Alumni Focus Dr. MariJean Eggen
It’s an honor to continue to provide stories about our prestigious Alumni who are making a difference in the field of chemistry and the world. This issue we are featuring Dr.MariJean Eggen, who received her B.S. in Chemistry from North Dakota State University in 1991 and her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1996. Post-Doctoral Research associate work was done at the University of Kansas Medicinal Chemistry Department from 1997-2000. She was one of Dr.David Berkowitz’s first graduate students and the first student working in the area of hydrolytically stable phosphate analogues. Her thesis title was “Synthesis of (β, β-difluoromethylene)phosphate analogs of phosphosugars and phospho-amino acids.”
“We worked very hard, but Dave (I get to call him that now) was always ready to answer questions and was a fantastic teacher. I remember on some days I would run a recitation, set up two reactions, run another recitation and set up two more reactions, work them up, do analysis and grade quizzes.”
Dr. Eggen remembers grad school as being a lot of hard work, but as a group they had a lot of fun as well. “Our class was relatively small and diverse, but we all got along. One summer weekend, many of us went camping at a reservoir in the Sandhills. The swimming and bon fires were great.”
“Often we would go out after cumulative exams and we also went out for wings or singing. I remember one time it was my birthday and others planned a surprise gathering for me. Another bit of fun was going to Husker home games! We would get a section of tickets and have a blast standing up through the entire game. I saw three national championship teams while I was there.”
Currently, Dr. Eggen is a medicinal chemist in the area of early lead generation drug discovery at Eli Lilly. In other words, she’s one of the early organic/medicinal chemists attempting to find a compound that is active primarily in a chosen cancer target. The effort is different for each target, and requires unique tools for each problem. As the project moves ahead, she works with a team of chemists to optimize the potency and other properties and figure out how to make new analogues of our starting active. Her chemistry team works with people from many different areas including biology, ADME and tox to identify opportunities with the best overall profile and attempt to optimize it all the way through to preclinical activities.
“My job is always evolving. If you like repetition, it's probably not the job for you.”
She definitely believes her time at graduate school prepared her very well. Thinking about problems in detail and how to solve them is a skill necessary for Dr. Eggen’s current job.
“What compound should I make to solve this issue? To make a drug candidate you have to think multidimensionally and often are optimizing properties and/or activities in parallel. All of that starts with drilling down through the data, forming a hypothesis, designing key compounds and then figuring out how to make them.”
“Another important feature of grad school was teaching lab and running recitations. At the time, it seemed like a pain, and sometimes is not as respected among the other graduate students as it should be. In reality, much of what I do day-to-day deals with interacting with colleagues from chemistry and from other areas. You have to have strong verbal and written skills to focus your team on the issues and drive the effort as quickly as possible. Often as scientists we are naturally comfortable working independently, but in drug discovery research it really requires a team.”
MariJean is married to Jon Eggen who works at the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. They live in Brownsburg, Indiana (suburb of Indianapolis) and have two children, Eirik and Annika.
