by J. K. Wenderott

It is clear while interviewing Dr. Amrita A. Iyer that communicating is one of her passions. She exudes excitement as she discusses her job as a science writer at Tempus Labs in Chicago, IL, as well as her path to choosing a career in science communication. “In my job, I get to drive [scientific] papers forward so that they do see light and get published. That is the most satisfying part of my job.”

Amrita grew up in India and attended Vellore Institute of Technology for her Bachelors in Biotechnology and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras for her Masters in Biological Sciences. During this time, she became well acquainted with genetics research, and continuing on this path, she joined Baylor College of Medicine for her PhD in Molecular & Human Genetics. It was while she was a PhD student, though, that she started to explore other interests. “Once I was done with my qualifying exams and those formalities, I started doing science communication as a stress-beating strategy,” she explains. Her PhD research was in a niche area – genetics of the inner ear – and being able to discuss it in more general terms with an audience and teach them something they did not previously know was exciting. “The response I was getting when people understood something new, that response made me feel good about my research.” This perspective-building (that can often be lost when being too close to a research topic), as well as the opportunities to speak at workshops and other events that started to snowball, pushed Amrita to seriously consider a career path in science communication. In 2021, when presented with the fork between continuing research and transitioning to a career in science communication, Amrita “took a leap of faith” and joined Tempus Labs as a science writer, which she considers now to be “one of the best decisions” she has made for herself.  

Tempus Labs applies data and artificial intelligence to solve healthcare challenges for patients,  and Amrita’s job as a science writer there consists of many roles. Beyond interfacing with marketing, medical affairs, and sales teams, she prepares, edits and reviews research communications including abstracts for conferences and manuscripts for publication. She is quick to note a key difference between her job now and her time as a graduate student: while she was working on one or two manuscripts or abstracts as a graduate student at the same time, now she handles more like eight abstracts and three manuscripts simultaneously. “There’s a lot of project management, as well, because each project is at a different stage,” she explains. Amrita believes the base skills required for her job – writing, editing, project management, organization, asking questions of researchers – were honed naturally during her time as a PhD student. When thinking about career advancement, Amrita brings up seeking out certifications through organizations like the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA), International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP), and Board of Editors in the Life Sciences (BELS).

For those considering science writing, Amrita has several pieces of advice. For those in the early stages of their PhD, she recommends starting to build a portfolio as soon as possible by pursuing avenues to enhance your CV like serving as a teaching assistant for a medical writing class, checking LinkedIn for volunteer opportunities, and reviewing papers. Besides also seeking out these opportunities, those later on in their PhD can target certain certifications and credentials; for instance, BELS accepts PhD work as relevant experience, so students can apply and take the certification exam immediately. She also notes there are a variety of career branches in science communication. Within the industry, there are opportunities to work primarily on scientific publications, medical writing catered to pharmaceutical businesses, and regulatory writing. Other paths outside of industry can be found at non-profits, in academia as a grant writer, or through freelance work on a project-by-project basis.

Outside of her job, Amrita has many hobbies and interests like gardening, cooking, and writing fiction. Additionally, she has served in several mentorship capacities, including as a mentor for the AWIS-CAC Mentoring Circles program which consists of small intimate groups that meet over the summer to discuss mutual topics of interest. Speaking of her roles as a mentor and mentee, Amrita says, “It goes both ways. I learn a lot when I mentor. Mentees have so much to offer from the perspective of where they come from, what their background is, the way they ask questions, the way they understand things.” Her willingness to be a mentor is apparent beyond her commitment to these formal programs. She emphasized she is more than happy to hear from folks that have interest in science writing, would like her to review their resumes, or simply want to connect. You can reach Dr. Amrita A. Iyer by LinkedIn message.

By: Nora Grasse

Dr. Lisa Utschig balances being an award-winning chemist and a mom. She is the Lead Principal Investigator of Natural Photosynthesis at Argonne National Lab with the Solar Energy Conversion Group. Dr. Utschig has defined her own path and stayed true to herself as she has brought novel bioinorganic chemistry approaches to the long-established field of photosynthesis research while being the mother of three.

