1991 recipient: Merritt B. Andrus, Professor of Chemistry, Brigham Young University
The last person to think Andrus would end up in academia was Andrus. As a graduate student, he had intentions to head for an industry position, but his postdoc advisor suggested that he also apply for academic positions. Inspired by his graduate advisor, Gary Keck, Andrus accepted an academic position at Brigham Young University and has been eager to help students with their overall preparation and development. Efforts in Dr. Andrus’s lab focus on methods for the synthesis of biologically active natural products that possess unique structures and potential for combinatorial library construction and screening.
Andrus admires Gary’s concern for his students then and throughout the years, especially his approach to teaching and his sense of humor. Not only did Andrus learn a lot from Gary’s creativity and innovations in synthetic chemistry, but it’s his personal approach to teaching that has stayed with Andrus as he works with students. His time in Gary’s lab gave him experience as a teacher when he trained new students in the group.
1994 recipient: Rik Tykwinski, Professor of Chemistry, University of Alberta
Rik never considered the possibility that he’d get so far in his career in chemistry as a professor of chemistry at the University of Alberta. “I was very fortunate at all points in my undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral education to have had mentors who allowed me to be independent and develop my creativity,” says Rik. Looking back on his graduate experience, he realizes that he was concerned with “how many molecules do I need to graduate?” but now sees how important it was for him to learn from others. His interactions with his Ph.D. advisor, Peter Stang, other researchers in the lab, and international postdocs about their research in China, Germany, Russia, and other countries gave Rik a unique graduate school experience that impacted the rest of his career.
After graduate school, Rik was a postdoc at ETH Zurich with Francois Diederich. He accepted a position at the University of Alberta, hoping it was as close to the mountains as Salt Lake City, but he quickly learned they were 3 hours away. In 2009, he succeeded John Gladysz, another U alumnus, as the Chair of Organic Chemistry in Erlangen, Germany, where he stayed until 2016, before returning to Alberta. Fun fact: Rik met his wife Annie Schroeder on a biking trip hosted by Utah professor emeritus Rick Steiner.
1996 recipient: Stanton F. McHardy, Adjunct Associate Professor of Chemistry, UTSA
“I think if I told my graduate-student self that we would be designing and synthesizing small molecule drug candidates that would actually go into humans in clinical trials to address diseases, I probably would not have believed it,” says Stanton. He attributes his success to his foundation at the University of Utah, where he was able to work with “Boss Keck”, who created an incredible learning and problem-solving platform that put Stan on his way to becoming an accomplished scientist, researcher, and leader in both the pharmaceutical and academic arenas.
After a short postdoctoral experience, Stan began his career in the pharmaceutical industry at Pfizer Neuroscience. During his ten years at Pfizer, he went from being a research scientist to Assistant Director, becoming involved with multiple therapeutic programs and internal research initiatives. He returned to Texas, where he works at the University of Texas at San Antonio as both an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Innovative Drug Discovery. Stan credits graduate school at the U with providing a foundation that helped him navigate a successful, interesting, and impactful career.
1999 recipient: Jamie Manson, Professor of Chemistry, Eastern Washington University
After graduate school, Jamie accepted a postdoctoral position at Argonne in the Materials Science Division. When he completed a three-year term there, he realized that academia was the only place where he could conduct the kind of research he was interested in. Without any teaching experience, he was hired at his undergraduate alma mater, Eastern Washington University, as an Assistant Professor. Mid-way through his 18th year, he is now a tenured full professor and was awarded the Trustees’ Medal in 2013—the University’s highest faculty recognition.
While in Professor Joel Miller’s group, Jamie was able to network and collaborate with groups across the chemistry community. He didn’t have research experience as an undergraduate at a small PUI, and so his graduate research experience was invaluable in helping him move forward in his career. Now he enjoys teaching in both the classroom as well as the research lab. Much of his funding comes from external sources such as the Research Corporation and the National Science Foundation. His primary research interest is focused on magnetism mediated by non-covalent interactions such as strong hydrogen bonds and halides. He has been able to publish much of his research in high-profile journals and continues to enjoy teaching research at a PUI.
2002 recipient: Rico del Sesto, Assistant Professor, Dixie State University
It was not a straight shot to Rico’s primary goal of teaching at an undergraduate institution. His unusual and unexpected path after earning a Ph.D. with Professor Joel Miller began with a postdoctoral fellowship doing research with the Air Force Research Laboratory, followed by a scientist position with the Department of Energy lab in R&D at Los Alamos National Lab. His experience in these labs equipped him with the skills he needed to build his own research programs and prepared him for a career at an undergraduate institution in unexpected ways. He was also surprised by what an “awesome” community there was among the graduate students and faculty in the chemistry programs. “I don’t think I would have survived grad school if it weren’t for that community, and today I still believe that collaboration and a supportive community is critical to success across the sciences,” he says.
