 So, thank you for the film. We're moving on to our next section in the chat earlier. Someone said, oh, DNA and genomics looks really cool. Is it all over-subscribed, and is there any room for someone new to get into the field? So I wrote back, not only is there room, there's actually many, many spaces. So our next session, which I will leave it to our moderator, Chris Gunter, to do the introductions for, is to just show you the wide range of different careers that are available in genetics and genomics, and in fact, for many of these, we need more people. So all the folks in Ghana should know this, all the folks listening should know this, as well as all of you in the room. So take away Chris. Thank you to everyone that's here and everyone watching online. I think this is going to be one of the most exciting parts of today. No offense to Adam for his video, but very exciting. So my name is Chris Gunter. I'm the Senior Advisor to the Director for Genomics Engagement. I think they asked me to moderate because I have tried out all the careers out there at some point. So I've done academia and publishing and nonprofit and now government. So, but what I'm going to do is ask each of our panelists to introduce themselves to you. So maybe we'll start on the endless Stephanie there. Good afternoon. I'm really excited to be here. So I'm Stephanie Morris and I'm a Program Director, a.k.a. Program Officer, a.k.a. Health Scientist Administrator, and an Extramural Research Program here at NHGRI in the Division of Genome Sciences. And I'll just quickly, yeah, whoo-hoo to that. Being a program officer is like a black box. So I'll just say that a big part of our job and maybe our tagline is that we serve two words of the taxpayers' dollars that go towards funding biomedical research and training. So we support a lot of the funding that goes out to medical organizations, research institutions and the forms of grants and contracts. Good afternoon. My name is Kevin Bishop. I'm a biologist with the Zebrafish Corps of NHGRI. I've been here for about 15 years, 16 years now. I have a very fascinating job where I get to model cancers and an actual live animal and see if we can fix it, correct it, or try to heal somebody by rare diseases, by solutions. We have an opportunity in my lab where we are very creative. We define very creative ways to answer very complex questions. And it's a great place to be. Hi everyone. My name is Amy Tereff and I am a genetic counselor. I work in a patient-facing role so I work with individuals and families who might be at risk of genetic disease or be diagnosed with genetic conditions. Right now I work on a research study called Identify with pregnant women who have undergone genetic testing to learn something out about their babies and they unexpectedly learn something about themselves. So they come here to the NIH clinical center and have a thorough evaluation for cancer. And sometimes we're learning that they have a medical condition that we incidentally picked up by a genetic test. I also do research to understand kind of the personal experience of receiving this sort of information. So we're trying to understand what it's like to receive that sort of information. So as genetic counselors and healthcare providers, we can do a better job of disclosing those results and supporting the people who receive them. And you all met me, but I will also say that I have two hats so to speak. So I'm lucky enough to work in the office of the director, including with the office of communications at times. And also I'm doing some evaluation of our grant programs to look at what's working and what we could do better on. And then I also run a small lab called the Engagement Methods Unit. And we look at autism genetics and genomics. Hello. You might be sick in my face already today, so I'm sorry. But I'm Jenny Montuth. I run the social media for NHGRI. And I help the NHGRI director with his account. I also help write some of the fun videos that you've seen today. But I really just try and take all of the amazing research that happens at NHGRI and make it fun and accessible for wider audiences on social media and beyond. And it's a really rewarding job. Hi. I'm Joyce Tung. I'm vice president of Research at 23andMe, which is the direct to consumer genetic testing company. Our team runs our participant centric human genetics research program for the 80 to 90 percent of 23andMe customers who opt in to participate in research. So we're responsible for genetic discovery that not only supports the business, but also for collaborations with both academic and industry researchers. My name is Ben Salman. I'm the clinical director here at NHGRI. As a fancy way of saying my job is to support all the clinical studies that go on in the hospital attached to where we are right now. Folks coming in so we can understand genetic conditions better. People who are coming in for some of the treatment trials like gene therapy that happen here at the clinical center at NHGRI. I think we'll talk a little bit later about some of my previous paths. But the only other thing I want to mention, one of the things I love about my job is that within the office of the clinical director, we have a wonderful and large training program for physicians and laboratorians who are going on for clinically oriented or research oriented genetic careers. Thank you so much everybody. So what I'm going to do is kind of ask questions in order here. I'm going to ask you to elaborate a little bit more on their introductions. And then we have time for the Q&A at the end. So we would love to hear from people watching. So