Hello everyone. :)
Welcome to my second chemistry page. I am glad that you still have energy to learn about my interest in chemistry.
Enjoy. :)
First Real Life Work as a Chemist
After completing my Diplomchemiker degree, I worked for a year at the Institute for Molecular Biotechnology in Jena in the research group of Prof. Hilgenfeld. While I worked there, his protein crystallography laboratory was just being set-up. I learned about protein crystallization and structure solving and refinement from his postdocs. Two good books about this topic are "Practical Protein Crystallography" by Duncan McRee and Peter David and "Principles of Protein X-ray Crystallography" by Jan Drenth. Mostly, I worked on thermolysin mutants. My work there resulted in one poster. During this time I also took a class called "structures and functions of protein" that Prof. Hilgenfeld was teaching in the biology department of the Friedrich-Schiller Universität. This class was pass/fail. In that year, I took the GRE and TOEFL tests and applied for graduate school in the United States.
My Study of Chemistry
Part II - Towards the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Chemistry (Ph.D. or Dr.)
The best offer I received from graduate schools in the United States was from the Chemistry Department of the University of Washington in Seattle. Since Seattle is located in a nice location, and since I wanted to perform graduate research in bioinorganic chemistry, I went to Seattle. I started my graduate study at the UW in September of 1996.
In my first quarter at the UW, I joined the research group of Prof. Kovacs to perform research in "bioinorganic modeling chemistry." I started working regularly in the lab in June of 1997 after I completed my first 3 quarters at the UW. My research consisted of synthesizing organic ligands, binding them to transition metal ions, in my case iron, cobalt, and zinc, and then investigating the spectroscopic and reactivity properties of the resulting metal complexes. Most of the metal complexes were designed to serve as spectroscopic, structural, and, hopefully also, reactivity models of the active site of the metalloenzyme nitrile hydratase (NHase). All of my coordination compounds contain the metal ion in a mixed nitrogen - sulfur coordination environment. In one case also an oxygen donor atom is present. Based upon some of my results, I wrote my thesis, which is entitled "Biomimetic Models of the Active Site of the Metalloenzyme Nitrile Hydratase." Here are its abstract and table of contents, you can also buy a copy of my thesis (ISBN: 0-493-24508-1). For a complete list of my results have a look at my publications list. Note that many of my results have not been published yet (December 2002).
After five years of hard work, I defended my thesis on the 16th of May of 2001 to obtain my "Doctor of Philosophy" (Ph.D. or Dr.) degree in chemistry. :) You can have a look at some pictures of me after defending my thesis on my "Pictures of Me - II" page.
My Postdoc Time
First Postdoc:
After the completion of my Ph.D., I joined the research group of Prof. Marzilli, who was then at Emory University in Atlanta, as a postdoctoral researcher. In my research there, among other things which I cannot mention for legal (patent) reasons, I mainly synthesized alkylated nucleosides and nucleotides. Other group members will then bind them to platinum-amine compounds and investigate the conformations of the resulting complexes by NMR. This research helps to understand how Pt-containing anticancer drugs influence the structure of DNA upon binding to it. Another project of mine involved the synthesis of novel amine-fluorophor conjugates.
Second Postdoc:
Since Prof. Marzilli decided to relocate to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA, I decided to look for a real, chemistry-related position. However, :( , I couldn't find any position. I applied to many, but I wasn't accepted at any. :( The unfair thing is that people who quit chemistry graduate school with a Master's degree have a very easy time finding a permanent, chemistry-related position. In contrast, it is very hard for someone who obtained a Ph.D. in chemistry, especially in a non-organic field, to find a permanent, chemistry-related job. The reason for this discrepancy is that Master level chemists are hired to perform work, while Ph.D. level chemists are hired to supervise and guide Master level chemists. Industry thinks that Ph.D. level chemists right out of graduate school are too inexperienced to perform this work. Also, about 80 % of the Ph.D. level chemist positions are for organic chemists, 15 % are for analytical chemists, and 5 % are for computational chemists. I should have known all of that before I started graduate school! I became aware of this situation while applying for real jobs, by talking to people, and by reading "Jobs in the Drug Industry - A Career Guide for Chemists" by Richard Friary. Because of this newly acquired knowledge, I decided to do a second postdoc in a 100 % synthetic organic laboratory with industry-relevant projects. Thus, I a worked as a synthetic, organic postdoc for Prof. Helquist at the University of Notre Dame.  My project involved the total synthesis of natural products and their subunits. Specifically, I completed the total synthesis of the complex marine natural product Iejimalide B. The iejimalides are interesting since they have anti-cancer activity.
Real Life
I am not currently looking for a position since I now work for a start-up company developing processes to convert renewable resources into value-added chemical intermediates. However, I am always interested in making more professional and personal contacts. Thus, please feel free to contact me: "dirk underscore schweitzer at yahoo dot com". :)
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