After grad school, he again thought himself an “expert” but now with the ability to problem-solve his way out of anything. He was humbled to realize how much (or little) knowledge he actually had, but he was also humbled to realize the potential directions he could go and how much science and chemistry intersect with the functionality of the modern world. “There is a universe of knowledge out there waiting to be discovered, and there is a universe of opportunity to utilize the knowledge we have to keep society moving in a positive direction.”
2003 recipient: Vanessa Oklejas, Senior Computational Chemist, Zymergen
From the realm of experimental chemistry to computational chemistry, Vanessa has surprised herself throughout her academic and professional career. As someone who wasn’t even sure she would graduate, Vanessa has excelled again and again around every corner. During her graduate school experience, she learned how to think about and treat chemical information in a very different way while working in Joel Harris’s lab. She was always aware of how helpful Joel’s data analysis class would be for her, but she is quite surprised at how very helpful it has been, as science and technology have now fully embraced machine learning for better or for worse. “Without Joel’s course, I’m not sure I would have been as prepared to operate as a scientist in this seeming ML-centric world.”
After Vanessa graduated, she was interested in translating some of the tools that she picked up as a graduate student into the field of biophysics. As an NIH fellow in Steve Boxer’s lab (Stanford), she worked toward characterizing enzyme active sites using spectroscopic methods. After realizing she was tired of performing “mind-numbingly boring protein expression” in the lab, she joined Peter Wolynes’ group, where she focused on computational methods for predicting protein folding. Her current work focuses on modeling materials performance, first at the Aerospace Corporation and now at Zymergen, a biofacturing company in the San Francisco Bay area. Vanessa married another Cheves T. Walling award recipient, Bob Moison, and they have a 12-year-old son who has a strong interest in chemistry and physics but seems to prefer math!
2005 recipient: Carina Sanchez, Senior Principal Scientist, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR)
Once Carina graduated, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and started working as a medicinal chemist at Novartis. She worked on projects in diabetes and metabolism disease area. She had the opportunity to do a rotation in the Synthesis and Technology group and decided to stay in the group. She now works with projects to advance their synthetic capabilities to access novel SAR, new routes, and large quantities of intermediates and final targets. Carina contributes to the synthetic strategy as well as the overall project strategy as she manages both scale-up and route-finding conversion rate optimization resources.
Her medicinal chemistry background enables her to easily understand the challenges the team faces. She serves on the core team for projects and collaborates with colleagues in development in Switzerland and China to enable a faster transition of chemistries. Carina is surprised at how much she has been able to define her role in helping projects reach their goals. “Boss Keck taught his students to solve problems and be pragmatic,” Carina says. A few months after she moved to Cambridge, she met her husband through a friend of a friend of a fellow Keck group member. They were married in 2009 and have two children, James (9) and Sofia (6).
2008 recipient: Malathy Krishnamurthy, Technology Transfer Associate, The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine
Malathy had thought that her academic training with Professor Peter Beal would translate into a career only in research and teaching. She currently works in the technology transfer office at The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, Inc. (HJF), located in the Washington, D.C. area. Malathy’s graduate school experience in Beal’s lab laid a strong foundation for her professional development. It provided her with the necessary exposure for broadening her scientific interests and in making her more adaptable to explore interdisciplinary research areas.
Malathy studied for the patent bar exam to become a registered US Patent and Trademark Office patent agent and completed an advanced course on technology transfer at the NIH. With these credentials, she took up a part-time internship opportunity before working a full-time position in the technology transfer office at USAMRIID. Now she is currently at HJF working with a team that helps advance medical technologies from the bench to the bedside. Malathy’s graduate school experience laid a strong foundation for her professional development. It provided her with the necessary exposure for broadening her scientific interests and in making her more adaptable to explore interdisciplinary research areas.
2011 recipient: Theresa Cooper Watson, Deputy Chief Scientist, AFTAC
Theresa has always wanted to make a real impact with her science, using basic research and fundamental data to drive applied consequences. She loved working with and for her advisor, Peter Armentrout, because he gave her the freedom to design projects that would make a positive impact on the environment, which is very important to her. Now her focus is on producing science, data, and products with immediate operational impact to help close national security gaps. The science and technology she and her team develop have direct impacts on missions across the Department of Defense, from tactical levels to strategic levels.
After her postdoctoral experience at Berkeley, she began at the Air Force as a mid-level scientist setting up a new DoD radiochemistry laboratory. As time went on, the lab processes became too routine for her professional interests, so she made a lateral move into a small mission area within the same organization that felt more exploratory, exciting, and professionally fulfilling. Theresa ended up becoming the program manager and leader of a 40-member mission team for several years. Now she is the Deputy Chief Scientist for AFTAC, a 1,000-plus member organization whose focus is to detect special events in the atmosphere, underwater, underground, and in space to determine if they are nuclear. Theresa’s professional goals changed after she had her three wonderful children (ages 9 and 4 years and 5 weeks), and she wants to say that women “can have it all.”
