenting that when we were young, there was no greater aspiration than to be a scientist, “she says. “But we live in a disposable world – kids don’t take things apart anymore. And you fall in love with science by doing it, not reading it.”

Dr Baskin is passionate about supporting women in business, sitting on the boards of many women-owned or -run companies. She has been quoted saying that women are genetically superior entrepreneurs. “We are hard-wired to be taking care of things and looking at details, to be focused on customer service….all the things we learn to do as girls and women and mothers,” she says. But her approach to STEM is gender neutral. None of the Science Mill programs single out girls because “the world is co-ed, especially in science. There aren’t going to be female-only labs. So you better get used to it.”

Her many honors and recognitions include the “Entrepreneur of the Year / Minnesota and Dakotas” award and being a 2012 inductee of the University of Minnesota YMCA Hall of Fame.

Extracted from: http://fortune.com/2015/11/02/museum-kids-into-stem/