When Mike McRaven graduated from Macomb High School in 2002, the world was still rearranging itself in the aftermath of September 11. His brother was serving in the Marine Corps. His family had a long history of military service. He remembers the pull — the question a lot of young men were asking themselves that year about which path actually meant something.

"It's still one of those things that conflicts me to this day," he said.

He chose college. Purdue, to start — he'd been taking dual enrollment courses in Cisco networking and electrical engineering at Western and Spoon River College, and a computer science degree felt like the direction. But after a year in West Lafayette, out-of-state tuition economics won out, and he transferred to the University of Illinois Chicago.

That decision changed everything.

At UIC, a grandfather's connection to a university bookstore salesman got him his first job — counting pencils and doing inventory. It paid the bills. He kept looking. In his junior year, he found a posting for a lab assistant position. He didn't know what they did. He went anyway.

It was an HIV research lab.

"They were like: you're willing to wash dishes, work long hours, not get paid very much, and help anyone who needs help? Sure, we'll hire you," he recalled.

What started with washing glassware eventually led to two years at the UIC lab, then a move in 2006 to Northwestern University's Chicago campus — a position he'd hold for the next twenty years. The lab he worked in became one of the top-funded HIV research programs in the country, if not the world. He went from, as he put it, "a lowly dishwasher" to managing it.

Along the way, he built expertise in advanced microscopy, laboratory operations, human subjects compliance, and research administration. He helped establish research partnerships and build lab infrastructure in Thailand, Papua New Guinea, and Kenya — where his team spent nearly a decade training PhD students and acquiring a half-million-dollar microscope, only to watch USAID funding disappear overnight. "It's difficult and a lot of times heartbreaking," he said.

He also earned something few scientists think to pursue: a master's degree in law from Northwestern, completed around 2018, approximately 90 percent paid for by his employer. The degree positioned him to sit for the patent bar and changed the texture of his professional life in subtle but real ways. His email address gained a ".law" suffix. Conversations with government officials and the CDC shifted. "Avenues opened up," he said, "that weren't there before."

When COVID arrived in 2020, Mike's lab was among those tapped to pivot. HIV researchers, he explains, were precisely the people Operation Warp Speed needed — they understood viral biology, mutation mechanics, and the challenge of an adversary that reinvents itself. His team spent much of a year gathering samples from COVID-positive patients and testing antibodies in development. It was, he noted, exactly the kind of problem HIV researchers had been trained to think about: a virus that simply cannot stop making copies of itself, throwing mutations at the wall until something gets around whatever barrier you've put up.

"It's the worst game of whack-a-mole ever," he said. "You think you've covered everything and then all of a sudden it has a hole in the front, or the side, or the back."

He left Northwestern this spring, recently enough that the ink is still drying. He's exploring consulting — helping research organizations run more efficiently, drawing on everything he's learned about how labs actually function versus how scientists imagine they do.

The thread connecting all of it runs back to Macomb — specifically to biology teacher Dean Rockwell, who took a group of students to Costa Rica, let them loose in the rainforest for a week, and back home allowed Mike to build a device measuring bioelectrical impedance as an independent study project. "He opened doors," Mike said simply. The same instinct Rockwell encouraged — combine the things you love, go find out what's possible — never really stopped driving him.

Macomb gave him that instinct and something else: a work ethic he traces directly to summers detasseling corn and watching people’s kids for money at the community pool. People raised in cities, he observes, sometimes assume someone else will handle things. Growing up where he did, you learned the alternative quickly.

"You have to get it done," he said. "If you don't do it, it doesn't get done."

He and his wife, Mary, are raising four children in the Chicago suburbs — four kids in five years, 2017 to 2022. His parents are still in Macomb. He gets back when he can, and always with a little sadness now at Western's declining enrollment. But the gratitude runs deeper.

"Having Western in town kind of gave you access to the outside world that some small towns don't get," he said. "It lets you see the opportunities of where you could go."

He took them.