2013 recipient: Na An, Life Science Attorney, San Francisco Office of Covington & Burling, LLP
“It never ceases to amaze me, as a lawyer, how much time I spend learning about our clients’ technologies and their competitors’ when structuring and negotiating a deal,” says Na. Graduate school education with Professor Cindy Burrows changed Na’s life, not only as a scientist but as a person as well. The most surprising and helpful lesson she learned in her lab years was how to face challenges and pick herself up in the face of failure. Experiences outside the laboratory setting have made her think more deeply about her research in the context of its social impacts. She had the opportunity to work on a few pro bono projects, representing non-profit organizations with missions to find treatments for orphan diseases.
It takes a tremendous amount of effort to take a life-saving therapeutic from the preclinical stage through clinical trials, regulatory approval process, and commercialization, to patients’ care. She was lucky enough to bear first-hand witness to the unwavering efforts put forth by families, advocates, researchers, industry, and regulators to make it a reality, and it gave her a much deeper appreciation for the difference and hope science brings about.
2018 recipient: Maria Demireva, Postdoctoral Researcher, Sandia National Laboratories
Maria stayed on at the University of Utah for one more year after graduate school in order to finish up several projects with Professor Peter Armentrout before she moved on to a postdoctoral position at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. She was initially surprised by how many more rules, regulations, and restrictions were in place at her new lab as compared to those at the university. Other than that, Maria’s day-to-day routine is very similar to her graduate school experience as she performs research on interesting physical chemistry problems with a goal to publish in high-impact journals.
The problems that Maria faced as a graduate student, whether it was trying to get an instrument to work properly or finding the optimal conditions for an experiment, became valuable tools that pressed her to be even more persistent in her research and to look for answers by deepening her knowledge and skills. These hurdles prepared her for dealing with similar setbacks in her current and future work. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, it was difficult for Maria to perform new experiments at the Advanced Light Source as she did when she first arrived there. She has made this past year an opportunity to improve her programming and modeling skills, which have opened up new avenues of research. Maria’s classes and research experience with Professor Peter Armentrout prepared her to think critically and creatively, enabling her to independently solve scientific problems.
2020 recipient: Peter Stevenson, Research Chemist, Air Force Research Laboratory
While in graduate school, Peter never imagined that he would become a principal investigator himself within a government laboratory. While in Professor Jennifer Shumaker-Parry’s lab, he had thoughts of continuing a research career in industry or academia, because careers in government laboratories seemed too competitive and were an unrealistic goal. But here he is, one year after graduating, doing exactly what once seemed impossible.
Following graduate school, Peter was a postdoctoral researcher at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. His research focused on the exotic optical physics of liquid-phase processedtwo-dimensional materials. He then had the privilege of becoming the principal investigator of the optical materials and coatings program at the AFRL. Peter’s research interests now encompass agile and high-performance optical coatings, tailored and responsive optical properties, thin film coating processing and mechanics, emergent optical materials discovery and implementation, plasmonics, nanophotonics, stratified optical media, low-dimensional materials, and metamaterials/metasurfaces.
Bill Jack has long been interested in finding new ways to look at the world. It all began when he was an undergraduate of chemistry at the University of Utah in Dr. Swaggart’s summer physics course, where the instructor announced on day one, “I’m going to teach you about a new way to look at the world.” After graduate school at Duke University, Bill greatly enjoyed his career at New England Biolabs, where he became a Senior Research Scientist and served as the Executive Director of Research for a number of years. In these roles, he was able to take risks in his research which gave him both a lot of freedom as well as a daily sense of excitement.
Recently, Bill expressed an interest in giving back to the Department of Chemistry to help graduate students as they begin careers in uncertain times. And so, in an effort to give students something that would last throughout their careers, the department decided to use funds donated by Bill to create a graduate award for the best dissertation in biological chemistry. For the next 30 years, a student will be awarded the William E. Jack Life Science Graduate Research Award, which comes with a cash prize as well as lifelong recognition for such an achievement.
The first recipient of the William E. Jack Life Science Graduate Research Award is Dr. Megan Browning, who was part of Cindy Burrows’s group. Megan studied DNA G-quadruplexes and RNA modifications using a protein nanopore in collaboration with Henry White’s lab.
This entails using a protein nanopore as a tiny hole between two chambers, and a voltage between the two chambers drives ions through the pore. Some of these ions are small buffer ions that flow through easily. However, larger ions like DNA and RNA get stuck and block the smaller buffer ions from going through, causing a decrease in electrical current through the pore that is detected. This provides information about the DNA and RNA such as their shape or chemical modifications.
Megan is absolutely fascinated with the study of DNA and RNA, especially in roles beyond the simple A,T,G, and C information storage. She was encouraged by a peer, Yun Ding, to join the Burrows lab, as she saw it as a perfect fit for Megan, who was starting graduate school with a two-year-old. Megan began a postdoctoral fellowship in medicinal chemistry at the University of Utah, working with Amy Barrios in the College of Pharmacy, studying phosphatases. “I love the U so much I wasn’t ready to leave. I’d love to end up someday at the NIAID studying viruses,” says Megan. She feels that receiving this award will help her help others to make a significant impact in people’s everyday lives.