Growing up, Dr. Utschig’s favorite subjects were art and math, so she decided to attend a small liberal arts school in Iowa, Cornell College, to explore her interests. She started classes thinking she might go to medical school and be a doctor. “I didn’t even know what graduate school was at that point or anything, coming from where I grew up,” she recalled. Her advisor at Cornell College was a chemist, who recommended exploring chemistry and encouraged her to try summer research at University of Iowa. Once she had her own research project outside of a classroom setting, she started to enjoy lab work. From there, Utschig applied to graduate school and attended Northwestern University for her PhD in Chemistry. Her focus was bioinorganic chemistry, specifically metalloregulatory proteins. She studied the effect of mercury on gene response.

After graduate school, the balance between work and family life started to help shape her career. Looking for a postdoctoral research position that could also be near her husband’s work, Utschig presented a poster at an Argonne National Laboratory event for women in science. There, she met Dr. Marion Thurnauer, who offered her a postdoc position in photosynthesis research. Thurnauer would go on to become her mentor at Argonne. Thurnauer advocated for Utschig so she could work part time, as Utschig wanted flexible hours to find her best balance of work and family life. Before starting her postdoc, Utschig envisioned herself becoming a professor at a liberal arts college like the one she attended, but her career goals changed as her love of research grew at Argonne.

Switching from her work on metalloregulatory proteins to photosynthesis was a big transition at first. “I used to joke that I didn’t even know what a chlorophyll was.” Photosynthesis research is a huge field with a rich history. “Interestingly enough, the differences in the fields led to my first discovery as a postdoc.” While studying the structure of photosynthetic reaction center proteins, which convert light to chemical energy, she discovered a zinc site on the protein that regulates an important electron transfer process. She elaborated, saying, “Other groups around the world picked up on that and actually proved that where the zinc binds is the entry point of the proton.” Coming from the fresh perspective of bioinorganic chemistry enabled her to make a new contribution to the photosynthetic research field. A key takeaway from this experience was to trust your instincts. After seeing something small and unexpected, she pursued it and asked more questions.

Some of her more recent work involves modifying photosynthetic proteins for hydrogen fuel production. Plants convert sunlight to chemical energy at near unity conversion; no artificial system comes close to this efficiency. “Part of my research is understanding how nature does it.” How do photosynthetic proteins capture the light energy? How can we use the light capture and conversion capability of nature to make solar fuel? Currently, Utschig is studying the production of clean hydrogen from sunlight and water. Her group has coupled synthetic chemistries and natural capture and conversion capabilities, adding a catalytic component to photosynthetic proteins. In 2020, Utschig won University of Chicago’s Distinguished Performance Award for her hydrogen research. Future direction for her work includes carbon dioxide research. She continues to bring an inspired approach to photosynthesis research through her bioinorganic chemistry expertise. Her experience binding metal complexes to proteins in graduate school still informs her work today.

Natural photosynthesis research is unique, so it requires hands-on mentoring in the lab. When asked how being a mom has impacted her mentoring style, she said, “I try to really listen, respond, and help best I can.” She prioritizes being approachable. She raised her children to be humble and kind, and she applies these values to her scientific work, too. Utschig aims to instill confidence in her mentees and push them so they can do the work.

Dr. Utschig offered advice to other women in science. She said that it’s important to remember that everybody’s different! She encourages folks to define their own path: “You can do good science and you can have three kids while you do it. You can be the mom you want to be.” Whenever making a big decision, she passes along advice her dad once offered her. “Always follow your heart and your mind. It’s gotta feel right and it’s gotta make sense.”

By Evan Phillips

Meet Barbara Di Eugenio, Professor of Computer Science. At the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Dr. Di Eugenio leads the Natural Language Processing (NLP) lab engaged in the transformative research of applying computer understanding of human language to the betterment of our world. She has been a keen supporter and member of AWIS-CAC, serving as treasurer for the chapter from 2014-17. In 2013, her work on NLP computational models and real-world applications was recognized by AWIS-CAC with the 7^th Innovator of the Year award. Her PhD mentees total 13 to date, half of which have been women—almost double the national computer science average. I had the pleasure of speaking with her and learning about her academic career and passion for mentorship.

