Other stories include: 

• : Asia Durr was the best player on Louisville’s women’s basketball roster this season. Just don’t expect her to acknowledge it.
• : Austin Marshall, a UofL alum, handled logistics for the historic launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
• : A Women’s Center essay contest paid tribute to Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau, a former UofL professor and prominent local activist for women’s and civil rights.

The full issue is available .

Marianne Barnes also graduated from UofL with a chemical engineering degree. She expected to find work in biofuels, but instead is helping bring an abandoned Kentucky distillery back to life.

Joyce Nethery used her chemical engineering training to work in indus­trial distilling, teach high school and become chief financial officer of a dairy farm. But when she combined her education with her passion for heirloom vegetables, she put a new Kentucky artisan distillery on the map.

Katherine O’Nan will graduate in May with her degree in chemical engi­neering. Following in the footsteps of Wilson, Barnes and Nethery, she is poised for a promising career in an industry that 40 years ago wasn’t on the radar for female graduates of UofL’s J.B. Speed School of Engineering.

Now, much to the delight of the women featured here, Speed School chemical engineering alumna are leading the charge in Kentucky’s bourbon industry, taking their science-based education to the distilleries and labs across the state.

“I sure hope that this boom in the bourbon industry attracts more young women to STEM careers,” O’Nan said. “You’ve got to show the fun side of STEM coursework especially to young girls who often hear it’s not for them. Making bourbon for a living is certainly a fun take on a chemical engineer’s career.”

The Char Connoisseur
Andrea Wilson, 96GS, 97GS
Master of maturation and executive vice president-general manager, Michter’s

Andrea Wilson is the Michter’s master of maturation, a relatively newer title for anyone — woman or man — in the Kentucky bourbon distilling industry. Wil­son works hand-in-hand with the distillery’s master distiller (also a woman, Pamela Heil­mann) to ensure the aging process of the bar­rels is doing its part to end up with the exact bourbon they have in mind.

“Having two masters is a recognition of the fact that there are two very distinct phases of making Kentucky bourbon,” she said.

“I look after all of the cask — every­thing from procurement of cask, deciding the toasting, the charring, the warehouse environment, designs of warehouses, equip­ment, monitoring of liquid temperatures, as well as supporting our master distiller with defining new innovations and doing trials and supporting all the needs that she has to deliver the highest quality products,” Wilson said.

Wilson calls it “wood science.”

“The vessel is so much more than just a container,” she said. “It is the catalyst for many chemical and physical changes that ultimately will determine the final color, fla­vor and aroma of the product.”

Wilson, a Louisville native, was exposed to distilling at an early age. Her grandfather, who grew up near the Maker’s Mark distill­ery in Loretto and made his own wine and beer, passed along stories from the days of Kentucky moonshiners.

“My grandfather would sit in his lawn chair and he would tell us these stories. For me, it was this very enchanting thing. Over the course of my life, I wanted to be in the spirits industry,” she said.

The problem was she didn’t know how to get there.

“There was no distilling school, so that was the most challenging thing for me, that I couldn’t find my way,” she said.

She decided “the best thing to do was to go into chemical engineering because that included the distillation process and how you develop products through chemistry.”

Wilson started her college career at Jeffer­son Community and Technical College, then transferred to Speed. After her graduation in 1996, however, the bourbon industry was stagnant and jobs were scarce.

Wanting to stay in Kentucky, Wilson found steady work as a consultant for differ­ent types of manufacturers. While doing con­tract work for UK-based Diageo, the world’s largest producer of spirits, Wilson was asked to manage the resurrection of warehouse operations at the former Stitzel-Weller dis­tillery in Louisville. After the company downsized and her position was eliminated, she was asked to join Michter’s, which was being resurrected by the Magliocco family.

“I thought, ‘This will be a great opportu­nity to be a part of leaving a legacy and build­ing a brand,’ ” she said.

