1. What is your current position?
I am an associate director for innovation and transformation at AbbVie, a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in North Chicago, Illinois. In many ways, I’m like an in-house consultant.
2. What does a typical day look like for you?
I meet with a variety of teams across AbbVie, such as the ones that are running the clinical trials and those that are manufacturing the medicines we make for our patients. At a high level, we work with these teams to solve their most pressing issues and realize opportunities for transformative change.
3. How did Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences prepare you for this position?
My Ph.D. training at WCGS trained me in how to take nebulous problems that no one has ever solved, break them down into their component parts, and work my back up into a solution. Additionally, I was trained in how to gather and understand data and synthesize it into actionable insights.
4. What stands out to you from your time as a graduate student?
In 2018, the Tri-Institutional Ph.D. Program in Chemical Biology went on a retreat outside the city. It was a two-day event, and the whole program went – first-year through fifth- or sixth-year students – and we got to hear about each other’s research and build genuine relationships in a casual setting. The strong bonds we built during the retreat and throughout our time in the program helped to create a supportive community that carried us through the uncertainty of the early days of COVID a few years later.
5. What advice would you give students interested in pursuing a career similar to yours?
The key is to be honest with yourself about what you want out of life and what you’re willing to take on to get there. I worked in consulting after my Ph.D., and it was not an easy job by any metric. Ultimately, it was a very efficient way for me to learn a lot about the industry I was interested in and later pivoted to. My advice would be to talk to people doing the work you want to pursue and see if their lifestyle choices are aligned with your priorities.