Dr. Di Eugenio had a love for mathematics growing up and wanted to find an interesting way to apply it. It was during her undergraduate years at the University of Turin when she first had the opportunity to consider whether she would pursue research as a career. She credits her academic mentors with the strong encouragement to do exactly this. However, she says it was more “happenstance” that she chose the field of NLP. By the time she was ready to pick a topic for her undergraduate thesis, it came down to either operating systems or NLP. Her criteria for selecting the topic came down to how friendly and approachable the professors she contacted were. As it turned out, she was not able to schedule an appointment with the operating systems professor. To pursue her new field further, she made her to way to Rutgers University as a Fulbright Fellow and then University of Pennsylvania for a PhD in computer science. From there, she continued teaching and doing research in Pittsburgh for five years before starting at UIC as an Assistant Professor. “In thirty years, the field has changed so much. I started working on it; I started liking it; and I kept liking it. That’s why I’m still at it now!” she said with a chuckle. In 2002, a few years after starting at UIC, she received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award. This early career award advanced her research in educational applications of NLP while she dedicated herself to mentoring women scientists in computer science.

“I’m really passionate about mentoring students. This has always been my favorite part of the job and still really is. It’s really great to see someone who starts as a student and basically becomes a colleague with whom you can have intellectually stimulating discussions on topics of interest and advance the field and discuss issues. That really keeps me going. I’ve always been very keen on promoting women in science, particular in computer science.” UIC proved to be an exceptionally supportive institution for women in STEM. Dr. Di Eugenio credits another NSF grant (ADVANCE program) awarded in 2006 at UIC. This grant spurred recruitment of women faculty and postdocs and solidified a positive culture of leadership, which included a few senior women faculty members.

As with other rapidly evolving technology fields, NLP has big challenges to overcome. A major challenge, according to Di Eugenio, is the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, “I don’t buy or subscribe to the hype. I see how easily these technologies pervade society but … society is not ready or informed enough about the limitations, the dangers, and the inherent biases that can be there. At the same time, some of my areas of applications for NLP, health sciences and educational technologies, there is really an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of people.” I also asked her how she would like to contribute to the health and education sectors: “I hope I can make a difference if not directly through some result of my own then at least through pushing a viewpoint to the community.” One of her main viewpoints she is aiming to promote is to question the development of NLP into a form of black box machine learning. That is to say, she is committed to ensuring that the algorithms and training sets used for NLP are transparent and understandable so that we can feel secure about how a decision or output was generated.

I was also interested to learn what professional goals Dr. Di Eugenio has in sight beyond 2021. One is serving as a NSF program officer for a few years so that she can play a role on “the other side of the grant review process.” The second involves the interaction of NLP with social media platforms: “This past spring, I led a seminar on NLP for social media. It was enlightening, especially reading these papers that concern what social media can do wrong—hate, bullying, and so on. But also sometimes techniques to discover bias sort of reintroduce bias from a different perspective. For example, there is work on recognizing offensive language. There was a very interesting paper we looked at that tried to attribute tweets to African American or white writers. Then lo and behold, the African American tweets were considered more offensive because these techniques are not very sophisticated. If they see a certain word, they think it’s offensive but in that context in that community it might not be offensive. So, these issues are interesting and complicated. I haven’t really worked on social media research-wise and so that’s an area I would maybe like to make a contribution to going forward.”

At the end of our conversation, Dr. Di Eugenio offered some parting words of advice that should ring true for academics. “Learn to say no,” she said first. “I don’t know if it’s being a woman, or being an assistant professor, or being at the beginning of your career, but it is really hard to say no to things. But one has to be able to focus on the important things.” Second, she stressed the importance of finding a good mentor: “That is one of the things that came out from this [NSF] ADVANCE grant, a formal mentoring program at UIC in general, not just for STEM.” Finally, she gave a practical tip that I found very helpful: “I found that I have to put slots in my calendar for writing. Only then could I make progress [on a book]. Consider it a meeting time for yourself and your work. It should be some time on your schedule reserved for the important things you need to do to advance your career …. I talk about this like I have practiced it for 30 years, but I guess that is a thing one learns …. I would recommend it.”