Pfizer Scientist Switched from Medicine to Microbiology

Shelley Ann des Etages grew up intending to be come a doctor — and indeed today she is one. But she has a Ph.D. in microbiology and genetics rather than an M.D. degree. “I fell in love with research,” Shelley Ann says. Now, at 36, she is a Principal Scientist in the Target Equity unit at Pfizer Inc. in Groton, Conn.

Shelly Ann grew up in Marabella in Trinidad and Tobago, the island nation in the southern Carribean. Her mom was an elementary school teacher, her dad a safety supervisor at a chemical plant. She has a brother who’s now a physician, and three sisters, an attorney, an actuary, and an undergraduate at Drexel University.

It was a broken bone – her own – that first led her to science and medicine. “As a child I was always running around, knocking into things, falling,” Shelley Ann says. “When I was four, I broke my left arm  and we went to an orthopedist. He had a nurse who was the warmest, most wonderful person in the world. While I was recovering she would talk with me among the fruit trees behind the doctor’s office. I loved her and decided I too should become a nurse.”

Her mom thought that was a fine idea – but why not aim even higher, and become a doctor? That Christmas, when Shelley Ann opened her presents, one of them was a little toy doctor bag, with plastic instruments and candy pills.

From age 11 to 18 Shelley Ann was educated at St. Joseph’s Convent, a Catholic all-girls school in San Fernando. At age 13, as is the custom there, she had to choose a curriculum for the rest of her high school education – science, languages, business, or technical/vocational. She chose science and took courses in biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, including calculus.

For college Shelley Ann chose Pace University in New York City. She started out as a pre-med but soon found herself more and more interested in biological research for its own sake. She took a part-time job in the laboratory of Dr. Dudley Cox, a microbiologist. One of her projects was to analyze soil from the Staten Island landfill, looking for organisms that were good at degrading the cellulose in garbage.

By the time she was graduated from Pace in 1990, with a B.Sc. degree magna cum laude with cum laude in biological sciences, Shelley Ann had decided to pursue a career in scientific research rather than train as a physician. For the next seven years she studied microbiology and molecular genetics at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, N.J., getting her Ph.D. in 1997.

After getting her degree Shelley Ann did two years of post-doctoral research, focused on yeast genomics, under Dr. Michael Snyder in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. It was while she was at Yale that she met scientists from Pfizer who were using genomic approaches in the study of human disease, and she joined Pfizer in 2000.

At Pfizer, Shelley Ann studies gene expression using microarrays and RNAi technology. She's received three Pfizer Discovery Recognition Awards and in 2004 won the Pfizer Global Research and Development Achievement Award. She continues to publish and has been an invited speaker at numerous panels and seminars. She has been a visiting scientist on Connecticut’s BioBus.

At home in New London, Shelley Ann dabbles a bit in painting and photography, plays a little piano, and gets together with friends for movies and musical theater. She also likes to garden.

Shelley Ann is convinced she made the right career decision. “I’ve worked with RNA, DNA, and proteins, and used techniques such as electrophoresis, radioactive labeling, and so on,” Shelley Ann says. “In lab work, to get a meaningful result, you’ve got to plan out your experiment carefully and then implement a series of steps with careful attention to detail. When it’s all over, and the results are in, you look at the graph, and you can see the patterns or an answer to your question. It’s a wonderfully satisfying feeling.”