Exploring Career Pathways: Cutting-edge technologies open careers in the life sciences

[Music] hi I'm kit poano I'm the DEA biological sciences at UC San Diego and one of the things I really love about my current job is that I'm really close to the research in the school of biological sciences and to the educational Mission and it's really rewarding to help all my trainees and students and faculty do the best science that they can do and then find the right career path degrees in life science es open up a wealth of career opportunities for students at all levels be they Bachelor MERS or PhD students there are careers in the Life Sciences industry ranging from bench science that you might think of to sales to technical work and finance and business management there are also ample careers in Health Sciences Beyond medical school and becoming a doctor there really is something for everyone in the Life Sciences industry and in careers out side of Industry that a biology degree prepares you for my name is David Gonzalez I'm an associate professor within the school of medicine and the department of pharmacology and also here in the skag School of Pharmacy and pharmacological Sciences I was the first not only in my family to Purser a higher education but the first to go and get a PhD when I was in junior high 8th grade I left I went to work with my father landscaping and then when I was 20 when I had my first child I called it an Awakening I really wanted to do something different I wanted to break away from being a laborer and I knew something in my head told me academics was the way to go so I went the next day and rolled into the local community colleges I was absolutely fortunate to run into good individuals good mentors taught me and were willing to help me that really pushed me into the stem field I always struggled with my cultural background identity there is a need for people like myself and in these types of positions and I was supported I had great mentorship I was given an opportunity and now I want to do the same thing to those and in particular with a focus on underrepresented minorities what really excites me about my job and what I do every day is twofold so the first is absolutely the science I love being a scientist and I love knowing that my work can impact those individuals that I love but also individuals across the world and the second is because I'm an alumni of UCSD I did my graduate research here and my postto and I was given my first chance by the university to be a professor so I really feel deeply appreciative of that and I every day I come to work I come with that sense of giving back to the university hello my name is mitsu marantes I'm the account manager at UC San Diego for Fisher Scientific I am a first generation college student I was diagnosed with dyslexia so I thought that I wouldn't do well in high school or get to college in high school I actually ended up graduating with honors and then I did graduate from Purdue University at my time at Purdue uh it was important for me to not go in with the idea that things were going to go as planned uh as everyone knows there's always bumps in the road and sometimes uh you might take a turn and decide you know what this is the right path for me I thought I was going to go to med school or become a researcher but when I did get that philos opy minor in the certification of Entrepreneurship I noticed that things don't always go as planned as a freshman you start off with all these goals and as a senior you might be on a completely different path I feel with some jobs you don't really get too much training they kind of throw you into the deep end I started my career in the sales development program with Fisher Scientific this was a three-month program where I got to learn a lot about the sales techniques and the equipment we'll be using once I actually got to UC San Diego I got to hit the ground running and start working with customers immediately I'm currently getting my Ms in global health and sustainable development at IU um I decided to continue my studies because Fisher Scientific offers a great program for us to go back to college it's also something I always wanted to focus on my name is Lisa Jones I'm a professor in the Department of Chemistry and biochemistry I run a research lab that is very focused on structural biology so we're interested in understanding proteins and their structure and how that structure changes when it leads to disease States because if you can understand what proteins look like in a certain disease State you can then develop drugs that'll help treat that disease and in particular my lab is focused on health disparities and trying to understand how protein structure might be different between different racial populations that leads to some racial populations having a higher incident of certain diseases rather than others my research impacts my community especially the black community in the United States is a group that is understudied in science and because of that we tend to have higher rates of different diseases part of that is that the black community is distrusting of science so part of what I do is to try to help bridge that Gap as a black scientist and go out into the community so people can see that there are black scientists and talk to them in a way that helps them Trust science more people in my community find out that I'm a professor or even when I was getting my PhD I would get a lot of support even as a young academic at my first position in Indiana most of the like custodial staff were black people and they would always stop at my office or my lab to talk to me and just say we're so happy you're here because I represented something to them that they had not seen on that campus before and so I feel like I've always gotten very good support from my community and that has helped me push forward during hard times I ended up doing my undergraduate work at Syracuse University and it was quite honestly my safety school I really wanted to go to Duke and I didn't get into Duke I still had a lot of great opportunities there I and I don't know what it would have been like at Duke so I appreciate where I ended up when I got in I was just thinking biology in my general chemistry class my freshman year two of the chemistry professors came in to talk to us to introduce this new biochemistry degree that they were putting together it would be a BS in Biochemistry and it just sounded so exciting and I attended the the session and then I was all in going towards biochemistry it's really important to open up all the careers in life sciences to all members of our society and so by incorporating more diverse viewpoints into our research and our research teams we can have more creative results and those results are more likely to serve a broader swath of our society this has really motivated me to make sure that everything we do is welcoming and inclusive so we can build a community in which all members can Thrive and where the results of our