Alumni in Action
Shane McGrath '11
What is your current position and what do you find exciting about it?
I am the Associate Director of Engineering Services at Corium Innovations in Grand Rapids Michigan. Corium is a full-service contract development and manufacturing organization specializing in novel drug delivery technologies. I oversee the analytical metrology and the validation engineering functions. Because I have such a wide breadth of responsibilities every day is a new challenge. We're working on laboratory scale problems all the way up to facility scale problems and everything in between.
How did your GVSU Chemistry/Biochemistry degree help you prepare for your position?
At a technical level I utilize my knowledge from the instrumentation/analytical coursework pretty consistently when troubleshooting or diagnosing some sort of laboratory problem. More broadly speaking though, chemistry as a discipline teaches you to categorize, recognize patterns, and understand a wide range of physical and mathematical phenomena that can be translated into understanding a variety of subject matter. If you can understand chemistry and reaction mechanisms, manufacturing and engineering are analogous at a macro scale, everything we're doing is adding/removing functionality and balancing the energy required to make things happen. The critical thinking and ability to analyze data that you hone during your chemistry education are incredibly valuable traits in the workforce when you figure out how to translate that knowledge to new problems beyond your initial discipline!
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