Jen Franks graduated from UNC in 2020 with a Ph.D. She was interviewed by Shu Zhang in April 2021 when she was a Research Scientist at Adrenas Therapeutics (BridgeBio Pharma).
As a research scientist, how’s working at BridgeBio different from working in a lab when you were in graduate school?
It’s very similar in that I do a lot of similar assays. I’m learning new ones as well. I’m getting cross-trained in a lot of different procedures, which is great. I work with a lot of different people. In terms of differences, the management style is different. In grad school, you task one person with one project, whereas in industry there’s more cross-functional teams. I’ve worked with multiple managers that aren’t my direct manager. I’ll get pulled to work on a different project for a couple weeks, because they need bodies, like “Can you help us out with this?” or “We haven’t had anybody to figure this out and you have this experience”. This would probably not happen in academia. A PI wouldn’t snap a grad student from another PI just like that. I really like that because then you get to work with different people and learn different skills. It’s great in terms of expanding your own leadership and managerial capacities as a manager, but then also for somebody under them to learn those different styles of working with other people, which is really important. I can’t underline that enough. You don’t really get that aspect of collaboration unless you do it. This type of collaboration or diverse experience can be a little bit harder to get in academia since academia can be a little more siloed. That’s what I found in my experience.
What is the structure and responsibility of your team?
My direct manager has multiple scientists that work with him, and he holds weekly meetings to assign tasks and divide up the work to ensure the projects keep moving forward at a good pace and everyone has a balanced workload. He’s not hovering over our shoulders for results. I finish the work as soon as I can and show him the results. There is a lot more communication. We also have weekly meetings as individuals in addition to our team meetings, but there’s not this sense of pressure to hurry up and get the data. It just kind of happens because people are efficient.
Do you think you have a better work and life balance now?
Absolutely. The kind of work I did was very time sensitive, so I’d have to add drugs at certain times and harvest things at certain times. And so that kind of work did make it a little challenging to have a work-life balance, but in this job the work I need to complete can fit into a standard work day If you want to ten to six, nine to five, or eight to four, there’s flexibility to accommodate your preferred schedule, and they try not to have you work nights and weekends which was not the case when I was in grad school.
So, in that way it’s been a lot better and I do appreciate that, but there is the reality that if there ever was a push to complete an objective under a deadline, they will ask us to put the work in to get it done. So, there’s the realization that we act like a small company, even though were part of the larger BridgeBio. We are nimble like a small company. When things need to be adjusted we just tag team and work with everybody so we can avoid having late nights and weekends.
How did GBCC help you launch your career?
GBCC was helpful because it gave me the opportunity to interact with people that were in the positions where I could visualize myself hoping to be someday. I’m really excited to be at the bench as a scientist, but who knows where I’ll be in the future and it’s good to see that at my company the lead scientists are at the bench.
Thanks to Jen for spending time with us to learn more about her experiences! If you’re interested in following her footsteps, you can visit the website of the GBCC.