S03-E02 Andrew and Miko work in biotechnology

Talking Technicians goes to a hackathon! In this special episode of Talking Technicians, we’ve collaborated with the 2022 Antibody Engineers Hackathon which is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education program (DUE 2055036). The episode was recorded as part of the Hackathon. You’ll hear from two biotechnology practitioners, Andrew and Miko. They explain their work and how they found and benefited from a community college technician education program .

The Talking Technicians podcast is produced by MNT-EC, the Micro Nano Technology Education Center, through financial support from the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education grant program.

Opinions expressed on this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Science Foundation.

Join the conversation. If you are a working technician or know someone who is, reach out to us at info@talkingtechnicians.org.

Links from the show:

The Micro Nano Technology Education Center (MNT-EC): https://micronanoeducation.org/

Digital World Biology: https://digitalworldbiology.com/

Episode Web Page: https://micronanoeducation.org/students-parents/talking-technicians-podcast/

Transcript

Peter Kazarinoff  0:02  
From MNT-EC, the Micro Nano Technology Education Center, this is Talking Technicians. The podcast about technicians: who they are, what they do, and where they come from. I'm your host, Peter Kazarinoff. I teach technicians and engineers that Portland Community College. In each episode, you'll meet a working technician and hear their story. That means real interviews, with real technicians, about real jobs. At the end of each episode, you'll hear actions you can take if you want to be a technician too. In this special episode of Talking Technicians, we've collaborated with the antibody engineers hackathon, which is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education program, DUE 2055036. The episode was recorded as part of the hackathon. You'll hear from two biotechnology practitioners. They explain their work and how they found and benefited from a community college technician education program. I hope you enjoy this special episode of Talking Technicians.

Sandra  1:23  
Andrew, how about you go first?

Andrew  1:26  
Alright. Thanks for the introduction and Sandra. So yeah, I'm Andrew. I attended the hackathon in January. I was on Dr. Brian's team, the braking and antibody team. So that was really my first exposure to antibody engineering. We were using ICM 3d to view the antibody antigen interaction and using that programs mutation functions to visualize which amino acid residues we could mutate to potentially break that antigen antibody interaction. So after that, I got really interested in antibody engineering. And I attended the Wistar Institute's biomedical technician training. Internship. It was a 12 week course that just finished last week. And yeah, so through that, I got to intern at two separate labs. The first one was company and turbomolecular. They use they do all sorts of work on antibodies. They have discovery teams characterization, production. The team I interned on was the shotgun mutagenesis epitope mapping team. So using shotgun mutagenesis and alanine scanning to identify the epitope on an antigen, a lot of it was SARS COVID to because the pandemic and then my second internship was in a lab at the Wistar Institute, the Culp laboratory, and there, I used another protein modeling viewing software PI ML. And in that one, I was modeling influenza B protein that can be used for immunization for trying to find antibodies for potential therapy for the flu. And so, after that, I actually just received a full time job offer at integral molecular, the first company I interned at, which is very exciting. And there I'll be joining the MPA team, the membrane proteome array team, which uses matrix of cellular membrane proteins, so about 6000 cellular membrane proteins, and they use that to scan antibodies and try to identify any off target binding for those antibodies. And yeah, I'll be starting that in about two weeks. And that's pretty much all my experience with with antibodies, my backgrounds, my work and what I'm going to be working on Doctor Porter sent us a list of talking points here. One of them was now that you're graduated and working, what would I have liked to know, before I graduated. And I think the biggest thing for me is, I would have liked to know that I don't have to know everything. In school, it's a lot of memorizing and like preparing for tests, and like knowing all the tiny details about certain things. In an actual lab, you do like do have to know those specifics. My field, but also, you can use a computer to look up anything you don't know whenever you want. There's tons of people there, you can ask questions. If you don't know anything. I think it's, it would have been good for me to know that the environment is like much more collaborative and, and that I don't have to know every little thing by myself.

Sandra  6:02  
Miko, why don't you tell us about your experiences?