Wilson knows it is unique that both she and the master distiller at Michter’s are women. “And while we don’t care much about being called out as women, I recognize that women are now being recognized for their contributions to this industry,” she said.

The Queen of the Castle
Marianne Barnes, 12S
Master distiller, Castle & Key

She’s not quite 30 years old, she’s a woman and she’s not shy, making Castle & Key Master Distiller Mar­ianne Barnes another clear indicator that Kentucky craft spirits are focused on the future, not just living in the past.

In 2015 when she joined Castle & Key, Barnes became the first woman since Prohibition to be named master distiller in Kentucky. Her job is to come up with the products that will revive a long-abandoned spirits company and distillery in Frankfort that is being meticulously restored.

She is loving every minute of the jour­ney, but she didn’t know that having a career as a master distiller was even a pos­sibility until she interned at Brown-For­man as part of her Speed School education.

“If I had seen someone in this position maybe I would have known this was pos­sible for me,” Barnes said.

Barnes decided to major in chemical engineering at the urging of her father. After taking some time between high school and college to help her mother open a boutique, she attended the Speed School and earned her bachelor’s degree in 2012.

Always interested in automobiles, Barnes originally thought she’d go into the biodiesel industry.

“I really thought I wanted to do renew­able energy research,” she said. “I had a lit­tle bit of an automotive background and I really wanted to save the world. I thought renewable energy would get me there.”

That all changed after she went to a Speed School career fair, where she interviewed with as many companies as she could to find an internship. One of the companies happened to be Louis­ville-based Brown-Forman.

“That was the one everyone wanted and I was lucky enough to get the offer,” Barnes said. “The co-op program can put you on a path you didn’t expect. I started working with them as an intern and I ended up falling in love with the industry.”

Pumps, heat exchangers, blending and filtration: the industrial distillery side of the operation grabbed her attention. And, slowly, that interest developed into a passion for distilling spirits.

Barnes was on a fast track at Brown-For­man. She was Woodford Reserve’s first master taster and master distiller heir-ap­parent when two friends who planned to house a new distillery in the historic Old Taylor Distillery in Frankfort lured her away. She left her role at Brown-Forman to help lead Castle & Key.

Castle & Key hasn’t put out its first bourbon yet — look for it in 2020 — but instead started with a gin. There’s a gar­den, the Botanical Trail, on the property for herbs and such, so Barnes can play with flavors and put her chemical engi­neering degree to work.

“[Distilling] is more than just num­bers … It’s a living thing really because you have the yeast and all these other tem­peratures and times and environments that shape what the flavor is going to be,” she explained. Then there’s the aging, the “mysterious magic at the end.”

The Matriarch of ‘Ground to Glass’
Joyce Nethery, 85S, 87GS
Master distiller and co-owner, Jeptha Creed

It was late afternoon when Louisvillian Charles Theiss sat down at the bar at Jeptha Creed Distillery in Shelbyville and glanced at a menu.

“I went to Speed, too,” he said to the woman behind the bar, “graduated in 1973.” Joyce Nethery smiled. It wasn’t unusual for a fellow Speed School alumnus to patronize the charming distillery she opened in 2016 and owns with her daughter, Autumn.

What was unusual is how she ended up perfecting her own small-batch moonshine, bourbon and vodka after earning an engi­neering degree in 1987 because she thought making hot dog wrappers was a cool way to earn a living. Her journey from hot dog wrap­pers to a family-owned distillery started when Nethery was a freshman at Murray State and visited her aunt’s place of work. Her aunt also was a chemical engineer and worked at a plant that made mylar for hot dog wrappers.

“I just fell in love with the concept of mak­ing something and being involved with pro­ducing something that people used in their everyday lives,” Nethery said.

After graduating from Speed, Nethery had a varied and rewarding career working in the industrial distillation unit for a chemi­cal manufacturer, then taught high school physics and chemistry and was chief finan­cial officer of her husband’s Shelby County dairy farm.

