Marilyn Rampersad Mackiewicz comes across as a naturally cheerful person, but when she talks about her students, she glows. “I love my students,” she says. “I wouldn’t be this successful without them.”
Mackiewicz is a new assistant professor in the chemistry department and was recruited earlier this year. Formerly at Portland State, her interdisciplinary research uses nanotechnology to solve problems related to human health and the environment.
As a non-tenure track professor at Portland State, Mackiewicz built up an internationally respected lab solely from external funding. With the only undergraduate-run lab on the campus, she developed multiple publications, patents and received numerous awards including the American Chemistry Society Stanley Israel Award for research excellence, the PSU Presidents Diversity Award and the Ronald McNair Mentor Award, four years running.
During 10 ten years at Portland State, she mentored over 36 students – nearly all of whom remained in her lab throughout their undergraduate degree and who have gone on to get higher professional degrees. But in addition to her love of teaching, Mackiewicz’ dedication to helping underrepresented students stems from personal reasons as well.
Teaching from experience
Born in Trinidad, she moved to the United States at 16 years old and was the first person in her family to graduate high school.
“Even though he could barely read and write, my dad always wanted us to have what he never had,” said Mackiewicz. It was that ideology that drove the family to leave Trinidad in 1992, selling nearly everything they owned for the chance to create a better future for their children. “My parents sacrificed everything for me, my sister and brother to get an education we could never have had in Trinidad,” she said.
As a 16-year-old transferring into a foreign high school in the Bronx, Mackiewicz recalls that she had initially been a very quiet student, who was insecure about her own capabilities. “My dad was the biggest advocate for my education, and I’m so grateful,” she said.
His support helped motivate her to apply to Hunter College, a constituent college of the City University of New York, for her undergrad where she double majored in chemistry and psychology. While she initially struggled in her chemistry classes, she found solace in the laboratory, where she conducted undergraduate research all four years of college. Her efforts were rewarded with a NIH Minority Access to Research Careers fellowship – part of a training program intended to support diversity in postgraduate education.
“If you have a lower GPA, but have experience to show in your personal statement, and good recommendation letters, you can get into schools you never thought you could get into.”
Without anyone in her family able to help her, she found that there were many life lessons other students seemed to know that she had to teach herself. Later on, as she began her own teaching practice, she would reflect on this experience to help provide mentorship for first-generation students like herself.
“I don’t remember anyone ever giving me advice on applying for grad school,” she says. “I was flying by the seat of my pants, and I had no one in my family to help me, or tell me what it was going to be like at all.”
To her great astonishment, Mackiewicz was accepted to Texas A&M University for a Ph.D. in bioinorganic and organometallic chemistry, despite her comparatively low GPA. She attributes this to her extensive undergraduate research and the positive faculty mentorship she received.
“If you have a lower GPA, but have experience to show in your personal statement, and good recommendation letters, you can get into schools you never thought you could get into,” says Mackiewicz.
Charting new waters
By attending college, and then graduate school, Mackiewicz helped create a pathway for her two younger siblings to attend higher education as well. “My decision to leave the Bronx and go to Texas A&M was so important, because it changed the direction of my life and my family’s life,” she says. “Sometimes you’ve got to be brave for your family, and make some tough choices, and leave home. I had to do that for my family.”
Mackiewicz did her Ph.D. research on developing biomimetic enzyme models with chemistry professor Marcetta Y. Darensbourg. Despite her enthusiasm for the work, her first year of graduate school got off to a rocky start. She recalls her Ph.D. mentor telling her after she had failed one of her classes, “I don’t think you belong here. You should start thinking about pursuing a psychology degree instead.”
As harsh as this advice was, it ultimately gave Mackiewicz the push she needed to work harder. She loved chemistry, but realized she needed a little help to fill gaps in her background. Soon, she began to excel.
“I went from one of the weakest students in my cohort of 75 students, to one of the most published,” she says. By the time she graduated in 2005, she had published 10 papers and received a number of awards and recognition, including the IUCCP Best Presenter Award in 2004, and an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award to conduct her graduate research, and also allowed her to travel to the University of Amsterdam to do key experiments for her studies.
"I’d seen myself as a scientist only – I hadn’t seen myself as a woman and a person of color who was doing things others were dreaming of.”
