On July 8, 2025, Prajakta Sonalker was profiled in Pitt Med magazine’s summer issue. The following is an excerpt:
Prajakta Sonalker didn’t know how to break it to her graduate advisor that her career plans were headed outside of research. She was studying molecular pharmacology at Pitt Med and loving it, but postdoc options were in short supply in the early 2000s, so she started to explore alternatives. That’s when she crossed paths with a pharmacology PhD who loved her job as a patent attorney. After their conversation, Sonalker (PhD ’06) borrowed a stack of books on patent law: “I read them cover to cover.” She realized, “This is what I want to do with my life.”
In Sonalker’s first week of law school, her father passed away suddenly. Deferring her admission, she says, wasn’t an option: Education was what her father valued most for his children. “I felt that if I did that, I’d be letting him down,” she recalls. She worked through her grief, juggling school and a full-time job at New York University’s technology transfer office. A good night’s sleep often meant one or two hours. But at the end of that year, she ranked second out of 171 students.
“If I can get through that, I can do anything,” she remembers thinking. “So, when I approach cases or difficult situations at work, they don’t scare me.”
Click here to access the article.