work can be broadly applied my name is Dr vasus I work at UC San Diego create which is an educational Research Center here at UC San Diego when we think about how my current role impacts our community primarily by bringing an attention to issues that sometimes can go unseen I get to be creative and come up with innovative ways to address different educational gaps I get to work with everything from kindergarteners postdocs and faculty members so more specifically inequities within specific communities or lack of representation in science I was the first in my family to graduate from college and go on to get a a post Balor degree uh it was my first in my family to be in stem we all come from very distinct backgrounds and I tell people I grew up in a very normal upbringing right we had dysfunction in our family I grew up in a neighborhood where most people went to jail and not Yale sometimes they chuckle right when I say that was normal that was normal to me right my normality was that I ended up being a a high school dropout for a couple of years for for a myriad of reasons and then it wasn't until later on in life after I had tried a lot of things that really didn't work out for me uh that I decided I want to go to school and the great thing about Community College is that they take the top 100% of applicants right Community College really then just kind of opened up the doors and made going to a university a possibility for me so that I can transfer over to the university where I got here at UC San Diego and then continued to move forward to my Master's Degree and then ultimately to my doctoral degree when we talk about academic paths they can be pretty challenging you know it could be pretty overwhelming you know there was a lot of confusion about you know what I wanted to do next and what was worthwhile and and I remember failing my first semester when I got to the university and questioning whether or not this is where I needed to be uh I even entertain thoughts of of just stopping really entertain the thought of of getting out of stem I've always been told just show up right just show up and you'll figure it out and that's what I did I showed up you know half the time I I I'll be honest I didn't know what was happening right and but I showed up and I figured things out stem education is a game changer it opens up many opportunities and it provides the ability to change so many other social factors like generational poverty generational opportunity upward Mobility uh and really does have the potential to challenge a lot of the issues that we're dealing with and some of these under resource communities I was born and raised in uh East Africa in Kenya and uh while growing up I saw a lot of people dying of uh infectious diseases I wanted to understand how microorganism causes diseases and that's what drive my motivation into science my name is George oroa I work for gillad science associate scientist my role is really important in uh most of the medicine in the industry because before medicine is pushing into the market for patient use I have to make sure that uh the process is uh okay to manufacture it and also the process it's safe for human consumption because I am a minority group and I have an accent one of the thing that I encounter is that people don't know what I know until I I started talking about it and demonstrating I am always not the first choice for people but what what encouraged me is like to push forwards and always trying to prove that I can be the same as all other student you're passionate about what you're doing reach out to you professors your teachers because during my low moments when I was working at night and going to school during the day most major people that encouraged me when I was about to give up was my professors the more I asked them the more they figure out that I was interested and the more they were willing to teach me and also like Mentor me to what I am today mentorship is key it's needed and many people will succeed and Thrive with key mentorship my name is Sonia Neil I'm an associate professor at UC San Diego in Department of Cell developmental biology I'm also an hhmi Freeman hoski scholar so I would say there was various challenges you know as a first gen identify as a black woman in stem the first challenge I faced was just you know being that first gen in undergrad so I was a first in everything I felt like I didn't belong taking classes with you know students I felt was more prepared than me was very intimidating since I was a chemistry major I was taking classes with you know predominantly male uh students and so I actually failed um got C's and D's in my physics and chemistry courses my first year so I had to learn very quickly how to be resourceful and identify like-minded peers to kind of gain that confidence and so once I gained that confidence I started you know really understanding how to navigate especially the academic Pathways in undergrad another challenge I faced was when I did go into grad school again I was the first person in my family to even go to grad school and then also I was a single parent traine when you go into an environment where you feel like you're the only one and then you're pregnant on top of that it just feels like you're so isolated and marginalized I again had to find my own community and resources to help me navigate um in grad school as a parent I didn't have the traditional working hours as a grad student I worked from 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. every day and you know the Silver Lining behind that again I was big on mentorship I had a team of mentees as a grad student that really I relied on a lot and this was early on I could see the mutual benefit of a mentor mentee relationship because my own mentees were helping me navigate through my extenda Circumstance the best part of this job is seeing a trainy that really starts you know day one where they don't know anything about science where they have no confidence in pipetting or working at the bench till their last day as the most confident person they can be uh where they're about to spread their wings and actually go out to higher scientific Pursuits and so seeing that growth in that trajectory really is what you know matters and I've actually developed a mentorship program called bump uh which is for undergraduate students and master students to really start mentoring students in a wider scale and what it really does is that it guides students that provide students with a team of mentors and this can be industry leaders faculty graduate students and postdocs where they can guide them in their career trajectory me personally I've had mentors from all backgrounds and the best mentors I've had were people that were completely opposite of me um and that was my postto mentor who from day one gave me a chance um he saw that I was struggling as a parent but he never second guessed me on who I was as a scientist you know these mentors they are lifelong relationships and this is