Four Ramapo College alumni who currently work for Pfizer Inc. at its Pearl River, N.Y., facility experienced first-hand the excitement of the company’s announcement last fall that its mRNA vaccine was 95% effective in preventing COVID-19 infections. The emergency use approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was a major milestone in the campaign to combat the virus that had already affected millions of people worldwide.

These four graduates not only have Pfizer and Ramapo in common, they also studied under Professor Paramjeet Bagga, a co-founder of the Bioinformatics program in 2002 at the New Jersey public liberal arts school. The indirect role that Ramapo’s undergrad Bioinformatics program played is a fascinating story as the Mahwah-based university was the first undergraduate college in the state to offer a Bachelor of Science degree program in bioinformatics, and these four graduates who studied with or performed research with Bagga in some way were directly involved in the development of Pfizer’s vaccine.
Amanda Gryzmolowicz ’10 (B.S. Biology, minor in Chemistry), Jake Stass ’10 (B.S. Biology), Mingzhao Liu ’16 (B.S. Bioinformatics, B.S. Computer science) and Patrick DeMarinis ’19 (B.S. Bioinformatics) each contributed in their own way to Pfizer’s success, culminating with the FDA announcement in early December.

In speaking of his former students and their work on such a historical vaccine development, Bagga’s sense of pride shines through. “I must have placed more than a dozen students in Pfizer. You are learning only about four of them. There were a lot more over there. It’s been joked to me that Pfizer needs a separate building for all the Ramapo College students over there.”

Ramapo’s Bioinformatics and Biology programs are part of its School of Theoretical and Applied Science which is also home to such programs as Data Science, Nursing, Biochemistry, Clinical Laboratory Science and Applied Health Technologies.

Bagga teaches senior level Biology, Cell & Molecular Biology along with the Bioinformatics course.

“These courses are known to be extremely challenging but these students worked very hard and accepted the challenges with smiles,” he said. Bagga said his four former students displayed exceptional organizational skills, a professional approach to problem-solving and excellent communication skills.

The National Institutes of Health defines bioinformatics as “research, development, or application of computational tools and approaches for expanding the use of biological, medical, behavioral or health data, including those to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyze, or visualize such data.” Bagga explained that by integrating multiple disciplines, the science of bioinformatics offers powerful research tools that would be difficult for individual disciplines to provide on their own.

He also said the program works so well at Ramapo because the school does not have specific departments, but allows groups to work together and alongside each other.

“This is a highly interdisciplinary field where the biologists, molecular biologists, chemists, biochemists, mathematicians, and computers scientists all join hands together,” he said. “And it is not just students taking courses in their different fields. Students in our program learn how to integrate these fields into one and then apply what they learned to solve problems. Problems which none of these fields can solve by themselves. So it’s the integration of their combined knowledge that makes them more powerful.”

DeMarinis, a Wayne native, in a recent article on Ramapo’s website about the former students’ success said he knew the Bioinformatics program was for him. “It was exactly the type of thing I was interested in,” DeMarinis said, noting that the unique combination of biology, medicine and technology was what he sought in a major.

He began his career at Pfizer as a validation engineer on the Research Informatics team shortly after graduation. “Things were busy, to say the least. Everyone knew the importance our work could have and was totally committed to it. There was a lot to get done, but I was really thrilled to see how people helped each other and came together to make it all happen.”

He credits his experience at Ramapo for his current career success. “When I went to Ramapo, I took my interest in the sciences and learned about applications that I had never previously known about. A lot of hard work went into this [vaccine] project. It was amazing to see all of that effort pay off. I was excited, proud and relieved.”

Liu, a Park Ridge resident, decided to study Bioinformatics because it “touched on almost every science discipline.” He also wanted to focus on Computer Science, earning a Bachelor of Science in both disciplines and joined Pfizer as a senior informatics engineer in 2017, responsible for developing and testing new systems for data tracking, maintaining existing systems and assisting with support tasks.

“I was directly responsible for building and supporting the application for one of our COVID-19 assays,” Liu said. “The work could be best described as being constantly on alert since everything relating to COVID-19 had to be handled carefully and quickly. We were constantly picking up one task and dropping it to work on COVID-19 related work. It naturally took precedence over all other projects.”

The importance of modern interdisciplinary bioinformatics science cannot be overstated. As a result, there has been a great demand for undergraduate- and graduate-level trained bioinformaticists in the industry as well in the academia.

While students in Ramapo’s bioinformatics program are prepared for employment in the industry and academia, most pursue graduate education, careers in medicine and related disciplines.

Bagga said that he is good at convincing his students to continue with their education and not to stop after they achieve their bachelor’s degree as many have gone on and now have their PhDs. The majority of the Ramapo-trained bioinformaticists have been accepted into elite doctoral programs such as the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, Albert Einstein College, Columbia University, and Yale University.

On a final note, Bagga highlighted the importance of such interdisciplinary programs to high school graduates uncertain of their college path. He said he hopes many see that Ramapo’s program offers students a chance to work on a blockbuster invention or an innovative cure as is evident not only the Pfizer alumni but the countless other graduates that have gone on to great careers. Bagga hopes that the added press and success of the Pfizer vaccine and the work his former students did on it will have an effect on those just beginning college and inspire the next generation of students.