But when the dairy farm didn’t work out, it was her entrepreneurial husband who had the idea to build a distillery along Interstate 64 in Shelby County. Nethery wasn’t so sure, but she attended Moonshine University — a six-day crash course in distilling offered in Louisville — in January 2013. And that’s when it clicked.

“I fell back in love with my engineering,” Nethery said. “I could see this vision for this ground-to-glass distillery, that we had a story from our agricultural roots and, with my engineering, we could distill it into a value-added product. I came out of the class with that vision.”

Jeptha Creed sold out of its first tiny batch of bourbon and makes flavored moonshine and vodkas. Next year, another bourbon will be ready. The Nethery family uses an heirloom corn called “Bloody Butcher” that they grow themselves on their farm.

“I grew up here and was always surrounded by bourbon, but to have our own distill­ery and to distill bourbon was not a thought that I had when I was going to school,” Neth­ery said. “My vision was to go into the petro­leum industry, the chemical industry, and work those kinds of things. And that’s what I did. And then it … came full circle back to my engineering, back to bourbon.”

Like her fellow alums, Nethery talks about the finer points of distillation in great detail. There’s corn and rye and barley and wheat. There are cookers and agitators and pot stills and shelves and coils and valves and direct steam injection. There are starches and enzymes and yeast and sugars. She watches it all, with the help of her family and computers.

“We are about making old fashioned new. Corn is old fashioned. Moonshine is traditionally done. But we want quality to be consistent, so we also have new, like a com­puter system that is programmed to make sure valves open when they are supposed to open, close when supposed to close and that temperatures are correct,” she said.

Nethery is frequently asked what it is like being a woman in the chemical industry and, now, in the bourbon industry. “I never thought about it a whole lot,” she said. “You know, I always wanted to do the job and do it with excellence.”

The Up-and-Comer
Katherine O’Nan
Speed School Class of 2018

When Katherine O’Nan was in high school in Ashland, she was taking all science, math and engineering classes. She was frequently the only female in the class, and she couldn’t understand why.

Five years later, through dozens of Speed School courses, three internships and plenty of discussion with her fellow female Speed School students, she knows why and she has some ideas of how to fix it.

The May graduate, who will receive a masters of chemical engineering degree, says young women need to see that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) careers can be fun. They also need more female role models. O’Nan was lucky in that regard. She interned at Michter’s under Wilson and Heilmann.

“Girls have to see themselves in the indus­try in which they want to work. Up until recently, there were only male master dis­tillers in the industry,” O’Nan said. “I have been very fortunate to work alongside strong women in the bourbon industry: Two prominent roles at Michter’s … are both filled by females.”

When O’Nan first thought about an engi­neering career, she envisioned herself work­ing in the petroleum industry (she interned twice at Marathon Petroleum). But her inter­est in distilling, which started with her craft-beer enthusiast father, sparked her curiosity. A Brown Fellowship in hand, she traveled to Scotland, then to Canada, to see how they made their whiskeys.

“I knew chemical engineering could mesh well with the distilling industry,” she told her hometown newspaper, The Independent, for a feature it published about her. “The focus is more on full-scale production than being a chemist in a lab.”

Then O’Nan, like Nethery, took the Moon­shine University course, which led her to an internship at Michter’s. At Michter’s, she “was able to learn a lot about whiskey fil­tration processes, how a distillery and its equipment operate and concepts about how whiskey ages in the barrel. My time at Mich­ter’s taught me just how many people it takes to get from that grain to a quality bottle on the shelf.”

She credits the Speed School’s emphasis on practical learning through co-ops with giving her the “deeper understanding” of her coursework that she needed to feel confident pursuing her dream career in distilling.

O’Nan is counting on the bourbon industry needing more and more people as she makes her future plans. Especially more female chemical engineers.

“It is my hope that these women by whom I have been inspired — and even myself when I get the opportunity to be out in the work­force — will continue to lead by example and show young girls that they can do this work, too.”

Ask her about her teammates and she won’t stop talking.

For Durr, arguably the standout on a roster full of superb players, the individual accolades don’t mean as much as the goals of the team.

