Alumni Spotlight
Southern Virginia University Alumna Chrissy Egbert Is on the Front Line of the Fight Against Cancer
When Chrissy Egbert (’15) walked across the Southern Virginia University stage a decade ago, she had no idea she would one day be helping build the next generation of cancer treatments. As a senior scientist in TechBio Discovery Biology at Recursion — a Salt Lake City-based pharmaceutical company — that is her reality today.
Recursion sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and experimental biology, using technology to accelerate drug discovery in ways traditional methods simply cannot. Egbert’s role places her at the front lines of that mission. Working within the company’s preclinical oncology pipeline, she helps evaluate and advance promising cancer treatments before they ever reach human trials.
“My job is to use technology to discover new ways to treat cancer,” she said.
The path from SVU to that lab bench was not a straight one. After graduating in 2015, Egbert spent two years teaching high school science and math — work she valued, but that ultimately deepened her hunger to understand the science itself. She found herself wanting to dive deeper into the “why” behind the science, and that curiosity eventually led her to pursue a Ph.D. at BYU.
During her five years in graduate school, she immersed herself in the molecular drivers of cancer, specifically investigating how certain proteins fuel tumor growth. A partnership with a local pharmaceutical company to develop a drug targeting a specific cancer-driving protein produced two peer-reviewed publications and her Ph.D. in 2022 — but more importantly, it produced a shift in direction. She had gone to graduate school aiming for a professorship. She left it with a passion for drug discovery.
“I was motivated to find a culture filled with colleagues who share my intense drive for problem-solving and a desire to better the world,” she said. At Recursion, she found exactly that.
That transition from academia to industry was not without its adjustments. Moving from a university setting to the fast-paced world of TechBio required Egbert to adapt quickly, but she found something unexpected waiting for her at Recursion — a culture built around the same intense drive for problem-solving that had defined her academic career.
Southern Virginia University is where that journey began in earnest. Professors like Dr. Schramm, now retired, and Dr. Van Kuiken pushed Egbert to ask deeper questions and gave her her first exposure to biochemistry. But it was the broader liberal arts environment that she says shaped the way she approaches everything. “My liberal arts education taught me that learning shouldn’t be confined to a single major, a specific career path, or even a singular perspective,” she reflected. That mindset, she adds, has enriched her personal life as much as her professional one — instilling a deep-seated curiosity that extends far beyond the laboratory.
Outside the lab, Egbert also serves on the SVU Alumni Executive Committee, motivated by a desire to pay forward the support and mentorship that shaped her own journey, whether they are heading to graduate school or entering the workforce. Having navigated the path from undergraduate student to Ph.D. and a professional career largely on her own, she feels passionate about bridging that gap for others.
For Egbert, the bond with Southern Virginia University has never faded. She still thinks about the friends she made, the mentors who changed her trajectory, and a small town her heart still yearns for. To her, SVU is less a single moment in time and more a continuous, growing force — one that has followed her from the Shenandoah Valley to the halls of graduate school to the cutting edge of cancer research. “That ‘SVU feeling’ hasn’t stayed in the past,” she said. “It follows us wherever we go.”