something I don't take for granted I love every mentorship relationships I've built that's really helped me along my pathway [Music] my name is James NY I'm an associate Dean in the school of biological sciences but I'm really a professor in the department of ecology behavior and evolution I am very lucky cuz I get to do something that I truly love and that is to study bees what I do in my role with bees is to look at their communication to try to understand why bees have this amazing cognition this amazing learning and memory and ability to process information about their world how they communicate it to each other and why that's evolved I'm an immigrant so I came to the United States when I was around 6 years old we went to a a fairly normal high school the community that I was in was very very white in fact it was a large High School it had about 2,000 students but within that there were basically two students who were Asian at least in my graduating class of 2000 in many ways I felt that there wasn't necessarily overt discrimination although certainly there were microaggressions that was also important for me growing up the time where it was not easy to be gay and as a young gay teenager I really wanted to find Freedom to express myself and find my identity there are a lot of people who study social insects specifically ants and bees that are gay I'm not sure the reason maybe there is something in that sense of shared Community where there is relatively little Strife or conflict where everyone is kind of accepted and is part of a whole that's appealing I can say there probably is something about that to Drew me into social insects I think as a child I was always intrigued as many kids are with trying to figure out what is it like to be a cat or a dog or a squirrel or even a bird that you see in the playground what is going on inside their brains um do they have a mind are they communicating and in many cases they clearly are so what are they saying what are they communicating and how do we understand that secret language of the animals so I started by looking at Communication in bees which actually don't really use sound communication they mainly use vibrational communication the technology and equipment that I'm passionate about is basically equipment that allows you to measure vibrational communication I use lasers for that I use accelerometers and I also occasionally also use regular micro phones like the one you're listening uh to me through now I think it's really interesting that not only can we hear the way potentially an animal is sensing its world through vibration but in building some of these devices like the one right next to me uh we are able to actually generate vibrations and communicate with the bees to test our ideas about how does it really work one of the things that really characterizes society today is the rapid development of new technologies and these Technologies range from things like instruments that let you see the molecules of work within living cells to new computational algorithms that let you analyze diverse data sets and connect foundational discoveries in the lab to clinical data sets this is really revolutionizing all areas of our life really and has the potential even more so in the future my name is URI Manor I'm an assistant professor in the department of cell and developmental biology I am running a lab where we do research on a number of different fundamental cell biological processes that are implicated in health and disease including things like organel and mitochondria Dynamics neurod degeneration and hearing loss as a student I encountered two really big couple challenges the first one is my physical disability of hearing loss as it turns out I also have ADHD so you can imagine that it takes a lot of focus and concentration for me to understand what someone is saying now in undergrad all my classes for the most part were physics and math and physics and math classes actually work pretty well for someone like me because it's very visual then when I went to my PhD in biology it was a completely different book ball game biology is extremely verbal so you really have to understand what the professor is saying much more than you did with physics where you were looking at equations and that was a giant shift for me on top of that I didn't know any biology so these lectures were packed with jargon and terms and just words that I could barely understand and actually I almost flunked out of my PhD program because I couldn't pass to classes that was a big wakeup call for me and I had to beg my PhD program to allow me to retake the classes and I asked for a note taker someone who could write down the notes from the lectures that I could then read later because it's impossible for me to write notes and hear everything you're saying I have to put all of my focus on your voice to understand what you're saying they agreed they assigned me a notetaker I had these beautiful notes and I got Ace I think there's a lot of lessons from my journey but one of the key lessons is don't be afraid to ask for help and there's no shame in it people will help if you ask and there is support out there I'm also the faculty director of the Goodell family technology sandbox the Goodell family technology sandbox is one of a kind I cannot find another place in the world that has all of these Technologies and experts Under One Roof we have an enormous opportunity to do what should have always been done which is to integrate all of these different expertises and Technologies and approaches by bringing together experts who will interact more by bringing together different types of data from these different technologies that typically are processed by a completely different software importantly for the next generation of scientists by giving students access to all of these Technologies so easily they can now have exposure to and training in what is truly Cutting Edge technology and biology all in one place it is really critical that students have hands-on experience using Technologies so that they can get a feel for what it's like to use Advanced instrumentation in a teaching environment or in a facility such as the technology sandbox is that will give them the confidence moving into the future to move forward and use any multi-million dollar instrument so we like to build a foundation of using different Technologies so they can understand how it works and so they can think about how to apply it in diverse Arenas and so that they're ready to go on and use the next super fantastic instrument that comes out when I was an analytical chemist while working at Catalin while attending UC San Diego in my Junior and Senior year I was trained on a variety of Technologies used in the early formulation stages those tests really gave me a strong foundation for understanding pharmac Dynamics and phaco kinetics which are then used in the world of Pharmacy to understand how to administer a medication how to to make sure that medication is given