“I don’t play for awards,” she said. “I play because I love the game of basketball. I play because I love my teammates, my coaches and my family. I don’t really worry about what award I’m getting; I tune all that out. I’m very grateful, I’m very thankful for it, but when the ball is up in the air, it’s time to play.”

And play she does.

Although Durr tunes out the hype on the court, the bas­ketball community has taken notice. She was named ACC Player of the Year. She was named to the USA Today All American first team and the ESPNW All-America second team. In February, Durr was named to the John R. Wooden Award Late Season Top 20, a list of student-athletes still in the running for the Wooden Award and the John R. Wooden All-America Team.

As of February, Durr ranked second in the ACC and 32nd in the country with an average of 20 points per game. She had a 46.6 3-point field goal percentage, which led the ACC and ranked fifth in the nation. She was the ninth leading scorer in school history with 1,618 points as of March 1. She scored a school-record 47 points in a victory over then No. 5 Ohio State in November.

Ask about that record-breaking performance, though, and Durr demures before immediately pivoting back to her teammates.

“I have great teammates. Especially through the Ohio State game, they noticed I had the hot hand and kept on feeding me the ball,” she said. “You know, that speaks vol­umes about the type of people they are, and it’s pretty cool. Just to have teammates like that, that bring you confi­dence, that tell you ‘do your thing and have fun.’ It doesn’t get any better than that.”

The confidence boost is a two-way street, according to senior forward Myisha Hines-Allen. “I have so much con­fidence in Asia, once she has the ball in her hands and it goes up, sometimes I just want to run back down the other way, but I know I’ll probably get in trouble if I do that.”

Coach Jeff Walz isn’t sur­prised by Durr’s performance on the court or her gracious responses to questions about her play. That’s just who she is.

“She wants to be a great basketball player. She stays in the gym and she works on it. That’s why she has been so successful,” Walz said. “But, she’s also a great teammate. She’s constantly praising her teammates for finding her in spots to score the basketball.”

Her teammates and her coaches are what brought Durr to Louisville after a stellar playing career in Douglasville, Georgia. “When I first came here, it was the family environment that stood out to me,” she said. “They made me feel like I was at home. They made my parents, my brothers, feel like I was at home. Everything just seemed like we fit right in.”

A basketball court has always been where Durr fits in. Durr doesn’t remember her first time holding a ball, but the story has become family lore.

“My dad tells me the story to this day,” she said. “My dad was outside — he was actually training my brother because he had a game coming up that weekend. And I just picked up a ball and started bouncing it through my legs, behind my back. And he stopped training my brother and just started watching me play.”

She was three years old.

Since then, her parents, three siblings and grandparents have supported every move. Her brothers followed her to UofL, where her younger brother, TJ, is a manager for the team. Her mom drives up from Georgia for nearly every Cardinals home game.

Durr’s first brush with stardom came when she was in fifth grade and plucked from a group of young players to star in a commercial for the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream. Ask about her starring role in the commercial and she even manages to loop her teammates in on that.

“I think people in my high school knew about it, but I didn’t really bring it up here,” she said. “Coach Sam [Williams] found it on the Atlanta Dream Instagram page, posted it and that’s how everybody found out. My teammates tease me about it. It’s just amazing to see how much I’ve grown since then. I was a little baby, but now I’m all grown up in college.”

Her TV highlights didn’t stop with one commercial. Durr was one of six players selected by ESPN to do national media in preparation for the 2017-18 season.

It should be no surprise by now, but if you ask her about that experience, she circles back around to other players.

“That was fun. I got to see Kalani [Brown] from Mich­igan and Sabrina [Ionescu] who were on the same (U23) team with me when we went to Tokyo,” Durr said. “I got to meet Morgan [William] from Mississippi State. It was cool to see people you watch; you respect each other’s game. It was a great experience to be around such great coaches and players who are well-respected.”

