What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?
I graduated from Bowdoin in the spring of 2016, and enrolled at Harvard for its PhD program in chemical biology. I was there for six years, and I just defended my thesis this May. A couple of days after I defended my thesis, I saw the job listing for a visiting assistant professor in Bowdoin's biology apartment. I had to apply, and now I'll be starting in the fall of 2022.
Why biochemistry?
Biochemistry is one of the disciplines that focuses on the smallest molecular level. We can zoom in and see what's happening at the tiny microscopic scale, and then zoom out and see what those those effects are for human health and disease, or for other really important things. When people come to college, they often have had some biology, or maybe they've had some chemistry, so we can then start to synthesize those two and talk about them together. Biochemisty sits at the intersection. You can take what you enjoy from both of these fields and apply them together. I also was drawn to being in a lab and doing the experiments—I love doing the work of mixing things together and seeing what happens! You can go so many directions with biochemistry—you can study study how plants grow or how pathogens cause disease. It's a discipline that touches on so much.