Tweetorial: My Education & Career Journey
30 January 2022
Welp… if you wanted to know more about the man behind the mask, here’s you’re chance. As part of the January #YoungScientistNetworking campaign organized by Teddy Zartler (@quantumtessera on Twitter), here’s my education and career story in all of its glory. Plenty of twists and turns and lessons in perseverance along the way.
This is the longest thread I’ve ever written, and probably also the most vulnerable. I’m not always comfortable writing about myself, and I’d rather write about pharmacology topics instead. But… I also believe that Twitter needs to be more human, and it’s helpful to post these kinds of stories so that people become more than just words on a page. While I feel like I’m in a pretty good career spot now, that wasn’t always so. There’s been a lot of tumult between there and here over the years. Everyone’s story is more complex than the surface reality you see.
Anyway, without further interruption, here it is.
Here’s my drug discovery origin story & career adventure for #YoungScientistNetworking. This is the longest thread I’ve ever written, and I’ve written some long ones! Jump down to post 57 (!) for the TL;DR. 1/
I grew up an only child in the Baltimore suburbs. It was an upper middle class town but we weren’t really upper middle class people. My dad (now retired) was an auto mechanic for the local power company, my mom (also retired) director of a preschool. 2/
Reaching back over many generations, my forebears were mostly from Pennsylvania. First farmers, then coal miners, then steelworkers - squarely working class people. My mom was the first person in our family ever to go to college. 3/
I took to science from a young age - inquisitive about the world, but bored with the pace at school. I had exceptional chemistry teachers in high school (2 of 3 were women, too!), took AP Chem, and knew I wanted to major in chemistry before I graduated. 4/
Meantime at my parents’ behest, I took a job as a line cook at the local Pizza Hut to earn spending money. Working fast while not making mistakes, and seeing people much older than me doing delivery and living paycheck-to-paycheck… I never forgot any of that experience. 5/
I ultimately chose to go to @UDelaware, which offered the right combo of a strong undergrad chemistry program and affordability. Their “college within a college” Honors Program was also a big draw and left me under the advisorship of the one-of-a-kind Burnaby Munson. 6/
My mom’s experience majoring in English and commuting to college in the 1960s had little bearing on my experience as a chemistry major living on campus in the 1990s, and I consider myself “functionally first-gen”. I had to figure out most of the unwritten rules myself. 7/
I did undergraduate research with a young PI who struggled to get funding and was ultimately denied tenure. I liked being in the lab and narrowed my focus to organic chemistry. But the funding/tenure situation left me with a sour feeling re: academia. 8/
Halfway through undergrad, I was starting to wonder what was next. Grad school was foreign to me, my family, and most people I knew. A clarifying moment was one day in a lecture when Doug Taber told us straight up that grad school in the sciences in the US is free. 9/
(It turns out that “free” really meant “tuition waiver and stipend way below cost of living while working your ass off” but… technically he was correct.) 10/
At first I couldn’t believe this, but some digging confirmed it was true, at least in the sense of my parenthetical above. Now… how to apply to grad school, how to choose where to go, who to work for, and… what did all of that mean for what I want to do with my life? 11/
Here’s where that first-gen thing is a bummer. Other people around you are savvy and navigate this unseen world with its own rules and you’re just… bumbling along and hoping that what you’re doing is correct and that you’re not missing opportunities. (You are, btw.) 12/
I applied to grad schools based on… potential advisors, I guess? Some papers I read in JACS & JOC? I mean, why not apply to an Ivy League school if it was going to be “free”? Taber had gone to Columbia and worked for Gilbert Stork, so I threw my hat in there as well. 13/
Simultaneously, a senior year course in organometallic chemistry taught by Chad Tolman (of the cone angle) pivoted my thinking away from organic chemistry to more of an organometallic bent. I knew I wanted that to be part of my graduate work… just not sure how. 14/
Grad school acceptances came from several corners. Then weekend visits meeting students and faculty and checking out the campuses. Greg Fu called my dorm room to try and get me to come up to MIT, which was a little surreal. 15/
I can’t say exactly why @Columbia clicked for me. Great organic faculty, multiple advisor options. The thought of a suburban kid of modest means going off and having an adventure in New York City for five years also weighed heavily. 16/
When I arrived at Columbia in 1997, I was a first-gen grad schooler. Living on my own in the biggest city in America. Taking classes with super-smart people who all knew more than I did. I sometimes felt like Columbia had made a mistake by accepting me to the program. 17/
