September 11, 2024
Royster Fellow Alita Miller, PhD student at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, discovered pharmaceutical sciences unexpectedly.
She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering from Purdue University with the original intent of attending medical school and having an engineering job as a backup plan.
However, during her sophomore year she joined a lab and ended up falling in love with research.
“I understood more that research is where you actually get to come up with ideas, test those ideas, and then hand them off to people like doctors,” she said. “Doctors have to use more established ideas, and I don’t like to be kept within boundaries—I felt more passion for a research field.”
Although she completed all the premed courses, she never applied to medical school. Instead, she pursued her master’s and prepared for doctoral programs. Keeping to her backup plan, she attended a career fair where she encountered Merck, a biopharmaceutical company. Miller was impressed with the recruiter’s passion for science and decided to apply for their open position as a formulation scientist.
She was offered the job, put a pause on her dreams of higher education, and moved to New Jersey for her next adventure. Her job at Merck was her first exposure to pharmaceutical sciences and she really enjoyed it.
“Once I realized that there were companies that’s sole purpose was to develop drugs, my mind was blown,” she said. Miller ended up working there for three years on multiple different programs, one of which received FDA approval.
“Those were probably the best three years of my life of just growing and learning and working with other scientists, many who had their PhD,” Miller said. “It just confirmed that building scientific expertise in something was what I wanted to pursue.”
After working in industry, Miller knew it was time to pursue her goal of completing her PhD, and the Division of Pharmacoengineering and Molecular Pharmaceutics at the School was the perfect fit. Today, she works in Professor Juliane Nguyen’s lab developing patient-friendly enhanced probiotics (engineered yeast) to target and treat inflammatory bowel diseases.
“I’ve always said that I’m more of a scientist in an engineering field—scientists are the ones that are making up the questions to ask and thinking of new ideas and engineers are the problem solvers.”
In 2023 Miller was offered the prestigious Royster Fellowship, which is a five- year interdisciplinary fellowship. The Royster Society of Fellows is a premier doctoral fellowship program at Carolina that recruits talented prospective students from around the world. Doctoral programs nominate a limited number of prospective students each year. Once selected, fellows become part of an exclusive community that extends beyond their time at the University, and they gain access to a wealth of benefits designed to enrich their academic journey and professional development.
Miller has enjoyed connecting with and learning from other Royster Fellows. The interdisciplinary community has helped her learn how to explain her research to those who don’t have a science background and challenges her to think about how she can engage the community with her research.
“The Royster Society of Fellows has been more impactful than I ever could have imagined with the campus-wide community and professional development opportunities,” she said.
Currently, she leads regular outreach events for local kids and youth alongside Professor Kristy Ainslie, PhD, to teach general science and perform making medicine experiments. Ultimately, they expose the students to what a career in science could look like and encourage them to pursue science in the future.
“I’m passionate about building a diverse workforce and this is a great way to reach others,” she said.
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