Dana Ferraris PhD ’99, MBA (Carey) ’09, has played many roles in the world of chemistry—researcher, educator, and purveyor of methylxanthines—specifically, the caffeine variety. Ferraris and his wife, Lana, run Kismet Cafe in Eldersburg, Maryland, where their customers are often the undergrads to whom he teaches organic and medicinal chemistry as a professor at McDaniel College in Westminster.

Previously a principal scientist in medicinal chemistry at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Ferraris worked in drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry for many years. In 2020, an anti-cancer drug that he’d worked on over a decade earlier, cedazuridine, was approved for use by the FDA. The drug has been shown to enhance the effectiveness of chemotherapy agents in treating certain forms of pre-leukemia.

Is there a common thread that took you from research to teaching and café ownership?

At Hopkins I taught a drug discovery course and mentored undergraduates. I really enjoyed that part of my job. I knew how to set up a lab, which is not a skillset everybody has; how to manage people and get them on the same page; to get a project to completion. Teaching came a little naturally to me because of that; I always thought of that as a second career path.

What was it like finding out that your drug was approved?

You can work your entire career and never contribute to a single medication, so the fact that it made it through all the hurdles and is now treating patients is something to be proud of. A lot of medicinal chemists can go through life without discovering a single drug, and we were a small group, with a small budget.

Do your chemistry skills play any role in the cafe?

It’s the other way around. I used to run a coffee lab where we were extracting caffeine from coffee, and then I did a food distillation lab with a local distillery. We take a mixture of ethanol and the students purify it and whoever gets the highest purity sample gets a café gift card.

I also bring food to my class. What kind of professor would I be if I owned a cafe and didn’t bring food to my class? My office is Grand Central Station—there’s always food on the desk.