Tammy Long got an idea of what science was all about when she went to Costa Rica as a college student.

“My instructors basically said, ‘There’s the rainforest. Go find something that you’d be interested in researching,’” she said. “That completely changed what I was going to do for a career. They had introduced me to inquiry.”

France Córdova, who just retired from the presidency of Purdue University—the first woman to hold the post in the school’s history—has had many other milestones in a career as an astrophysicist, chief scientist for NASA, and university administrator.