Taraka Dale

LWV News:

The League of Women Voters (LWV) invites the community to its monthly Lunch with a Leader event, noon to 1 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 16, at the Unitarian Fellowship Hall on Sage Street. The leader will be Taraka Dale, PhD.

Dale grew up in northwestern Pennsylvania, in a rural area between Pittsburgh and Erie. In 1999, she received her B.S. in Biochemistry from Allegheny College, a nearby liberal arts school. Since then, apart from a few years in Chicago, she has spent the bulk of her adult and professional life in the mountain west, receiving her Ph.D in Biochemistry from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005 and spending a year in Utah before moving to Los Alamos in 2007.

During her 17 years in the Bioscience Division at LANL, Dale has progressed from Postdoctoral Researcher to Principal Investigator, and for the past two years her primary role as been to serve as the Group Leader for B Division’s Microbial and Biome Sciences Group.

In 2023, Dale was honored by Biofuels Digest as one of the “500 most innovative, transformative leaders in the advanced bioeconomy” and received the R.A. Glenn Award for the “most innovative and interesting paper” presented at the American Chemical Society Energy and Fuels Division Symposium.

Dale and her husband, Ben, are raising their two sons, a freshman and 5th grader, here in Los Alamos, where they enjoy the small town life and easy access to the outdoors. Dale’s hobbies include spending time with family and friends, hiking, biking, traveling and enjoying good food. 

During her presentation on Jan. 16, Dale will be talking about B Division’s work on tackling plastic pollution and developing more sustainable plastics for the future.