Evolution of a Company and a UR PhD Graduate Student

Career Story Blog Post By Ernest Smith, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Vaccinex

I entered graduate school in the summer of 1994, a couple weeks after graduating from St. John Fisher College with a Biology degree. I joined UR’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology, which afforded me a wide range of labs to work in. Over the following nine months, I did rotations in labs that focused on Immunology, Virology and Biochemistry. Even as a graduate student, I have always been more interested in developing new technologies than I have been in discovering new biology. I see discovery research as a form of detective work; you uncover the facts, follow the leads and present your case. You don’t change the facts; you just try to understand them. In contrast, I found inventing new technologies exciting because you are changing the reality and making something exist that didn’t exist before. Although building a knowledge base through discovery research and understanding biology well enough to intervene and treat diseases are both critical, I was most excited at the prospect of inventing technologies that are used to solve intractable biology questions.  

Traveling the winding road: Perspective from an early career PhD

Career Story Blog Post By Jennifer Head Wheeler, PhD, Research Investigator II at Bristol-Myers Squibb 

When I found out I had been accepted to the Toxicology PhD program at the University of Rochester, I had a vision of how my career would unfold: 4 years of research and a 2 year post-doc followed by a tenure track professorship. This path that I ended up taking was not what I initially imagined, but has ended up being much more than I had hoped for. Throughout my experiences in grad school, my post-doc and in my current position, I’ve learned that there’s so much more to training to be a successful scientist than just the work you do at the bench and the papers you publish. For this blog post, I want to share my experiences from graduate school and post-doc and how they have shaped my scientific career so far.

The Best of Both Worlds—Insights Toward Establishing an Academic Center and a Biotech Company, from One Perspective

Career Story Blog Post By Joseph F. Petrosino, PhD, Associate Professor of Molecular Virology and Microbiology, Director of the Alkek Center for Metagenomics and Microbiome Research at Baylor College of Medicine, and Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Diversigen, Inc.

In anticipation of my visit to UR, I’ve been asked to share my experiences in what brought me to where I am today as a director of a strategic research center at Baylor College of Medicine and as the founder and CSO of a metagenomics sequencing and analysis company, Diversigen, Inc.

A Day in the Life of a Scientific Jack-of-all-Trades

Career Story Blog Post By Christine (Crisy) Sanfilippo, PhD, Manager, Pharmaceutical Medical Affairs at Bausch & Lomb, a division of Valeant Pharmaceuticals

What exactly does a job in Medical Affairs entail? I had the same question when approached by a colleague at Bausch + Lomb, wondering if I would be interested in an open position in that department. So when asked to write this blog post, I figured I’d share with fellow scientists my view of Medical Affairs and the tasks performed during an “atypical” typical day at my job.

Scientific Careers: The Big Picture

Career Story Blog Post By Donald Moir, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Microbiotix, Inc.

I’ve been asked to reflect a bit on my career and to share some stories.  These are some of my experiences from a career at small biotech companies.  I hope these anecdotes and suggestions will be helpful, at least as starting points for a larger discussion about scientific careers.