Incidentally, “first-gen” wasn’t even a concept back then. Or if it was, I hadn’t heard of it. It’s really only via Twitter in the last few years that I’ve learned about this identity. It’s been helpful for me to frame how I was feeling at this earlier period in my life. 18/
And man we were poor relative to the cost of living. Grad student stipends were ~$16K a year back then, and just my share of the rent was $500-600 a month. It never even occurred to me to question it at the time. I viewed it as apprenticeship and not work. I was wrong. 19/
During my last two years, I started tutoring a few hours a week to earn some extra spending money. Imagine my surprise when folks handed over the cash without blinking. It made me realize for the first time that you should rarely give your time for free. 20/
Jim Leighton wasn’t on my radar when I accepted Columbia’s offer. He had just joined the faculty when I was applying. But his research program around unconventional organometallic methods for organic synthesis was exactly what I’d envisioned for my PhD. 21/
I joined Jim’s group and spent the time enjoyably engaged in polyketide total synthesis. Because of the methodology program Jim was pursuing, I got to do all kinds of wacky catalysis stuff under high pressure. I never once ran an aldol reaction. 22/
Approaching the end of my PhD, I had to decide if I was going to try to go get a real job or use a post-doc as a holding pattern while I figured out what came next. A couple of things pushed me toward the former. 23/
For one, I had now been through my second experience with a young PI. Jim got tenure unlike my undergrad advisor, but that was far from sure when I joined his lab as grad student #3. I was fairly certain I didn’t want the stress level of an academic job. 24/
But I knew next to nothing about industry. I had gotten a fellowship from Pharmacia (now Pfizer) during my third year and gone out to the site in Kalamazoo to do a poster and mingle with other grad students. That was the first I saw of what industrial medicinal chemists do. 25/
A few people ahead of me in the lab had taken the industry plunge in the prior year, but all process chemistry, and all to Merck too. So I decided to try and land interviews. Pharma hiring was still in good shape in 2001, and you could get a job without a post-doc. 26/
I interviewed at a bunch of places for both med chem and process positions, not really knowing what I wanted. The companies (mostly) sorted it for me and had me pegged as a medicinal chemist, so that’s where the offers (mostly) came from. 27/
One piece of interview advice I picked up from my advisor here (he spent time in industry himself before he went to grad school, which is rare): frame your talk around problems solved. This is when I first learned about “portable skills”. They were hiring a thought process. 28/
2002 was a busy year. I became PhDone, got married a month later, and took my first job at GlaxoSmithKline in RTP, North Carolina. I liked the people, wanted to work in oncology, and… it scratched that itch that had sent me to Columbia. Another state, another adventure. 29/
I loved working at GSK. The group had many young scientists like myself and we were all trying to do Great Things without yet realizing that drug discovery is a brutal, difficult, and humbling business. Against all odds, that group discovered three marketed oncology drugs. 30/
I had the good fortune to be on the discovery team for the BRAF inhibitor dabrafenib at this early stage in my career. I learned a lot about what it takes to get a discovery project across the finish line from the chemistry team leader, Dave Uehling. 31/
Chief among those learnings was that science is only one variable. Networking, managing connections between groups, and influencing others to get things done separated the best leaders from adequate ones. It was a skill, and you could learn it like any other skill. 32/
No good deed goes unpunished, however, and a massive reorganization axed the entire oncology group at RTP in 2008. Thus I got a brutal first lesson in the uncoupling that can occur in industry between a group’s performance and overall bu$ine$$ goal$. 33/
Momentary crisis. My wife and I had just had our second kid. She had quit her job to be a stay-at-home mom after realizing her entire paycheck was needed to pay for daycare. Both of our kids were young, so schools weren’t an issue. But we were about to have zero income. 34/
We also weren’t from North Carolina. We had friends there, but few close friends, and our families were hundreds of miles away in the northeast. Having the kids closer to family was a strong draw to head back to the northeast, and so our Southern Living experiment was over. 35/
Thus, another plunge: into biotech, and a new place to live. I took up the torch as a project leader at OSI Pharmaceuticals in Farmingdale, NY. We packed everything up and moved to Long Island. 36/
This was my first in-depth experience leading projects, and began a gradual pivot away from bench work. The learning curve was steep, and I first appreciated that maybe that curve had begun to plateau for me at GSK. Important to always be learning something new. 37/
The pace at OSI was brisk compared to GSK. I was working my guts out to the point of burnout because expectations were high and the spotlight was always on at a small place. I barely knew what I was doing and had to build the plane while flying it. 38/