Stephanie, I'm going to mix things up and start with you on the end. You got this. You got this. So you alluded to this in your introduction, but there does seem to be a lot of misunderstanding about what extramural program officers do. Can you tell us more about that and also how someone that's interested could become a program officer? I'll try my best. So it's like a black box. So a lot of you in the audience here may be involved in research in what we call our intramural research program here at the NIH. The extramural portion of what we do at the NIH is really to support all of the research that occurs across the country and other parts of the world. And we provide funding to do that. This is in the form of grants that go out to research institutions that go to individual labs to support the research that they're doing. A lot of what I do is a lot of planning and thinking about where funding should go. Thinking about the science and sort of the questions that still need to be answered and a lot of the investigators are asking them. I do a lot of different things. So a lot of planning, reading about science, talking to scientists and advising them about what we are trying to achieve here at NHGRI and talk about our mission at the NIH. We have 27 institutes and centers and each of those institutes and centers have a different mission and different goal. And so we try to make sure that investigators find the right fit in terms of thinking about how to get their research funded. So if you're interested in a career in program management, and so there's a lot of managing of not just the funds that we give out and the supported grants, but also large research programs. There could be large consortia where we bring investigators together. If you're interested in something like that, it's really knowing your science in terms of trying to get into this. It's usually based on initially your expertise. But I'll say once you become a program officer, you can end up managing a portfolio of grants in a totally different area than what you originally studied. So if you're interested in something like this, you would usually go to graduate school. You might actually do an additional training, do a postdoctoral training and think about what you are interested in supporting. It's a job where you're constantly learning, learning all the time and that's a big part of why I love it. I get to see the broad portfolio of what we're doing and supporting here at the NIH. I can go on and on and on, Chris, but I'll stop. Thank you. People can ask questions, hopefully if they want to know more. So I'm going to move on to you, Kevin. So as you mentioned in your intro, you've been at the Zebra Fish Corps for many years and I think one of the coolest parts of that is that you get to work on so many different projects. And I know you've seen a lot of different things come and go. What are some of the most interesting questions or trends that you've seen over time? Let's see, trends over time. I would say that the biggest game changer that we've had is undoubtedly CRISPR-Cas9 technology. That was a complete game changer. The ability to manipulate the genome in specific ways to knock in or knock out specific, you know, sequences, specifically human sequences and try to correct those has been phenomenal for the Zebra Fish in particular. Initially we had a genome technology. It was very labor-intensive. We couldn't dictate how we manipulated the genome. One of our early projects was actually with Dr. Francis Collins trying to make him a mutant. It didn't quite work, which is something that we all kind of get used to and research things just don't work sometimes. But, besides that, I mean, we've just, you know, working with a variety of projects really expands your skill set. We don't answer just one question. We answer many questions over time. We work from anything from blood to brain to... We've done projects with cancer metastasis. You name it, we've probably done it. We've made genetic animals. We've done a lot of very, very creative things with the Zebra Fish in hopes of advancing that toward, you know, clinical research and things like that to hopefully get up to humans. But yeah. Yeah, thank you. That's exactly what we're looking for. Yeah. And I'm going to move on to you. Amy, so I have a number of trainees that I'm mentoring and I talk to a number of trainees. And so many more people are interested in genetic counseling, which is fantastic because, as you know, we need a lot of genetic counselors. So what would you tell people to do or learn before applying to a program? Yeah, I think my main piece of advice for people who are considering genetic counseling as a profession is to learn as much about it as you can through talking to different genetic counselors in different practice areas who trained at different genetic counseling programs, talking to students in current programs, exposing yourself to some of the maybe patient populations that you could work with as a genetic counselor. There's lots of summer camps for kids with genetic conditions. There's different types of advocacy experiences. A lot of prospective students do crisis counseling or other ways to expose themselves to the type of situations that we as genetic counselors face. And the reason why I think that's important is because there are so many incredible applicants to genetic counseling programs each year. The programs are really competitive. There's few slots. And I think what really makes someone stand out is the ability to demonstrate that they're making an informed choice. They understand what it means to be a genetic