Miko  6:05  
My name is Miko as Sandra pointed out. And I'm located in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is my second hackathon. And I'm really excited to continue working on the project that I worked on in January, the IE DB team. Currently, I'm both a research associate at Sinai biotechnology and also a catalyst intern at UCSF. I started at Sinai just over two months ago. But due to legal reasons, I can't really talk too much about what I do at either of these jobs. So I kind of made this talk more focused on how I got to where I am today, and how I used anybody's and some of these other jobs. Feel free to do a quick web search. If you're curious about these places do I'm not really supposed to talk about it. And I know that there's a wide range of experience of participants in this hackathon. So I hope some piece of my story kind of resonates with you guys. So I'm going to walk you through my work history, and talk about how all my experiences landed me where I am today. I grew up in California, so specifically here in the Bay Area. And I only left to go to school in Southern California to pursue my interest in environmental chemistry and studio art. And I know that there's a lot of early career people in this group. So I thought I'd include some fun things to do, maybe to connect with you guys make it seem like researchers are real people too. So when I was in high school, I was a boy scout. And in the beginning, it was just something that my older brothers did. So I did what a good youngest child does, and just kind of followed my brothers learned. But I grew into it. And I really liked it. I followed it all the way through. And I actually qualified to be an Eagle Scout, I had a lot of fun. And I learned a lot about little things. And those experiences really fueled my love for the outdoors. I'm also a pretty active person. I've been diving since I was eight years old. And I was fortunate enough to go to college where I could be a part of the swim and dive team through my four years there. But I find it hard now to find diving boards around. So I channeled my energy in like other directions. I'm a big rock climber. And I really enjoy like the adventure element out of it. So gets me outside of the lab sometimes, which is nice. As I mentioned, I also studied studio art in college, and I first fell in love with photography in high school, and still carry a camera with any indvidual I can go on. And I guess this was like a really good opportunity to plug my photography. So bear with me. Here are a few examples of projects I did when I was developing as an artist. During my experimentation, I became pretty interested in how images can portray different stories and ideas. I really, really enjoyed the fact that lighting could really evoke emotion and tell different stories. I tend to like portraiture as a medium because I find find out a lot about people when I work with them. And I firmly believe that my interests in the arts have allowed me to develop my skills to convey ideas in a more compelling manner. But okay, I'll get back into my career stuff. But here we go. So summers during college, I worked at a small clinical research lab mostly doing assisting on the clinical side and administrative side. And following school, I decided to continue out helping there. For the longest time I thought I wanted to be in healthcare. So I was trying to get some unique experiences while trying to take some Postback classes before I applied out to some more traditional healthcare related programs. I was provenience when I saw a huge potential in biotech, but I didn't really think I had the skills to be successful to get into a research position in the field. While I was taking some of those Postback classes at CCSF, I discovered that they had a biotech program. And I probably took the biggest risk of my life and changed my direction again. But I'm really, really happy that I did. I'll admit, it was a little difficult at first because there, but there were so many awesome people I met in the program. My very, very first lab partner is actually in this hackathon, too. So shout out to you, Carmen for helping me out through some of those tough times. So I stuck through it. And I really felt I had finally found a home in this program. And I finished a number of the program offerings there. And I cannot stress the amount of opportunities I found because of this program, including my involvement with this hackathon. My involvement will be come pretty obvious pretty soon. On the road at CCSF, I got connected to my very first research lab experience at UCSF studying topics in cancer immunotherapies and antibody engineering. I was fortunate enough to work in Dr. Jim wells lab with Dr. Jamie burns and Dr. Susannah Elledge. Susanna was finishing up her PhD at the time. So I got to work with her a lot and got to see what life was like in an academic lab as a student. I also got to taste what like a really great lab culture could be. I'm not gonna dig too much into this project. But in this project, I engineered protein products called by specific T cell engagers, or baits. And these baits would allow one to connect a T cell to a cancer cell and activate them for cancer killing. There was this project and this poster I shared at the ATA II principal investigators conference in the fall of last year. And at that conference, it was that conference, I got me involved with this hackathon. Todd actually stopped by and asked me if I wanted to participate in the hackathon. And honestly, I did not really know what that meant. But here I am, again for the second time. So thanks for the input thought. Following that experience, I wasn't entirely sure what the next steps for my career should be. But it got me really excited to be a part of biomedical research. And I applied everywhere, jobs in industry and academia. I've been applied to grad school and I was also offered an extension at my current current job. So I got into grad school in Ohio. But I opted to defer that to participate in the California Institute for Regenerative medicines, Bridges Program that was connected to the biotechnology program at CCSF. And you might be wondering why I just didn't go to grad school. I decided that I wanted to really make sure that research was for me. And if I could really last and research on this program through CERN was funded was a funded research opportunity that put me in a position to find a lab that is studying topics in stem cell and regenerative medicine that I was also interested in. Well, it was tempting to just head off to go to grad school. They were not like offering to help me pay for school or even