As if North Carolina wasn’t culture shock… Long Island, just wow. My experience was that you’re either from there, or you’re not, and the locals know the difference. I hated: how expensive everything was, my commute, and the hurricanes (Irene & Sandy). I digress. 39/
Then some painful gyrations. OSI decided to pull up stakes and relocate their HQ to Westchester County. We sold our house that we’d been in <2 years and went back to temporary housing. Then Astellas bought the company and decided to keep us on Long Island. 40/
We rented a place, then bought a new place. We lived in 5 different places in <5 years, and I never changed jobs once. The kids were getting older. My oldest started first grade. My wife had friends. And I was certain that another layoff was in the not-too-distant future. 41/
The most painful move we made was when I voluntarily left OSI to join Boehringer Ingelheim in Ridgefield, CT in 2013. I was tired of the instability, tired of uprooting the family, and wanting to work in a different therapeutic area for a while. But mostly just tired. 42/
One month to the day after I left OSI, everyone at the Farmingdale site was laid off. Maybe after the GSK layoff there was some Spidey Sense developing about things going sideways. I don’t know about that, but the pain of the move turned out to be the right call. 43/
I spent a bit over 3 years at BI. Meanwhile, Arvinas started up in 2013 and my old boss at OSI (@andeecru) was hired as head of chemistry and came to Connecticut at nearly the same time that I did. He spent a good chunk of those 3 years trying to get me down to New Haven. 44/
For a while at BI, I was learning new stuff. The chance to do cardiometabolic diseases and immunology was exciting. The chemistry team was terrific and I learned more DMPK in those 3 years than in all the prior years. And it was a big, relatively stable, private company. 45/
We now had two kids in elementary school and had a third kid shortly after the transit to Connecticut. Stability was paramount. I committed to keep us rooted in one place for as long as humanly possible so the whole family could have a semblance of normalcy. 46/
Incidentally, this is why big hubs like Boston/Cambridge and the Bay Area become self-perpetuating. They’re among the few places where scientists in pharma can (and will!) change jobs many times, but never have to move once. 47/
Another thing I learned at BI is that I had no patience for the bureaucracy of a large pharma anymore. So I left in the summer of 2016 for Arvinas. Six months later, BI shut down small molecule discovery in Ridgefield and laid everyone off. Another bullet dodged. 48/
The perhaps-counterintuitive plunge from my “stable big pharma job” to a startup had both kept me employed and, for the first time in my career, allowed me to change jobs without having to uproot the family. Sometimes wins come when you least expect them. 49/
There’s a lesson in there about continued networking. The job changes mean I now know lots of people in the business who are scattered to the four corners of the earth. That helped me land a job at Arvinas, and also enabled me to hire others, or connect them with new jobs. 50/
At Arvinas, I’ve gradually moved along the chemistry director track. I still lead some projects to keep my head in the game, but I also now have broader responsibilities to the portfolio. My lab days are well and truly behind me after 20 years in the business. 51/
I don’t miss lab work. Being a project lead brings its own challenges (scientific & people) to tackle. I also enjoy the hell out of being a mentor to the folks on the team and the broader chemistry group. I’ve finally reached a point in my career where I can teach something. 52/
In fact, I just enjoy the hell out of the job, period. It’s a small environment where I can contribute and my work is noticed and valued. And working on degraders, as a medicinal chemist, is just super cool. 53/
It’s down to doing what you love. When you come out of school, it’s often hard to envision giving up lab work. It’s what you know. Sometimes that changes over time. Be open to going in a different direction if you like the work. That’s how you stay happy. 54/
When I look back, why did I take the lumps to stay in industry vs. getting off the merry-go-round? The stability ain’t what it once was, but the work is tough, engaging, noble, gratifying, humbling. It’s hard to let it go once you get the drug discovery bug in your blood. 55/
But who knows? I can see myself taking the off-ramp in my 50s (once the kids are out of the house) and doing something radically different for a decade. Maybe teaching, which I enjoy. I’m a big believer in writing another chapter or two later in your life. Still adventuring! 56/
Takeaways: 1) I spent most of my career feeling like I was flying by the seat of my pants. Downside: creeping feeling of inadequacy. Upside: that feeling is (mostly) learning, and is a good thing. 2) Network! It’s 100% who you know and not what you know. 57/
3) There are buckets of unwritten rules, and it’s privilege to know them (or not have to). I’ve tried to share some here. Ask questions. 4) Take career risks, but balance that against life/family. Easier to do when you’re younger. Math changes when you’re older. 58/
