Alessandra Ferzoco began identifying as a scientist when she started in a program in high school that allowed her to join a molecular biology research lab at nearby University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). From there, she embarked on a “career built around labs.”

Ferzoco chose to attend UCSB as an undergraduate to continue her work in the molecular biology lab, and being accepted into the College of Creative Studies allowed her to fast-track her studies. The College allowed students to design their own majors, bypass some of the prerequisites to get to more advanced content more quickly, and work on their own independent research.

“I switched into a physical chemistry lab, which was a completely foreign environment—everything was stainless steel,” says Ferzoco. “The lab was using devices to try to understand the fundamental physics of why biological molecules adopt the shapes they do.”

Ferzoco became particularly interested in the different shapes DNA helices can fold into, which could lead to better understanding of what they can do in the body. During this time, she became interested in the devices facilitating her work.

“Everything I was studying was in a vacuum and uninterrupted by their usual contexts,” says Ferzoco. “I liked the scale of the problem—I was examining only the physics of DNA folding.”

After earning her B.S. in Chemistry from UCSB, Ferzoco considered applying to medical school, but she changed her mind too late to apply to other graduate programs. She took the opportunity and moved to East Coast, where she worked as a research assistant in a lab in the physical chemistry department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

After a year, she joined the Ph.D. in Chemistry program at Chapel Hill, spending the first several years working on building devices that would bring more detailed understandings about the fundamentals of chemical reactions.

After earning her Ph.D., Ferzoco was awarded a five-year Rowland Fellowship at Harvard, where she built devices to generate and trap ions and ion-molecule complexes and then measure their reactions using mass spectrometry and laser spectroscopy.

“Photosynthesis is useful but complicated, and humans can’t rebuild the millions of constituents that cells use to complete the process,” says Ferzoco. “However, smaller molecules also use sunlight, and no one understood how, so we sought to learn more about them and electron transfer mechanisms.”