March 4, 2025
Sometimes, career moves happen purely by chance. Just ask Adam Chernick, PhD/MBA, an associate at IDT (a Danaher business), who was in the right place at the right time for a tremendous career opportunity.
In 2016, while working on his PhD, Adam was considering using an IDT product to selectively enrich a specific viral genome to improve the on-target sequencing rate. He was working with IDT’s applications support team to explore that solution and had a discussion with the local sales manager, who mentioned he was looking to hire an inside sales representative.
“I’d already been considering non-academic careers at that point, and the opportunity to move into a non-academic career while still getting to use my scientific knowledge every day was very compelling—and IDT sounded like the kind of place where I could do that,” explained Adam. “It was also an opportunity to learn more about the business side of science, where I really had no personal experience.”
Adam was hired for that role and two years later, IDT was acquired by Danaher. Every few years, he progressed to higher roles until landing in his current role as Senior Commercial Product Manager – CRISPR, in May 2023.
Today, he manages a team of Commercial Product Managers who oversee the launch and maintenance of IDT’s CRISPR and Functional Genomics products. He works closely with other teams to take mature technologies and get them ready for customers to purchase and use in their own experiments. He also collaborates with many other IDT functional teams—from manufacturing and R&D to legal and sales—on product updates such as new features, pricing and marketing materials.
With access to Danaher’s portfolio of best practices (known as the Danaher Business System or DBS), Adam finds his work especially fulfilling.
“DBS helps us tackle a whole range of business and technical challenges in reproducible and dependable ways,” he said. “Danaher has been using DBS successfully for decades, and the DBS toolbox has taken that success and enshrined it into something everyone here can use in their daily work.”
“It’s exciting to see my work contribute to something that scientists all around the world use every day,” he said. “Not every industry gets to say that they contribute to positive change in the world, but IDT products are integral for customers who are advancing medicine and our collective understanding of biology—that’s truly inspiring.”
“While customers are doing their work, we’re committed to learning about their challenges and developing tools to help overcome them,” he added. “This is a really satisfying way to apply my technical background to solving problems that’s a little different from running my own research program in an academic setting.”
Going forward, Adam isn’t sure what his career future looks like, but he knows it will be exciting.
“Most of the products I support are based on CRISPR, a technology that’s barely a decade old,” he said. “I doubt anyone can truly predict what the future holds in such an innovative and dynamic industry, but I’m excited to be part of it.”