J. Michael Ramsey

Meet J. Michael Ramsey

Most important lesson Perseverance! Your best ideas will be the ones that are initially least accepted by your scientific peers.  If you believe in your ideas, and the fundamentals support them, then stay with it despite early negative feedback. I now view initial lack of positive support for new ideas to be motivational.

Encounters with serendipity I always say it’s better to be lucky than good. I am a great believer in the adage: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

Funniest/most unexpected moment I am amused by my career! I was uncertain about whether I wanted to go to college as I was mostly unmotivated during high school about anything other than science and math, and my grades strongly correlated with that notion. Nevertheless, I did go to college and even ended up going onto graduate school, which I found to be very exciting – learning all that there was to learn! Now, I have been a professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the last eleven years – a department with an analytical chemistry group that has been ranked as number one in the US for most of that period. I think that deciding to go to college was a good decision.

Eye on the horizon Smaller, faster, better, cheaper!

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