Resonance

Top: Christine Moore still performs as a flutist. “My parents were just so proud of me,” she said. “My achievements and performances always brought them so much joy. They drove down from Baltimore for every single concert and recital at UVA. I think they'd be happy knowing that I'm still playing.”

Bottom: Christine Moore and Robert Bartolo both enjoyed long careers with Procter & Gamble. They made bequests to their alma maters as a tribute to the ways their educations shaped their lives, hoping to provide similar experiences to future students.

Caring Mentors

Moore's mentors at the Engineering School included Elmer L. Gaden Jr., who was the Wills Johnson Professor of Chemical Engineering until his retirement in 1994. “I felt an immediate affinity with Gaden, triggered by his Brooklyn accent—he sounded just like my parents, who were from Brooklyn. As I later learned, he attended Brooklyn Technical High School and was in the Navy, both just like my dad. So we had an instant connection,” she said.

“As my advisor, he was there for me all four years and even kept in touch after graduation. He was a great teacher and had a way of making difficult concepts more approachable with his storytelling and sense of humor. He genuinely cared.”

Engineering professor Thomas E. Hutchinson—inventor of the Eye-gaze Response Interface Computer Aid, or ERICA—was another influence. “I was doing pre-med on top of engineering to keep my possibilities open. He took an interest in me and brought me to his graduate school biomedical engineering labs. It was so inspirational. I considered pursuing graduate school for biomedical engineering.”

Innovations for Daily Life

Moore ultimately continued in chemical engineering and joined Procter & Gamble's Research and Development organization right out of college. She developed and commercialized new products for brands like Pantene, Herbal Essences, Zest, Always, and Pampers, designing to meet the diverse needs of consumers all around the world. “The process at P&G is unique in that technical folks like me would be the ones interacting with consumers to learn what they are struggling with—what's not working in their products today and what are the things they never dreamed of so that we can design the products to better meet those needs,” she said. “I had the opportunity to work on diapers for premature babies. Preemie babies' skin is not fully developed, so we had to make sure that we were designing our diapers in such a way to not only protect the delicate skin of those babies, but also to meet the needs of the NICU nurses who are caring for them. Then you still have to figure out how to make the diapers on the manufacturing line at over 1,000 diapers a minute with a consistent high quality, which added another level of depth to the technical challenges we had to solve.”

Moore progressed into R&D management, and her experiences at UVA—as a chemical engineering student, a musician, and a student of the engineering humanities program—all contributed to her success at Procter & Gamble. “As a musician, one of the biggest skills you learn is collaboration and listening. When you play music with others, you really experience creating something where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Each voice is important and plays its role, but it's so important to listen and know when your voice needs to shine, or when you need to support, or where you need to blend. That working together is what can really create something magical,” she said. “When you're on a team developing and commercializing an innovation, you need to integrate all of the different diverse points of view, backgrounds, and experiences to be able to design and deliver the innovation.”