Making the Leap: A Non-Academic Career Planning and Job Search Boot Camp

Organizers

Yaihara Fortis Santiago, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences

Dr. Yaihara Fortis Santiago is the manager of the Science Alliance, the professional development branch of the New York Academy of Sciences. Yaihara develops and implements innovative workshops and courses that provide early career scientists with a range of soft and business skills that will be essential for all careers. Yaihara also gives seminars on career development and exploration at many of the partner institutions of Science Alliance; and works closely with career development offices and student and postdoc organizations to consolidate resources and implement new ideas for professional development programing. Yaihara is a former AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow and she worked at the National Science Foundation (NSF) during her fellowship assignment.

Dr. Fortis obtained her bachelors' degree in Biology from University of Puerto Rico and her doctoral degree in Neuroscience from Brandeis University. Her doctoral work focused in studying the role of multisensory integration in taste processing. Yaihara can be found on Twitter @yfortiss.

Speakers

Rudy Bellani, PhD

Oystir

Rudy Bellani is co-founder and CEO of Oystir, a company dedicated to helping PhDs find non-academic jobs at no cost to them. Oystir has also partnered with numerous research universities to help them understand the skill development, skill gaps, and career opportunities of their graduate students and postdocs. Prior to Oystir, Rudy was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he served pharmaceutical, education, and technology clients, specializing in innovation and talent development strategies including how to identify and hire talent from non-traditional backgrounds. In addition to his client work, Rudy helped lead PhD recruiting for McKinsey's New York office. Rudy received a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from Rockefeller University where he studied the developmental origins of brain asymmetry. He is passionate abouttraditional archery, comic books, and has an extensive collection of vertebrate brains. Rudy can be found on Twitter @RudyBellani.

Zach Marks

Oystir

Zach Marks is co-founder and COO of Oystir, a company dedicated to helping PhDs find non-academic jobs at no cost to them. In this role, he helps employers source and hire talented PhDs and works with PhDs to identify their skills, potential career opportunities and how best to position themselves. Prior to Oystir, Zach was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he developed strategies to hire talent from non-traditional sources. He advised large public, private and social sector clients on a range of organizational strategy topics with a focus on economic development, including an engagement designing South Sudan's first national agriculture plan. Zach received a BA in Ethics, Politics and Economics from Yale University. He is writing a book on chai wallahs, India's roadside tea vendors.

Mónica Feliú Mójer, PhD

Ciencia Puerto Rico and iBiology

Dr. Mónica Feliú-Mójer grew up in rural Puerto Rico, surrounded by nature and with a cow in her backyard, which sparked her interest in all things biology. A scientist-turned-communicator, she loves building meaningful connections to make science and scientists accessible to all. Mónica earned her B.S. in Human Biology at the University of Puerto Rico in Bayamón, and her Ph.D. in Neurobiology at Harvard University. She is the vice-director and news editor-in-chief of Ciencia Puerto Rico (@CienciaPR), an organization leveraging social networks to engage Hispanic scientists in science communication and education. Mónica is also the Science Outreach Program Manager for iBiology (@iBiology), an UCSF-based non-profit organization that produces free educational science videos featuring the world's leading biologists. She has received numerous awards and recognitions, including a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the COPUS Paul Shin Memorial Award (2013) for her efforts to increase public understanding of science among Hispanic audiences. Her work has been featured on international media outlets, such as Univisión, VOXXI, and Scientific American among others. Monica can be found on Twitter at @moefeliu.

Amy L. Pszczolkowski

Princeton University

Amy Pszczolkowski has served as the associate director of graduate student career services at Princeton University since 2008. In this capacity, she collaborates closely with The Graduate School and has led the expansion of career advising and professional development programming for graduate students for the academic and non-academic job markets. Amy has over 20 years of higher education experience in academic and career advising, as well as administrative roles in strategic planning, development, and community relations ranging from research universities to selective liberal arts college, and community colleges. She has taught career management courses and first year seminars for undergraduate students. Amy received her Master's in higher education administration from Miami University of Ohio. She is the president-elect of the Graduate Career Consortium, a nonprofit organization comprised of over 200 university professionals who advise doctoral candidates and postdoctoral scholars in the area of professional and career development at over seventy research institutions and medical schools.

Panelists

Nicholas DeLillo Jr., PhD

AXON

Nick DeLillo is the Director of Medical and Scientific Affairs at AXON, a healthcare consultancy specializing in the planning and development of creative, scientifically-accurate, and innovative healthcare communication strategies intended for diverse audiences across multiple communications platforms. His role involves the development of medical strategies and content throughout all aspects of drug development from molecule to maturity including strategic positioning, scientific messaging, product launches, branding, dissemination of clinical trial data, conferences, symposia, key opinion leader development, and advisory board meetings.

Nick graduated with a BA in English Literature from Manhattan College and a PhD in Molecular Biology from St. John's University. His thesis centered on chromatin remodeling and kinetochore function in S. cerevisiae cells harboring phospholipase C mutations.

With 14+ years of experience in healthcare communications, Nick has worked in a diverse range of treatment settings, including but not limited to oncology, ophthalmology, infectious disease, central nervous system disorders, and COPD. His clients include some of the largest pharmaceutical and medical device companies in the US and globally, and his job allows him to travel the globe and meet some of the top physicians in the world.