Those coaches and players also respect Durr. Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw called Durr the best player in the country after Durr scored 36 points in the Cardinals 100-67 rout of the Fighting Irish.

And, of course, in the press conference following the regular season game, Durr gave all the credit for her performance to her teammates.

Encouraging her teammates to be the best, to play strong, to be in top shape, and to keep positive is where Durr truly shines. All season Durr counseled freshman point guard Dana Evans. She kept up freshman guard Lindsey Duvall’s spirits after Duvall suffered an injury. She pushed freshman Loretta Kakala to stay in shape even when she isn’t getting playing time on the court.

“I’m just trying to stay in their corner with posi­tive things,” Durr said.

It’s good training for Durr’s future, which includes plans to become a coach or trainer after playing professional ball. “I would maybe like to be a high school coach or something like that, teaching kids the game of basketball. I just love to teach people the game and see how they can grow.”

A born leader, but always refreshingly humble. If Durr won’t acknowledge her leading role on the team, her teammates certainly will.

“Playing with her at USA Olympic trials, I really got to see what Asia is capable of doing and now everyone is seeing what she is capable of doing,” Hines-Allen said. “I think she is the best player in college basketball, and I’m just happy she is on my team.”

Austin Marshall, 12S, 13GS, is part of the SpaceX team that launched Falcon Heavy — and it’s owner Elon Musk’s Tesla — into space in February.

“It was awesome,” Marshall said. “We all kind of had this thought in the back of our head that it might not work — even Elon said there was a 50 percent chance it could go wrong. But the more times things worked, the more excited everyone was.”

Marshall, who graduated from the J.B. Speed School of Engineering with an industrial engineering degree, is the mate­rial flow planner for SpaceX. His job is essentially logistics, making sure all the parts and pieces needed to build the rockets are right where they should be, when they should be there.

“Right now building a rocket takes a long time,” Marshall said. “SpaceX wants to make it a really quick process, like an assembly line.”

Marshall, who worked in logistics for Toyota before join­ing SpaceX, was the perfect fit to help move SpaceX toward a more automotive-type manufacturing system. Since start­ing with the company, his role has expanded to include handling all the packaging for all the rocket parts, as well as ensuring those parts move around the company and across the country for the launches.

Marshall, who grew up in Possum Trot, Kentucky, before attending UofL, applied to SpaceX twice before joining the team.

“I wanted to work at a company that was driving things forward and at the forefront of technology,” he said. “At SpaceX, we have the smartest people on Earth working here, and we all have the same goal — something you don’t see in a lot of jobs. Here, building rockets is every­one’s job.”

While Falcon Heavy was a record-setting rocket, it is just the beginning of what SpaceX has planned. “Our number one goal for the year is to put people in space,” he said.

Meanwhile, Marshall is working with his co-workers to launch their own satellite into space. After that — though still several years out — is the BFR, or Big Falcon Rocket, which is designed to be capable of carrying humans to Mars.

“BFR is going to be three times the size in diameter and twice the height of Falcon Heavy. It’s going to be really intense,” Marshall said. “It’s going to be a whole different experience for SpaceX.”

Marshall is playing an integral role in the BFR design process as the logistics manager. His time at Speed School, particularly his engineer­ing co-ops, prepared him well for the fast-pace of SpaceX. But it was a freshman year calculus class that gave Marshall his best experience.

“Our teachers really taught us to keep work­ing and solve problems that shouldn’t be able to be solved,” he said.

That determination fits right into the mantra at SpaceX, where they are expanding the limits of space travel.

“It’s a dream job, being able to work on some­thing that’s going to go into space,” Marshall said. “It’s definitely one of those jobs you don’t mind waking up for every day.”

That’s no surprise, consid­ering his mother, former UofL professor Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau, was a prominent local activist for women’s and civil rights. In her 30-year career on campus, Tachau was a nation­ally recognized constitutional historian, the first female chair of the UofL history department, the first female president of the Faculty Senate and the first fac­ulty woman to sit on the Board of Trustees.