safely with other medications it gave me that important biological background for these otherwise chemistry related interactions I knew growing up that I wanted to come to California for college that being said I am from uh Chicago Illinois and then from there I kind of researched you know top universities that are for research for chemistry biology applied to a couple different colleges got to visit and then I ultimately ended up picking the college that fit my personality and lifestyle best the struggle I faced the most was just navigating higher education as a first generation college student and also a huge portion of that is going to be the monetary aspect coming from very average middle class family in the Midwest and choosing to come to an out of-state School in California financing my degree was a huge struggle one of the most impactful things was finding my home at the black Resource Center while going to UCSD in my senior year I became a peer guidance leader where we're paired up with either first year transfers or first year college students our goal is to help them navigate higher education a lot of them are first generation students as well so the fact that that program exists and its a paid position was something that was incredible and I think very unique to the university [Music] so I've used a range of instruments so just to name a few I've used a range of advanced microscopy approaches to understand Dynamic behavior of certain biomolecules within the cell I also use Mass spectrometry approaches to understand how uh biomolecules interact with each other to really discern or unveil new Pathways within the cell I've also used Floy ometry to understand the chemical character istics of certain cell populations throughout my career I have used a lot of different instrumentation I trained uh in graduate school as uh an NMR spectroscopy I've also done a lot of fluorescence right now my main passion is mass spectrometry I find Mass spectrometry to be very fun because there's so many different applications you can use it for and it's so versatile and flexible in the life science or Healthcare industri Mass spectrometers are incredibly important because they help discover drugs they help figure out whether or not drugs are going to be poisonous or if drugs are going to be able to work I'm a technical sales specialist for mass spectrometry for thermofisher scientific I'm passionate about the work that I do because it gives me a very high level but also diverse way to see science it helps me kind of keep my skills broad too because I get to talk to a lot of different types of scientists I started out from a research perspective and I honestly saw my path as becoming a research scientist at a Pharma company or a startup company but there are a lot of ways you can be involved in this I'm a technical sales specialist and I still I think this is the least scientific job title that I've ever had but also the most science I do in my career because of the diversity of applications that mass spectrometry um is involved in so there are a lot of different ways to be a scientist getting exposure to Scientific equipment during my education really helped push my uh stem career forward my name is Brandon bills I am a product manager at thermofisher scientific my work impacts the world in a way that I couldn't really foresee when I was younger basically I get to travel around the world speaking with the top-of-the-line scientists doing cutting Ed research in fields like cancer treatment looking at depletion of our coral reefs all of them with new and interesting scientific challenges that have never been solved before I get to be the one on the front line saying okay how do we come up with a solution that will help the scientists of this generation and next address these problems so students should interact with industry while they're still in their studies because industry might have internships for those students so during the summer if you're looking for something to do some of these places do have internships some will be paid some may not be paid but it'll give you hands-on experience you could see if that's what you like and so you have an idea of this is what I want to do for my career or maybe if a different area is more appropriate for you it also gives you the company information about you maybe now you're done with your degree and looking for jobs but you already have contacts at that company because you have interacted with them earlier that could help you get a long-term job as [Music] well my name is Marissa tesman I'm a senior research scientist here at Al Genesis materials Al Genesis is a plant-based biodegradable polyurethane materials company we are trying to move scientific research forward in order to reduce petroleum pollution prevent microplastics basically try to make our planet healthier overall so I started Al Genesis as a master student working on making the world's first algae based surfboard that involved learning how to make polyurethanes which I did not know and I had to learn uh that involved learning how to grow algae which I did not know how to do beforehand but I learned uh that involved actually going to the factory that made the LG surf board which was my first experience going to a factory like that the moral of the story is it's okay to push outside your comfort zone your path forward may not be exactly where you thought of when you think about going from point A to point B that's okay when I was an undergrad when I was a high school student even I did not expect that would be working in a polyurethane materials company working to save the world from plastic pollution I am extremely happy that I landed in this space that I am right now networking is extremely important you can't do everything on your own you can't save the world by yourself it takes a community it takes people who share your mindset who have similar goals as yourself and you can only discover that Community by reaching out to people you don't have to have a specific linear Pathway to pursue a career everyone has a non-traditional route and there's plenty of resources mentors out there uh peers as well that can help you uh in your journey stem is can be difficult you're going to face a lot of failures experiments fail that's just what they do so you really want to find an area that you're really passionate about it really excites you so that even in Failure you learn from your failures and you move forward if you have any any any thought about entering stem do it science is just an absolute wonderful career you have an idea you can Implement that idea and at the same time every morning you wake up you're helping somebody right not only your immediate family you can find a new drug you can find a new way of treating a disease but all your efforts and all your time in this life is going to be set forth to help humanity and I think stem is a powerful way of doing that [Music]

2024-10-31 01:19

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