What are your primary job responsibilities?

Upstream process development. I engineer both the genetics and growth conditions for microbes to produce various enzymes.

What is a typical work day-in-your-life like?

Bench work 5-6 hours a day with the rest being data interpretation and reading. Lots of PCR, cloning, SDS-PAGE, and growing various fungi and bacteria.

How did you find your first job?

Applied online. I was very lucky that my graduate school worked aligned closely with the activities of a company. I was willing to relocate.

What level of education (Bachelor's, Masters, PhD, etc.) is required to do your job? 

Masters to get a job. PhD to advance in career.

What is your work schedule like? Do you ever work weekends or nights?

Pretty standard 5 day work weeks. I’m lucky enough to like what I do and spend time reading and thinking about my research outside of work hours though.

Do you travel for work? If so, in what capacity, and how often?

In some roles I’ll visit customers across the US to give presentations every couple of months. Currently I travel for conferences 1-2 times a year.

What is your work environment like? Do you work mostly with a team or mostly independently? Do you stand, sit, or move most of the day?

Stand most of the day. I work as part of a team and specialize in one aspect of what we do. Some around me however work independently and do everything for themselves from start to finish.

What do you like most about your job?

Process. I really enjoy standardizing processes and procedures so we can scale our solutions. If for every project we come across similar issues, we can standardize how we respond to it to figure out quicker and more efficient ways to solve it.

I enjoy treating science more like an engineering discipline. Science is repeatable and quantifiable. Sometimes in biology, researchers forget that biology can operate repeatably and reliably.

What are some tools or skills that you can't live without? These can be technologies, soft skills, hardware, or anything else you can think of.

Python - being able to code a little bit helps a lot.
Automation - liquid handling robots for instance are a big booster of efficiency.
Be friendly and professional - we spend a lot of our lives at work. There’s no reason to let it be miserable or not enjoy it. 

What's your best productivity trick?

Timing. Figure out how long things take in terms of hands on time and hands off time. While something is running, use it as a chance to set something else up.

Do you have any habits that are essential to your professional success that you wish you started earlier?

Every week I start a list of things I’m working on and how it relates to what I’ve been doing. I then plot out what I’ll try to achieve each day that week and make a checklist.

What's the best career advice you've ever received? What career advice would you give to someone starting out in your field?

You’re not going to do the same job for 40 years in science/research. Those days are long gone. It’s ok to do a job for five years and feel like you need a change and to move on. In biotech, you are lucky if that job even lasts 5 years.

How do you build community in your career field? Are you part of any professional organizations?

Conferences and work history. The hardest part is getting your first job. People will remember how kind you are and what you are able to contribute. Unfortunately in biotech, companies fold quite often. While that is awful, when all of your coworkers get jobs at new companies, your network just dramatically expanded.

Do you have a favorite memory from your time at the University of Minnesota?

Prof Distefano’s chemical biology course and Prof Jiali Gao’s enzyme course.