Being a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire was truly a unique experience. Professor Zercher was a great mentor both in the lab and out. The entire faculty was incredibly knowledgeable in the field of chemistry but what was more important was their willingness and desire to teach the students and prepare them for the future. The faculty and staff felt like family which made the entire graduate school experience much more enjoyable. I have a lot of positive memories from my days at Parsons Hall and I will always remember the five years I spent there training to become a scientist.
After graduate school I joined the laboratory of Professor Gary Posner at Johns Hopkins University as a postdoctoral fellow learning medicinal chemistry while synthesizing antimalarials for animal studies. After two and a half years working under the guidance of Professor Posner I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Merck & Co., Inc. in West Point, Pennsylvania. My research at Merck was a collaborative effort between the Medicinal Chemistry and Imaging departments trying to develop radioactive diagnostic markers for PET imaging.
Since my academic and industrial postdoc’s, I have joined Johnson Matthey Pharmaceutical Services in Devens, MA and have been working there for two years as a process chemist. I started working on small-scale process and have since transitioned into working in the kilo labs where I am part of a team that produces kilograms of active pharmaceutical ingredients for clinical trials for a number of companies throughout the area.
Each job I have had since my time at the UNH has been quite different from the rest and I think that UNH prepared me to be able to quickly and efficiently shift from one job to the next. Not only did I learn a lot about the specific research I was doing in the Zercher group but I learned how to critically think as a scientist and learn new chemistry and techniques quickly. The faculty and staff at UNH played an integral role in this development and have helped me get to where I am today.
-Alex Jacobine
