Andrea Hill grew up in southeastern Bedford County in a place so rural that the closest convenience store was 5 miles away.

Her bus ride to Staunton River High School near Moneta took 90 minutes, giving her plenty of time to go over homework or dream of the future.

One dream, going back at least to middle school, was to become an engineer and help people. This year, Hill is being honored with Virginia Tech's Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus Award.

The teenage girl who spent three hours a day on a Bedford County school bus was Andrea Byrnside. She married Keith Hill when both were students at Virginia Tech in the late 1990s.

Halfway through her junior year at Tech, Andrea followed Keith to Fort Hood, Texas, where the member of Tech's cadet corps went to fulfill his commitment to the Army.

Andrea returned to Tech in 2001 and graduated with a degree in materials science engineering two years later. Keith, who had been a psychology major, returned to Tech to pursue a mechanical engineering degree and will graduate this spring.

A week after her graduation, Hill went to work for a Blacksburg company, NanoSonic Inc., which designs what she calls "interesting materials" by building them one molecular layer at a time with nanotechnology.

Hill's educational and professional achievement is all the more sweet for someone whose 10th-grade trigonometry teacher told her in front of the class that she was not smart enough to be an engineer.

"That hurt a little bit," Hill said. But she was stubborn, and she had something to show her teacher. "I remember getting an A in her class and thinking: 'Look at that,'" Hill recalled last week.

Fortunately, Hill had other teachers at Staunton River who believed in her. Her calculus and chemistry teachers, both women, inspired and helped her; and the director of the school band, Steve Hedrick, pushed her constantly to do better. She led the marching band as its drum major and played flute in the all-county and all-regional bands.

Hill also had a personality that would not be defeated easily by negative assessments from a teacher. She got some of her mother's stubbornness, she said.

"I always tried to do things that challenged me," she said. "When I ran track, I ran hurdles because it was hard."

Her parents, who run a small manufacturing business in Bedford, had never attended college and did not pressure her to go either, Hill said. "But they never let me feel like I was limited in any way. You could pursue your own destiny and own dreams."

In choosing engineering as a major, Hill was in some ways swimming against the tide, as women have not historically been a large presence in engineering schools. The ratio of women to men in her field of materials science engineering was somewhat greater than in other engineering fields, but women's numbers are increasing now in all fields, she said.

At NanoSonic, one of Hill's mentors has been Jennifer Lalli, who has a doctorate in chemistry and is one of the inventors of Metal Rubber, one of the company's trademarked products. Another has been Rick Claus, the company's founder and Virginia's Outstanding Scientist Award recipient in 2001. Lalli's and Claus' receptiveness to new ideas make the company's work exciting and innovative, she said.

Claus says he has been very impressed with the range and variety of work that Hill has been willing to take on and do very well in, given her educational and technical experience compared with other researchers at NanoSonic.

"She works doggoned hard," Claus said, noting that it's not unusual to get an e-mail from Hill at 11 p.m. or on weekends about an idea for work.

NanoSonic was founded in 1998 to develop products from patents leased from Virginia Tech for an electrostatic, self-assembly process for high-tech materials. The original patents, which are leading to more patentable products, were based on research done by a Chinese graduate student under Claus' supervision.

But working in the nano scale allows scientists to tailor the properties of materials to make them more useful, Hill said. "The word 'nano' is overused in general. . . . It is a buzzword right now," she said.

For example, Hill and her colleagues at NanoSonic have recently begun creating electrically conductive wearable textiles. They incorporate Metal Rubber, a tough material that conducts electricity like metal but can be stretched to two to three times its length and return to its original shape.

The new textiles have both commercial and military uses in wearable electronics and wearable antennas. They could be used in health-monitoring devices for soldiers and others and incorporate sensors to measure impact trauma, Hill said. The material also provides a shield against electro-magnetic radiation, and one envisioned use is in protective clothing for power-line workers.

Of five patents on which Hill's name has appeared in the past 30 months, two are with NanoSonic and the rest with a joint venture between NanoSonic and a major corporate partner. The patents involve the textiles and Metal Rubber and similar materials.

NanoSonic is allied with Lockheed Martin and other large companies, including defense contractors, and works with the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense and NASA.

"I definitely want to see these materials used in a product," Hill said. "I want to . . . keep improving these materials and make something really beneficial to society."