SCC Graduate Morteza Fatemi Receives Alumni Award From NCCA

Morteza Fatemi is the recipient of the 2017 Nebraska Community College Association’s Distinguished Alumni Award from Southeast Community College. Each of the five Nebraska community colleges who are members of the NCCA selects one graduate who is worthy of the award.

Originally from Iran, Fatemi came to the United States in the late 1970’s. He enrolled in Southeast Community College because of its affordable price tag and small class size. Fatemi graduated from SCC’s Environmental Laboratory Technology program in 1985. He is a senior qualification engineer for Novartis Consumer Health/GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare in Lincoln.

Following his graduation from SCC, Fatemi worked as a lab assistant at SmithKline Beecham Animal Health and worked his way up to a research associate. He worked there for 13 years and then worked at Pfizer Global Manufacturing for 10 years as a quality assurance specialist. In 2009 he commuted to Elkhorn, where he worked as a quality assurance specialist at Merck Animal Health. Two years later he returned to Lincoln to work at Novartis Consumer Health as a QAS, and now as a senior qualification engineer.

Fatemi says he is able to use his experiences at SCC every day in his job. “I love the science field; I learn every day,” he said. “I can always go there and relate to what I learned at SCC.”