Some of the images from the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic are indelible: doctors and nurses wearing garbage bags instead of gowns and reusing the same protective mask for days at a time; homemade plastic face shields replacing professional-grade models; live coverage of deliveries of personal protective equipment to hard-hit hospitals. The...

Inside one of the new labs at the University of New Hampshire’s Manchester campus on a recent afternoon, assistant professor of biotechnology Kristen Johnson and two students evaluated genes as part of pancreatic cancer research.

The process is known as quantitative polymerase chain reaction, or qPCR.

“We are looking at various aspects of...