Graduate school was also where she met her husband. After they graduated, he got a job in Portland working for Intel, and she agreed to follow him to work for the company as well.
At that point, she still had never seriously considered becoming a professor. “I thought I would be a horrible academic because I didn’t want to teach,” she laughs.
She lasted about six months as a process engineer, before realizing that working in an industry wasn’t for her. “I realized I was getting too far away from chemistry.”
Bringing the world into contrast
In 2007, Mackiewicz was hired as a postdoc at Portland State with Scott Reed, a young assistant professor, studying nanomaterials chemistry. This research would prove to be the building blocks for her independent work, first as a non-tenure track professor at PSU, and now as an assistant professor at Oregon State.
Her current research uses gold nanoparticles to address knowledge gaps in ophthalmology, particularly in diagnostic tools for eye disorders like macular degeneration. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of vision loss in the world, currently affecting more than 10 million Americans. Caused by deterioration of the central portion of the retina, it is currently considered an incurable disease. There are two forms of the disease: dry form, which is comparatively benign, and wet form. Though only affecting 10% of people with AMD, wet form is responsible for 90% of all blindness among those patients.
“I have to understand the biology of the eye, and the cells inside of the eye, to design chemistry that complements the biology – as well as the chemistry to match the OCT instrumentation.”
Previous animal research showed stem cells could be transformed into retinal cells, and injected into the eye as a possible cure for blindness. As of now, the limiting factor for stem cell development for AMD is a lack of technology to visually track stem sell migration and survival in the eye to determine their long-term efficacy. In a collaboration with ophthalmology professor David Huang – co-inventor of optical coherence tomography (OCT) – Mackiewicz is working to develop nanoparticle-based probes to visually track cells in vivo with OCT.
OCT is a non-invasive imaging test that uses light waves to take detailed pictures of the retina. It is currently used in more than 30 million procedures every year to detect and assist in treating diseases including glaucoma and AMD. For the past four years, Mackiewicz and her lab have worked to develop nanoparticles – characterized by their nano size – that can bind to the cells and provide enough contrast for the imaging software to detect the movement of each individual cell over time.
“I have to understand the biology of the eye, and the cells inside of the eye, to design chemistry that complements the biology – as well as the chemistry to match the OCT instrumentation,” she says. In the future, she hopes her nanoparticles could be used to help provide regenerative treatments for other diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s and glaucoma -- that she is already developing nanotechnologies for.
Finding purpose through mentorship
Ultimately, Mackiewicz attributes the success of her research to the dedication of the students she mentored. “By helping my students become successful, I become successful,” she says.
While at first she’d been skeptical of teaching, she soon realized that through teaching and mentorship, she was able to help students like herself build better lives for themselves. “Everything I wished I knew as an undergrad I began to teach my students,” Mackiewicz said. “I wanted to teach them how to be resilient, and not give up. How to navigate difficult issues.”
“I always think of my students first because I remember what that’s like,” says Mackiewicz. “Working with underrepresented minorities helps me remember who I am.”
“I didn’t realize how much of an impact I was making until some students asked me to come give a talk. Not about science, but about my life and how I got to where I was,” she said. “This was the biggest turning point for me, because up till then I’d seen myself as a scientist only – I hadn’t seen myself as a woman and a person of color who was doing things others were dreaming of.”
Realizing the extent of the inequity still present in higher education, she developed a class that was targeted to women and underrepresented minorities in STEM, focusing on important life and asset-based skills like how to negotiate, build emotional intelligence, develop mentoring relationships, build networking relationships and how to effectively communicate and self-advocate. Later on, she also helped lead the NIH-funded programs Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) and Enhancing Cross-disciplinary Infrastructure Training at Oregon (EXITO), two enrichment programs to promote strong professional and scientific identities.
“I always think of my students first because I remember what that’s like,” says Mackiewicz. “Working with underrepresented minorities helps me remember who I am.”
This fall, Mackiewicz co-instructed a new course at OSU called Careers in Chemistry – but, she insists, it’s so much more than that. “I got a D in O-chem. I had a 3.25 GPA and I got into one of the top 10 universities in the country,” she says. “Being successful and your career pathway is about so much more than just your GPA – it’s about building relationships with people who can mentor you, overcoming your imposter syndrome, becoming your own advocate, becoming resilient, and building supportive communities. So that’s what we’re going to be teaching the students.”
