John Sears
Why did you choose Northwestern?
I chose Northwestern as I really wanted my focus in graduate school to feel more disease-based, especially as I had a deep interest in infectious disease and cancer. Northwestern's program offered the ability to join a research team that was disease-focused. As such, Driskill was located on the downtown campus, and I felt that in order to commit to graduate school for five or more years, I needed to feel like I was surrounded by more than school. Being in downtown Chicago was unbeatable in that regard.
How would you describe your research and/or work to a non-academic audience? What was it then and/or what it is now?
I studied how a certain virus, Epstein-Barr virus, finds a way to live inside ourselves undetected and causes cancer. Because my research was molecular-focused, I was exploring how a special protein the virus produces called EBNA-1 interacts with our DNA, allowing the virus to persist quietly in the cell and also trigger cellular machinery that causes the cell to replicate. I used a lot of microscopy to catalog these interactions. My research helped to advance our understanding of how the structure of viral proteins can find ways to interact with our cellular proteins and cause harm.
Tell us who or what inspired your research and/or work.
My older brother inspired my early interest in research. Sadly, when I was 11 he passed away at the age of 13 of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I was compelled from that point on to do anything I could in the field of oncology to cure cancer.
What are you most proud of in your career to date?
I am so proud of being able to overcome what seemed to be a project roadblock that was going to collapse my thesis project. I stared at the amino acid structure of the protein I was studying while digging up exploratory references to just read and think for three weeks. What otherwise looked like a waste of time from an activity perspective helped me achieve a tremendous breakthrough on how to interpret my results differently. I re-engineered a new hypothesis and my work sort of exploded from there.
Tell us about a current achievement or something you're working on that excites you.
Right now I work in global commercial development at a rare disease, plasma therapy-based company called CSL Behring. In our group, we get to work on drugs that are in clinical development and help shape the marketplace as well as the drug to ensure its commercial success. I am really excited about being stretched in my role to be working on some very critical work in global pricing strategy. I am excited about this as the initiative has a rippling impact on our company globally and financially and the level of responsibility it carries.
What advice would you give your younger self or someone considering a similar path?
The soft skills learned by earning a PhD transfer to an array of different careers outside your field of study -- deep analysis, critical thinking, effective verbal and written communication, extracting a lot from minimal information, etc. You will always have a successful career, so long as you think about your career beyond the finite, technical aspects.