Nick takes great enjoyment in mentoring those individuals leaving the lab and seeking career direction. As someone who has "bootstrapped" himself to his current role, he shows his gratitude to his mentors by offering the same guidance and support to anyone who is unsure of their career path. Over the last 25 years, he has been a loving husband and father (his 2 favorite roles), a student, a teacher, a scientist, a mentor, an actor, a voiceover artist, a New York radio personality, an Aikido instructor, a comedy writer, a salesman, a complete failure, an unintentional success, a Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger (seriously), and a survivor of his own decisions, good and bad.

Avalon Garcia, PhD

BGB Group

Avalon's role as a Senior Medical Writer at the medical communications agency BGB Group, involves working collaboratively with multifunctional teams to develop content around the clinical data of BioPharmaceutical clients to help them communicate messages to healthcare professionals about the efficacy and safety of therapeutic agents, diagnostic tests, and medical devices. Prior to BGB Group, Avalon worked at Thieme Medical Publishers where she partnered with faculty to develop medical and scientific educational content for review books and digital platforms for medical students and their professors. She earned her PhD in Biochemistry with a concentration in Cancer Signaling from the CUNY Graduate Center-Hunter College, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Oncology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Avalon is one of the founding members of the 10-year old NYC Minority Graduate Student Network (MGSN), and serves on the group's advisory board to fulfill her passion for "feeding the STEM pipeline".

Paul-André Genest, PhD

Elsevier

Dr. Paul-André Genest is an Associate Publisher for Elsevier, the leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, where he is responsible for the management of a portfolio of ten journals in Life Sciences. He co-organized in 2015 a conference on the Impact of Environmental Changes on Infectious Diseases (IECID 2015) in Sitges, Spain, and launched the journals Contemporary Clinical Trials Communications and Current Opinion in Systems Biology. He is also the project manager of Elsevier's Atlas award. Prior to this function, he held the position of Managing Editor at Elsevier for the International Journal for Parasitology: Drugs and Drug Resistance (IJP:DDR), the International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife (IJP:PAW) and the Malaria Nexus web portal.

Dr. Genest has a BSc (Biology) degree and a MSc (Microbiology-Immunology) degree from the Université Laval in Québec City, Canada, and a PhD (Molecular Parasitology) from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He held two postdoc research positions at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, prior to joining Elsevier in 2012.

Nancy Ilaya, PhD

The Estee Lauder Companies

Nancy Ilaya is currently Manager of Scientific Affairs with The Estee Lauder Companies. She is responsible for identifying and developing skincare claims strategies for supporting ELC's top skincare launches. In this role she works with R&D, legal and product development teams to develop unique approaches to skincare claims substantiation. Before joining The Estee Lauder Companies, she had worked at Avon Product Inc. across New Technology and Product Innovation (Skincare) where she was responsible for evaluating technologies for beauty product development across skincare and color categories with focus on technical translation, new product innovation and ideation, claims development, SKU design and execution. During her tenure at Avon, she delivered eight skincare products to market, patented a skincare active, developed a global strategy for market re-activation of Anew skincare products, and delivered a Product Signals Cues Discovery Guidelines template to guide formulation design to align product proposition, concept and benefits with the anticipated consumer experience.

Prior to her career in beauty, Nancy worked in science communications and education. Upon arriving in New York, she worked at a healthcare/biotech PR firm where she oversaw training for publicists, management and executives, served as scientific counsel on scientific and health care accounts, and managed and designed strategic scientific public relations campaigns. Previously, she had managed postgraduate courses and programs through The Australian Stem Cell Centre and tutored undergraduate science and biomedical students with The Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne. Raised in Australia, Nancy has a BS Hons in Pathology and PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia in Neuropathlogy.

Tejinder Kaur, PhD

Healthcare Consultancy Group

Dr. Kaur earned her doctorate in Neuroscience from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she investigated mechanisms of synaptic transmission in the retina. Following graduation, Dr. Kaur worked on a crowdsourcing project with Scientists Without Borders and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to identify solutions to advance maternal and child health in developing countries. Alongside, Dr. Kaur gained experience in intellectual property at Forest Laboratories where she worked directly with patent attorneys to evaluate new pharmaceutical opportunities and gained first-hand knowledge of FDA regulations during drug approval process.

In her current role as a Medical Director at Healthcare Consultancy Group, she is responsible for developing medical education content and communications strategy that is scientifically accurate and aligned with the objectives of the brand. Dr. Kaur supports brands in a number of therapeutic areas at all stages of development, from pre-launch, disease awareness to a mature brand at the end of its life-cycle.

Marcus Kelly, PhD

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals

Marcus is currently a Staff Scientist in the department of Oncology and Angiogenesis at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. He is responsible for discovering and validating targets selectively expressed in cancer, and characterizing fully human antibody therapeutics developed against these molecules from early in vivo models through to advanced pre-clinical development. Prior to Regeneron, Marcus was a post-doctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Lloyd Old at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research New York Branch of Human Tumor Immunology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His project there focused on assessing the drug ADI-PEG20 in lung cancer and assisting in the development of antibodies against cancer immunology targets. Marcus received a BSc (Hons) and PhD in Pharmacology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Caitlin McOmish, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences

Caitlin McOmish began her scientific career at the University of Melbourne where she completed a BSc (Hons) and PhD in Neuroscience. She was recruited to a postdoc in New York for which received a CJ Martin Overseas Biomedical Fellowship from the NH&MRC. This fellowship allowed her to split her time between the labs of Professor Jay Gingrich at Columbia University, NY, USA, and Professor Brian Dean at the Florey Neuroscience Institute of Mental Health, Melbourne, Australia. During this period she engaged in freelance editing and science writing, as a way of exploring non-academic careers. In 2015, Caitlin joined the New York Academy of Sciences as a Program Manager for the Life Sciences Discussion Groups.