Alum spotlight: Soumyajit Chowdhuri

When Soumyajit Chowdhuri ('20) enrolled in the chemical engineering master's degree program at Carnegie Mellon, he was purely an experimentalist. He first developed a knack for playing around with chemicals and machines in the lab when he was in high school. He kept up with his scientific pursuits through multiple research projects while majoring in chemical engineering at SRM Institute of Science and Technology in Chennai, India.

However, once he arrived at Carnegie Mellon, he faced a steep learning curve when it came to computation. On the first day of the course Chemical and Reactive Systems, Zachary Ulissi asked students to "open their notebooks." Soumyajit remembers taking out a physical notebook and wondering why his classmates were opening their laptops. That was the moment he first learned about Jupyter Notebook, a web-based interactive coding environment.

Luckily, Ulissi and another of Soumyajit's professors, John Kitchin, were very supportive in getting him up to speed on coding. "They not only helped me learn how to tackle engineering problems in a new manner, but also motivated me and pushed me to do better," Soumyajit recalls. Whether it be from the batchmates who picked up dinner together after working for hours in the graduate student lounge, or the Ph.D. students who served as his mentors in the research group of former professor Lynn Walker, Soumyajit learned the importance of being surrounded by supportive people.

During his master's program, he went from not knowing how to code to earning third place with his teammates in Carnegie Mellon's 2020 VentureWell Virtual Energy Hackathon. It was one of his proudest achievements at CMU.

Now, as a process development engineer at Sanofi, Soumyajit is glad to have "reached the center point" and built expertise in both experimentation and modeling. "People in the company know me as a multitasker," he says.

His dedication has taken him a long way. He began working in drug product development at TranslateBio, a relatively small biotech company with a "cohesive, collaborative environment," where he was able to build expertise and collaborate with fellow CMU chemical engineering alums Rebecca Goldman (Ph.D. '18) and Paul Haberman (B.S. '12). After Sanofi acquired TranslateBio, Soumyajit found himself with new international colleagues—a result of Sanofi being headquartered in France—and working in a much faster-paced environment.

"It was super challenging, but I knew from my time at Carnegie Mellon that people are there to help you out and keep you motivated," Soumyajit says. He learned to think on his feet and stay ahead of the curve.

After just a few years, Soumyajit now heads a team at Sanofi's mRNA Center of Excellence, working primarily on phase one clinical development and platform development and improvements. He strives to take what he's learned from his professors to heart in his leadership.

"They taught me very clearly that problems have a solution, you just need to be able to think critically in a quick turnaround time," Soumyajit says. "They taught me important ideas that I'm implementing as a people manager now—that it's okay to fail, that it's okay to ask a thousand questions, because at the end of the day, that's how science is done."

But even though he's now a manager, he always tells his team to leave some bench work for him; he doesn't want to step away from the lab entirely. When it comes to mRNA and LNPs, "there is always something new being discovered," he says.