Soon after earning her mas­ter’s degree in history from UofL in 1958, she began teach­ing and quickly became an influ­ential advocate in statewide government, chairing the Ken­tucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and serv­ing on the state Commission on Human Rights. She also was a historical adviser to the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee and worked with the Commis­sion on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution.

But while she was break­ing barriers at the same time as national feminist icons such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Stei­nem, Tachau’s contributions were generally more local.

David Tachau, along with his sisters, Katherine and Susan, decided to honor their moth­er’s legacy by funding an annual essay contest through the UofL Women’s Center.

“I grew up in Louisville, so I understand and appreciate the university’s incredibly import­ant role for the region. I wanted to benefit one aspect of the institution: the Women’s Cen­ter,” David Tachau said. “I did want to try and tie it to the expe­riences our mother had and encourage other women to think about how the patriarchal land­scape has and hasn’t changed in two generations.”

The contest asked students to consider historical and sociolog­ical attitudes toward women of the 20th century, using Tachau’s life and their own experiences as examples. Valerie Casey, director of the Women’s Cen­ter, said the center was delighted to facilitate the contest and spread Tachau’s story to a wider audience.

“She inspired a lot of people,” she said of Tachau, who died in 1990 at the age of 64. “We felt she deserved to be recognized.”

Tachau’s experiences have much to teach students about the tectonic shift society has had to make in gender equality, Casey said. For example, when Tachau obtained her doctorate in 1972, the press wrote stories about her. The coverage reflected the biases of the era with headlines such as: ‘She mixed babies and study… ’ and ‘History mastered, with diapers.’

It’s a challenging subject, Casey said, but the students rose to it well. The winners this year are Mallory Cox, who is graduat­ing this spring with her master’s in anthropology, and Hadley Hendrick, a senior bioengineer­ing student in the J.B. Speed School of Engineering.

Cox said she didn’t know much about Tachau at first, but once she delved into the profes­sor’s papers, which are housed in UofL Libraries’ archives, and got familiar, she knew she’d have material to write something worthwhile.

“She really led the way for women in academia and the political arena,” Cox said. “It’s a neat thing for students to get to learn about the fight for gender equality and politics right here in Louisville.”

Hendrick also had not heard of Tachau before researching her life for the contest.

“There needs to be more opportunities like this for peo­ple to learn about these incred­ible figures in history that we wouldn’t learn about from history books,” she said. “It is so important to highlight women’s rights advocates, racial justice advocates, LGBTQ+ leaders, and more to get a more holistic view of what history really looked like that often isn’t taught in schools.”

In her essay, Cox noted that growing up, there weren’t many role models around her of women working in the sciences. Cox, who plans to enter doctoral studies this fall at Yale Univer­sity on full scholarship, wants to change that. Last summer, she volunteered for STEM Girls in Science Week at the Kentucky Science Center.

“Dr. Tachau was a perfect example of the woman I strive to be. She was simultaneously a caring, nurturing mother, an activist and an academic. These are goals I set for myself,” Cox wrote in her essay. “I will con­tinue to pursue all opportunities to share with others my success story as a woman in science in hopes of creating a mentality of equality for future generations.”

INSPIRED TO ACT

“We should take the things she fought her entire life for — things like economic opportunity for all women, providing equal access to higher education, giv­ing women agency over their bodies, and closing the wage gap, to mention a few — and build on them. As times change, so too does our awareness of the problems facing women, or even our definition of who “women” are. Mary Tachau is a cornerstone of what the feminist movement has become, and it would be a disservice to her memory to not take her ideas even farther … It is our duty as women to spread awareness for the amazing work that she accomplished during her lifetime, and to build on it. Feminism is a struggle that has come a long way, and if Mary Tachau were alive today, I am sure she would agree it still has a long way to go.”

— Excerpt from Hadley Hen­drick’s award-winning Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau Essay. Her com­plete essay, as well as the essay by Mallory Cox, can be found at louisville.edu/womenscenter.