find a lab to work in until your to do serve, I was able to conduct real research. Real funded research at Vitale and research institute with Dr. Marcus mu. There, I helped to narrow down some of the mechanisms and the initial transplantation of Matterport ik stem cells into immunodeficient mice, we are trying to improve the establishment of a human immune system within a mouse. This would allow one to have more representative or more representative in vivo studies. And we use we use anybody's a lot in this project to identify selves, ourselves. And if our selves were actually able to be transplanted in in this diagram, you can see we use Flow cytometry to sample tissues and blood to see if our human cells are actually able to survive in these mice. These antibodies would bind to only human cells. And if we observed any that were CD 45 positive, we deemed them as human cells. They also express CD 34. We call them like an early progenitor cell. And if they had all three of these markers, we believe that those were hematopoietic stem cells. And this is just another cool application one can use for antibodies. I wish I included a QR code for this poster too, but I forgot. But you can reach out to me at some other point, if you want to hear more about this. I felt like I grew a lot in these internships and that I was able to understand what it takes to do research, or at least I think I have a little taste for it. I was faced with a tough decision to continue with my lab or find one more experience before the next grad school application season, I ultimately decided to join an industry job because I had experience in an academic lab at UCSF, a nonprofit lab in AI talent. And I thought that an experience in industry, a company whose work was a little closer to the clinic would be would provide me with a more well rounded understanding of the biotech field before I actually committed to grad school. This experience into research so far has really been good for me. I've been in school for a while. And there's way more stuff, as Alex mentioned, that you can learn then in your textbooks. In research, you can really dig deep into subjects that really interest you. I know that it seems like I have a ton of experience. And maybe you're still in high school, maybe you're still an undergrad, or you're a post grad, just trying to figure it out, like I was. I will say that all of my relevant experiences has come in the last few years after, after I completed my undergrad. And before I got involved with these programs, I was having a hard time finding opportunities that were not connected to programs like CCSF. So to all of the instructors that are at this conference, thank you for participating in things like this and bringing these ideas and connections back to your home programs. I owe so much to the City College of San Francisco's but that's our program. And I definitely would not be where I am today without them. But tangent aside, I wanted to get to some other pieces of advice that you may be interested in. If you're interested in research, and you're still kind of early in your career, if you choose to get into research, it's important to develop good habits in order to be successful. There's a really big need to be self motivated. Because there are a lot of things you need to do need to learn. And you're probably not going to get it on the first try, you're going to fail. So always keep in mind like why you're doing this a big reason I deferred grad school was to figure out that I was cut out for research life. And I've definitely learned a lot about myself and my work ethic and this time. Another big tip would be to get to know the people in your lab investment time into these relationships, they can really help you out. You never know when you're going to need advice or like an extra hand. Also network all the time, it's really, it's a really good skill to learn. And you can find so many opportunities that way. Next, I'm a huge proponent for the work life balance, it's a really tough job. And if it wasn't for my hobbies and the sport I have, I don't really know where it'd be. Finally, my last tip would be to take your time, find events like this to be a part of find some good mentors. See if there are internships you can apply to. Before really taking a deep dive into your career. You don't need a full time job. If it's your first experience in research, you've may find you don't really like it. Or maybe that experience just puts a bad taste in your mouth. Internships are great because you are literally there just to learn. No one is expecting you to know everything at the beginning. I've made so many mistakes in my entrance into the research field. But I've realized it's all just part of the learning here. And I'm really glad I took my time and ease my way into it. Also, yes, one last thing, really leverage your time as a student. There are a ton of resources and programs out there that are just made for students. And a lot of those things can go away when you step away from a program. These experiences have really like motivated me to are have really motivated me and confirmed my interest in pursuing grad school. And I'll be applying out in the fall. I'm currently figuring out what other experiences may prepare me for the long haul that will be grad school and ultimately my career. And I'm really interested in studying protein and anybody engineering for therapeutics, really fancy fascinated by the versatility and specificity that engineered antibodies and protein products can have. I do think there are so many applications for these systems and I hope to find a lab that I can continue to explore this even being part of the eye ebdb team and hackathon has changed the way I've approached them problems. I've have even made suggestions that I've justified using the IE db to some projects that I've been a part of since I've learned about this tool. And that was kind of a cool moment for me to make that connection. And think about how you can use some of these tools in my own research. So I'm really excited for where my career is heading and I hope to continue learning with all of you.

Peter Kazarinoff  20:33  
Talking Technicians is produced by MNT-EC, the Micro Nano Technology Education Center through financial support from the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education grant program. Opinions expressed on this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Science Foundation. Join the conversation. If you are a working technician, or know someone who is, reach out to us at info@talkingtechnicians.org We're always looking out for great guests to share more stories with you.