Research, Co-ops, and Student Leadership Lead to PhD Path
From extracurriculars to industry, academic, and clinical research, Dominic Pizzarella, E’25, chemical engineering, optimized opportunities at Northeastern. He is the recipient of the 2023-2024 Donald F. & Mildred Topp Othmer Scholarship Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
With so many career avenues for chemical engineering, Dominic Pizzarella, E’25, chemical engineering, was uncertain about his path as when he began his Northeastern journey. So, in the fall of his first year, he joined Northeastern’s American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) chapter with Teaching Professor Courtney Pfluger as the faculty advisor.
“I wanted to find my place at Northeastern and figure out my ultimate career goals. AIChE really helped shape my future at Northeastern and beyond,” says Pizzarella.
Dominic Pizzarella attended the 2024 AIChE Annual Student Conference in San Diego, California, to accept the 2023-2024 Donald F. & Mildred Topp Othmer Scholarship Award.
The guidance he gained from his first year at AIChE inspired him to share his transformative experience with other students. In his second year, he ran for K-12 outreach chair, which allowed him to organize AIChE opportunities to expand STEM accessibility in the greater Boston area. Teaching young students easy chemistry experiments revealed his love and passion for mentorship and eventually motivated him to pursue additional AIChE leadership roles.
Research at the start
Beginning research in his first year as part of the Undergraduate Leaders in Future Transformation (UPLIFT) program also helped set Pizzarella on his path.
“It was impactful in terms of feeling comfortable here and overcoming the struggle of imposter syndrome,” he says, “by being able to connect with peers transitioning to college and some first-gen students I felt more at home at Northeastern.”
Dominic Pizzarella presented his research poster from the Koppes Lab at Northeastern at the undergraduate student research poster competition at the 2024 AIChE National conference in San Diego, CA.
Pizzarella’s first research experience was working as a research assistant at Northeastern’s Neuromodulation and Neuromuscular Repair Lab led by Ryan Koppes, associate professor of chemical engineering. The exposure he gained through the lab’s cardiac research inspired a new passion for creating physiologically relevant engineering systems to accelerate drug development and increase the accessibility of life-saving therapies for patients. He proposed and led an independent project focused on cardiac tissue engineering, creating a 3D chip that acts as a heart and can be used to screen pharmaceuticals before they go to clinical testing. After three years, Pizzarella is still working on his project at the Neuromodulation and Neuromuscular Repair Lab.
Industry research was the next phase of Pizzarella’s academic journey. For his first co-op, he worked as a bioprocess engineer at Visterra Inc., a biologics company that designs antibodies to treat complex diseases. His role was to find ways to optimize mass drug production for clinical and commercial sales. He ended up leading a project with a few other researchers to develop an alternative cell line development (CLD) platform that reduces the high-throughput burden required for CLD. This platform would increase the efficiency of CLD, enabling the company to support more manufacturing projects.
But restrictions come with industry research, and Pizzarella felt they constricted his professional aspirations. His motivation to improve care for patients with hard-to-treat conditions compelled his application for a second co-op in a clinical setting at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Bing Center for Waldenström’s Macroglobulinemia. The impact of this co-op reached beyond professional development and fulfilled a personal motivation.
“My grandfather suffered from cancer, and witnessing the side effects of the medications he was taking was difficult. Working at Dana-Farber showed me there are a lot of people in the U.S. that have this experience, but people are working on better medications to improve patient care,” Pizzarella explains.
Towards the end of his fall 2024 co-op, Pizzarella led an independent project that he is still working on part-time. It’s focused on developing a dual inhibitor for B-cell malignancies—a drug that would simultaneously target two cancer-causing signaling pathways that originate from B-cell lymphocytes. Pizzarella characterizes and tests the dual inhibitor, and he thinks “it can make it” to clinical testing.
His many research experiences in industry, academic, and clinical research have helped Pizzarella narrow down the realm of research he wants to pursue and motivated him to apply for a PhD to work towards a career in academia. He was awarded the highly competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
AIChE service and leadership
The professional and academic success he attained over the course of his time at Northeastern bloomed from his first year at AIChE and his leadership roles since then. AIChE offered opportunities that inspired confidence in a medical chemical engineering career that Pizzarella did not have beforehand. Being a part of the club has connected him with alumni and industry mentors who have helped him discover the research he is interested in. “The exposure to different chemical engineering careers shaped my career and my future in medical engineering,” Pizzarella says.
Many students have the same overwhelming feeling and Pizzarella wanted to share the clarity he gained from the club. It was what motivated him to run for president during his third year. Students benefited from the many professional development opportunities Pizzarella integrated during his year as president. They learned about the various career opportunities a chemical engineering degree provides and can now leave Northeastern with the network to be able to pursue those ambitions.
Dominic Pizzarella won the 2023-2024 Donald F. & Mildred Topp Othmer Scholarship Award for his dedication to AIChE.
For all his contributions, Pizzarella received the 2023-2024 Donald F. & Mildred Topp Othmer Scholarship Award, which is presented by AIChE to 15 students annually for their outstanding academic achievement and involvement in student chapter activities. After a year as president, Pizzarella moved on to cultivate the professional and personal growth of students as the professional and alumni relations chair for AIChE where he collaborates with alumni and industry representatives for career fairs and presentations. There is value in giving a new generation of AIChE leaders the platform to share their own journeys and Pizzarella is eager to see what they have to offer.