After serving in the United States Air Force, Jennifer Gresh earned her bachelor’s in geology at Temple University and a master’s at the University of Delaware. Gresh, a licensed professional geologist, has dedicated her career to supporting the environmental needs of private and public sector clients. Gresh has provided high-level consulting services to the cities of Philadelphia and Wilmington and numerous economicredevelopment agencies. These services have included property assessment, remediation, planning for brownfield redevelopment projects, and managing large multidisciplinary projects.

Before becoming Verdantas’ principal and senior consultant in environmental assessment and remediation, Gresh was Mid-Atlantic environmental practice leader as well as Philadelphia division director. Her recent projects included EPA brownfield-funded environmental assessment and cleanup of abandoned oil terminals along the Schuylkill River to support redevelopment for Bartram’s Trail and citywide assessments of Philadelphia’s parks and recreation properties for potential lead impact. She also led the Philadelphia Housing Authority’s assessment of more than 3,000 single-family homes for environmental clearance under US Housing and Urban Development regulations.

A recognized leader in the environmental consulting industry, Gresh was awarded the 2021 Touchstone Award by the Society of Women Environmental Professionals of Greater Philadelphia. Gresh earned Temple University’s Gallery of Success honor in 2023 and is a past president of CST’s Alumni Board.

Yumna Ejaz is graduating with a bachelor’s in biology with a minor is clinical and health psychology. Her research at Temple includes work in Parkson Lee-Gau Chong’s lab at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine. Her work focused on lipid-based nanoparticles, involving preparing liposomes and evaluating their stability, size fluctuations and interactions with bovine serum albumin. She presented her findings at CST’s research symposium in 2024, showcasing nanoparticle fabrication and characterization.

At CST, Ejaz has been a teaching assistant as well as a peer leader and then a peer leader captain, supporting first-year students as they transition to college. She presented on academic success, wellbeing and campus involvement and connected students to campus resources. Beyond Temple, Ejaz has worked as a patient observation assistant at Lehigh Valley Hospital where she provided emotional support and basic nursing care and documented patient well-being to medical staff.

In 2025, Ejaz attended the 44th First Year Experience Conference and explored innovative strategies to enhance CST’s first-year and transfer seminars with the goal of improving student engagement and retention. She presented key insights gained from the conference at CST’s Spring 2025 Research and Leadership Symposium.

After graduation, she plans on taking a gap year to travel and work to gain more experience in healthcare before applying to medical school.

James Guare earned his bachelor’s and master’s in chemistry at Temple University. He started at Merck & Co. in drug discovery in 1980, and over his 28 years with the company he did research on antidepressants, oxytocin inhibitors (premature labor), and siRNA, a short, double-stranded RNA molecule that regulates gene expression used in drug development and gene therapy.

Guare started working on protease inhibitors for the treatment of HIV in 1985, and by 1996 Merck released Crixivan (indinavir), the first effective treatment for the disease. In 1997, Guare and four of his colleagues received the National Inventor of the Year Award for the discovery, and the following year received the Award for Creative Invention from the American Chemical Society. In 2007 the group received the European Inventor of the Year Award. Guare continued to work on HIV, and in 1999 invented a proof-of-concept drug that demonstrated integrase inhibitors are a better target then are protease inhibitors or reverse transcriptase inhibitors. As a result, Merck released Isentris (raltegravir) in 2007, which has proven to be far superior to integrase inhibitors.

After retiring, Guare cofounded the College of Science and Technology Alumni Board, and under his leadership started the college’s successful Owl to Owl Mentoring Program, the Alumni Board Scholarship Fund and various other initiatives.

Jordan Howe is graduating with a Professional Science Master’s in bioinformatics, earned through the college’s +1 master’s program for undergraduate students. As an undergrad, Howe was part of the university’s Honors Program with a double-major in biochemistry and Spanish and a 3.7 GPA. Howe was also a student athlete on the Temple University Women’s Rowing team, a Fly in 4 Ambassador and an undergraduate teaching assistant.

Howe worked with Professor Spiridoula Matsika’s research group on “Benchmarking Computational Methods for Absorption of 4-Substituted Indole,” a computational chemistry project that involves using programs to calculate the theoretical values associated with the excited states of the indole molecule with substitutions conducted on the fourth position. This is performed with the ultimate goal of creating an improved indole-based fluorescent probe with a larger fluorescence duration and higher quantum yield. This work was recently published, with Howe as first author, in the Journal of Computational Chemistry in September 2024 under the title “Modeling the effect of substituents on the electronically excited states of indole derivatives.” She has also worked on a project with the College of Public Health that involved conducting literature reviews and data analysis from surveys to examine potential causes of increased tobacco usage among sexual minority populations.

With the Elrod Lab in the Aging and Cardiovascular Discovery Center at the Temple University Lewis Katz School of Medicine, Howe is conducting a computational protein docking pipeline to determine the interactome of the MICU proteins. After graduation, she will be continuing this work in the biomedical sciences PhD program at the Katz School of Medicine.