Career

My goal is to shape the scientific vision of a company which uses computational biology or data science to impact society.

More specifically, I envision my eventual ideal role as a CSO, or CSO-like person. I want to:

• interact with data analysis in a non-trivial way, either through doing analyses myself or advising on computational/data analysis work
• engage non-scientists and get them excited about our work and potential impact
• shape the long-term vision of the company I am a part of

My ideal company:

• impacts society through public health interventions or other population-level effects
• harnesses computational biology and ‘omics data to achieve impact
• preferentially works in areas with large disparities, and endeavours to reduce them
• centers its values in every aspect of the scientific work it does

One possible long-term career goal might be to be a key player in shaping the integration of precision medicine into public health, specifically focusing on conditions other than cancer (e.g. infectious disease, lifestyle-associated diseases, nutrition, maternal or women’s health, etc).

In my mind, “precision medicine” means any combination of multi-omics or otherwise “big” data and some sort of fine resolution (e.g. at the individual or neighborhood level, and/or longitudinal).

That said, I’m open to any career path where I can use my technical training to reduce disparities and increase equity and justice in society.

Jobs that would really excite me:

• Shaping the future of data (especially biological ‘omics data) in public organizations like the CDC, WHO, or other large key players
• Establishing a data science team in an otherwise clinical or public health place (e.g. Data Science Director at the NIAID, Chief Data Officer in a large hospital or at a city or state public health agency)
• Early employee or leader at a company innovating on public health. For example, one that is creating new types of data for public health surveillance, and/or developing novel biomarkers for common diseases which have known health disparities
• Bonus points: a job that centers building up the open-source community and building up the civic data for social good movement