By Lauren Maynard

You don’t often meet someone with the name Peculiar, so we had to ask.

“It’s actually a funny story,” Peculiar Lawrence says, laughing. Born into the Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria, Lawrence, BS ’20, had a different skin tone than the rest of her siblings. Upon seeing the newborn, an aunt exclaimed, “How peculiar!”—and the name stuck.

Now a continuous improvement specialist at Pfizer, in Boston, Lawrence has followed a path full of twists and turns but with a constant underlying goal: to help people. In particular, patients.

Lawrence grew up in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in a multilingual family. Her mother is a human rights lawyer; her father sells biomedical equipment to universities. Both encouraged education and self-exploration—and she took that encouragement to heart.

As a child, she often joined her mother in court and briefly considered studying law. “I take after my mum in this regard, as I care deeply for people,” she says. At the same time, she excelled in science and math. But rather than narrow her interests and choose a path, Lawrence just kept adding to the list. As an undergraduate at East Tennessee State University, she found herself drawn to medicine, biology, engineering and computer science. She transferred to UB in part because there, in its robust biomedical engineering department, she could explore them all.

A Dean’s List student, Lawrence was driven to work hard from the start. “My dad sacrificed a lot to ensure we get the best quality of education, so I always tell myself that I cannot fail.” Initially considering a PhD, she loaded her schedule with every STEM course she could fit.

Which is not to say she spent her college years buried in books. On the contrary, Lawrence immersed herself in campus life, becoming a diversity advocate for the Intercultural and Diversity Center, singing in the Gospel Choir, joining the African Student Association and multiple engineering organizations, serving as an international student orientation leader, and working as a student supervisor in the UBIT Help Center.

An early riser and meticulous planner, she also managed to do hands-on research at UB. In the summer of her junior year, she worked on an intramural project to design a 3D-printed prototype of a prosthetic arm (part of a national volunteer group to help children in need) and then, for her senior engineering design project, she worked in the lab of biomedical engineer Yun Wu to develop a microscopic sensing device for lung cancer.

Post-graduation, Lawrence carried forward the same curiosity and patient-centered mindset that defined her college years.

Her first job was as an entry-level lab technician at MIT and Harvard’s prestigious Broad Institute, where she processed COVID-19 samples for PCR testing. She moved from there to Moderna, working in inventory management and then manufacturing to support the COVID vaccine team during the height of the pandemic.

When a supervisor offered her a research role in gene editing, she jumped at the chance to return to lab work. “It was a very small, new group and exciting for me,” she says. “I learned how to screen some guide RNAs, which tell the genome where to make corrections, for gene editing experiments.”

At Moderna, Lawrence also discovered Six Sigma—a business efficiency methodology designed to root out waste and improve performance—and was hooked. Here was a way to improve patient outcomes using all of her assets: her engineering background, her interest in medicine, and her knack for planning and data analysis.

When some troublesome equipment began plaguing the company, she leveraged her willingness to learn on the job, helping colleagues fix the issue while earning what’s known as a green belt in Six Sigma. Driven to learn more, she went back to school, earning a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Cornell while also obtaining her Lean Six Sigma black belt.

At Pfizer, Lawrence uses Six Sigma’s data-driven approach to optimize the company’s manufacturing and distribution processes. She says she enjoys crunching numbers, managing databases and working with teams across the company to move medical products and treatments from bench to bedside.

As for what comes next, Lawrence remains true to form: “Who knows what the next step will be?” she says. “I just have to stay open to the opportunities as they come.” Meanwhile, she’s found a way to bring all of her interests together in service of the goal that has guided her from the start.