Exploring Careers in STEM 2023

Thursday, July, 20th 2023
10:00-11:45am
Research, but not industry

Image

Jaishree Garhyan, PhD is Director at High containment laboratory with School of Medicine, Stanford University. She received her PhD in Infectious Diseases from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, where she worked with Mtb and drug delivery in stem cells. For a part of her PhD, she was developing models for Mtb infection at the High containment laboratory at Ragon Institute of Harvard, MIT and MGH. She then completed her postdoctoral studies at the UMass, Amherst, and Patel Chest Institute, New Delhi. Later, she joined Stanford as a Director of High containment Laboratory where she operates the core and manages multiple projects. Jaishree has extensive experience of working at various Biosafety Level 3 labs including the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Harvard University CFAR BSL3 Core Facility, Cambridge, MA (Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA). She is a certified IFBA professional for BSL3 Biorisk Management, Biocontainment Facility Design, and Operation and Maintenance, and is an ABSA member. Among her numerous awards are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ASM Award and a Bio-epoch award. She served as a speaker and committee member in various biosafety invitation-only meetings, along with the Indo-US Biosafety and Biosecurity dialogues for two consecutive years. She also works as a consultant for Biosafety and Biosecurity projects.

Image

Kristine Faye Pobre-Piza, PhD is a Senior Bioinformatics Research Scientist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. She uses her computational and experimental skills in investigating disease mechanisms, especially pediatric diseases that involve lung injury and cancer. She received her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from UMass-Amherst where she utilized an integrated experimental and computational approach to explore how the protein homeostasis (proteostasis) network, consisting of molecular chaperones and degradation enzymes, modulates the folding fate of a protein. She went to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for her postdoctoral training where she studied the binding sites of co-chaperones on their substrate proteins and revealed molecular consequences of disease-causing mutations on protein folding and maturation.

Image

Amy Ryan, PhD is a Nonhuman Primate Biologist serving as a contractor staff scientist and human-monkey interactions specialist in the Laboratory of Neuropsychology at the National Institute of Mental Health. Prior to NIH, Amy earned a PhD in Neuroscience and Behavior at UMass Amherst, where she studied the effects of environmental predictability on stereotypies in rhesus monkeys and neurotypical humans. She then completed an Autism Research Postdoctoral Training Fellowship at UC Davis where she studied the effects of maternal immune activation on rhesus monkey offspring social development.

Image

Charles Swofford, PhD is an Assistant Director at the MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation (MIT-CBI). In 2014, he received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he focused on engineering microbes for targeted cancer drug delivery.  He later completed his postdoctoral studies at MIT, where he engineered single-domain antibodies for detection of illegal antibiotics in food supply chains.  In 2021, he joined MIT-CBI, where he supports collaborative sponsored research projects, including investigating long-read sequencing for adventitious agent detection and developing a continuous manufacturing testbed for virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine production coupled with advanced process analytical tools.

Thursday, July, 20th 2023
1:00-2:45pm
Industry, but not research

Image

Jessica Zimberlin Eastman, PhD is a Patent Attorney at Pfizer. She earned her Ph.D. from UMass Amherst in Polymer Science and Engineering, where she studied the mechanical properties of soft materials. Jessica then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Polymers Division where she focused her research on cell/material interactions. After her postdoc, Jessica worked as a patent agent at Cantor Colburn, where she helped a broad range of clients to protect and maintain their intellectual property, focusing her practice on polymer and material science companies and universities. Currently, Jessica works at Pfizer as a Patent Attorney, focusing her practice on biotechnology and pharmaceutical innovation.

Image

Jessica Caballero Feliciano, PhDis a neuroscientist working as a Market Researcher at Genentech. She first stepped into the biopharmaceutical industry by participating in a 2-year rotation program at Genentech where she worked in portfolio management, program management, project management, competitive intelligence, and market research. Through these experiences, she learned to translate scientific insights into meaningful business strategies. Jessica's expertise lies in the therapeutic areas of neuroscience, oncology, ophthalmology, and is now starting a new role in respiratory diseases. Through her work in these fields, she has gained a deep understanding of the scientific and clinical aspects of drug development, as well as the commercial and strategic considerations that are essential for bringing innovative therapies to patients

Image

Archit Rastogi, PhD is an Assistant Director of Preclinical Development at Ionis Pharmaceuticals with expertise in mechanistic and developmental toxicology. At Ionis, he drives comprehensive, integrated safety assessments of drug candidates. Prior to joining Ionis, Dr. Rastogi worked at Gradient Corporation, an environmental toxicology consulting firm based in Boston. In this role, he served as a subject matter expert on a variety of projects in the environmental, pharmaceutical, and medical device field. He earned his doctorate in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research focused on identifying the mechanisms by which endocrine-disrupting chemicals exert toxicity in the developing embryo. He has won over 15 awards from the Society of Toxicology, Society for Redox Biology and Medicine and the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences for his research. Dr. Rastogi was appointed to the Program Committee for the American College of Toxicology in 2021 and is the current Vice-President of the Mechanisms Specialty Section for the Society of Toxicology. He has authored several peer-reviewed research articles and presented his work to diverse scientific and non-scientific audiences, including US legislators. 

Image

Abla Tannous, PhD is a regulatory medical writer at BMS. She leads and manages the writing of different document types such as clinical study reports, summary documents, investigator brochures, and other documents. Before that, Abla had been performing research for over 13 years. Her research experience encompasses Molecular & Cellular Biology and Proteomics. She obtained her Master of Science from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and continued on as a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she studied protein maturation and quality control in the endoplasmic reticulum of mammalian cells in the lab of Dr. Daniel Hebert. After graduating with her PhD in 2015, she became a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University working in proteomics, then a scientist at BioAegis Therapeutics where she got introduced to regulatory medical writing. She left BioAegis to pursue a full-time medical writing career and has been a regulatory writer at BMS for over 2 years.

Image

Janel Titus, PhD is the Engagement Lead for Takeda’s Real-World Data Center of Excellence (RWD CoE). She is responsible for driving employee engagement, understanding, and excitement around the RWD CoE, and RWD-related assets and capabilities, leading training and informational events, and other cross-functional collaborations. Prior to Takeda, she spent 7 years curating content for a clinical decision website/app, she developed skills in critical appraisal, synthesis, and summarization of medical literature, managed content operations, processes, and the content management system, and helped develop the user interface. She holds a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology and a B.S. in Microbiology from UMass Amherst.