Alumni Spotlight on Drew Nowakowski, PhD

Drew Nowakowski, PhD, is a CRS alum. He was a postdoctoral fellow and conducted research with Dr. Thomas V. O'Halloran and Dr. Teresa K. Woodruff. He is currently the Lab Instructor at the Collin College Plano campus.

What is your connection to the CRS community and what is your current position? 

I linked up with CRS in January of 2014 when I started at Northwestern University and was an NRSA F32 postdoctoral fellow with CRS members Thomas V. O’Halloran as my PI and Teresa K. Woodruff as my Co-PI. I stayed with CRS and NU until May of 2019 when I moved to Texas. Currently, I am the Lab Instructor at the Collin College Plano campus and am excited to announce that I have been promoted to Professor of Chemistry at Collin College Plano campus starting in Fall 2025. 

Could you describe your current work?

As Lab Instructor, I am responsible for all prep work required for the Chemistry Labs taught at the Plano Campus (thankfully I also have an assistant). This includes setting up and taking down labs, preparing chemical solutions, managing inventory, etc. I also teach 6 sections of lab throughout the academic year. But here’s the most fun part. At Collin College, all of our Chemistry labs are designed in-house. So as Lab Instructor, I’m tasked with coming up with ways to improve or expand upon our current version of each lab. Since we offer 6 different lab courses, each with ~15 labs, there’s lots of potential for improvement.  

What aspect(s) of CRS did you find most valuable?

The one that comes to mind right off the bat is collaboration. I came to NU as a recent PhD graduate from UW-Milwaukee. While UWM is an R1 institution, I was blown away at the level of collaboration within CRS and NU, specifically between scientific disciplines. It really opened up my mind that, say, a biologist, a chemist, and an engineer each approach a problem from a unique scientific perspective. Each scientist asks a different but related question or proposes a different but related experiment. That is an extremely valuable approach when the goal is a better understanding of a scientific phenomenon.  

What has been the most valuable aspect to your training as a scientist?

The most valuable aspect of my training as a scientist is understanding that the scientific method is a method of improvement. In every experiment, either “successful” or “unsuccessful,” you learn something new. From there, you get to constantly tweak your conditions to improve upon your understanding of a topic. Incrementally, maybe, but ultimately, yes, the more experiments you do, the more you will know about what you are researching.  

What would you recommend to junior scientists in order for them succeed in their careers?​  

Accept failure. Fs are bad as an academic score but not the result of an experiment. Many of your hypotheses are going to be wrong or more correctly stated are unsupported. Edison had a famously paraphrased quote that, after many years of trying to invent the incandescent light bulb, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Failure in life is inevitable, but nowhere near final. Don’t give up.  

What do you think will be the next big contribution in your field?  

My PhD and postdoctoral work were all about zinc biology and how and when certain metalloproteins get their metal cofactors. Based on current copy number estimates of zinc proteins and quantitative metal analysis, there are not enough zinc ions in each cell for the number of zinc proteins present. I think the next big contribution will be to square this circle and figure out which proteins get their metal cofactors first and how. 

Do you have any notable stories from your time in CRS? 

Just by happenstance, it was ironic that all the research in the O’Halloran group on mouse eggs were done by males and all the research done on sperm were done by females.