counselor and they're committed to the profession because we need genetic counselors. And I think that from a program perspective, you don't want to invest in training someone who decides, well, actually, I want to be a doctor or I want to be a psychiatrist. So I think showing and understanding the profession and a commitment to it is my advice by speaking to as many people as you can. That's a great advice for anybody, but especially for counseling, as you said, because there are so many different components that go into it. Yeah, thank you. Okay, Jenny. I wanted to ask this question in the form of a meme, but I couldn't really think of any good ones. So I'm just going to ask you straight out. So I think many scientists and science appreciators understand the importance of science communication. So could you tell us a little bit about what you have found works for scientists? And more importantly, I think as Kevin alluded to, we learn from failure sometimes too. So what does not work sometimes when scientists are trying to use social media? Sure, yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think the field of genomics is really amazing because I think all these scientists are so passionate about getting the word out and talking more about this exciting field. So I think people that work in science communication understand that it's so important to help people feel that this is an accessible part of science. I know that I didn't come from a high school that even talked about genomics. I didn't know what it was. Most of the time when I tell people about my job, they're still asking what the word genomics is. And so this field is so interesting because it's newer and it's really just great to see people that are trying to allow the public audience understand that genomics is just as much for them as it is the scientists. And as this keeps progressing and becomes a bigger part of healthcare, it's just really amazing to help people understand that genomics doesn't have to be scary or overwhelming or inaccessible at all. You know, I also did not have that background. So I think it's just as important to have scientists as it is people from other backgrounds to help communicate about it. And so I think the things that don't work in terms of social media are when it's just communicated as just a relevant message. I think it can be misconstrued that just because something's relevant means that you don't have to meet the audience where they are. So a big part of science communication, I think, is to be a part of the world that people are in in social media. So the memes are so much more than just trying to get attention or just trying to get numbers. It's trying to get emotional engagement, which is just as important as the message itself. Yeah, definitely, because people don't come to your post knowing nothing, right? They come with a preconceived set of notions. So you have to think about how they're going to interact with it. Exactly. Yeah. Cool. Okay. So I have questions for Joyce and Ben, but I'm going to warn you all that then after that what I'm going to do is let you ask questions of each other. So also be prepared for that, too. So we're going to shake it up a little. So, Joyce, I know you probably get questions all the time about how do I go into industry and all that kind of thing, but I read an interview with you where you said you didn't really like taking risks that much, which I thought was kind of ironical given that you were in the industry. So can you tell us a little about how you square that tension and then how you've seen that change over time, maybe? Yeah, it's a great question. It is true. I am pretty risk averse. And at the time that I actually joined 23andMe, this was before the company had launched a product. So there were like six people and there was no website and there's no product. And of course, you also know that most startups fail, right? So I had like a nice postdoc. Is this something that I really want to do? Fortunately, I had a cousin who had done an industry postdoc. It was now a scientist at a company. And I was like, well, Ben, what do you think? And he was like, well, if you want to go into industry, I think even like a year's worth of experience there is probably going to help you more than like another year of postdocs. So that gave me the confidence to join. And then, you know, it's been 15 years and so far I think it's worked out. But, you know, I think now that I've had the experience, so the other thing that he told me is that like of all the people he knows who moved to industry, none of them have ever looked back. And so I think it feels risky at the moment because all you know is academia because that's where everybody gets trained. But I would say looking back at it now, I actually don't think industry is more risky inherently than academia, right? Like all these people who have had long careers gone to many different things, tried all sorts of different careers even within industry, right? Like I think it's a really exciting way of doing science particularly for people who want to be close to the application of science. It's like a very common thing that I hear from people who join 23 in these that they like the idea of doing something that would impact people very directly. So, you know, I think like, it's just maybe the whole framing is different. It's not necessarily riskier. It's just different and because it's unknown at the time it feels more scary, but it's actually not. Yeah, no, that's great advice. And I'm sure you would also probably say that you learn skill sets in each position that you can take with you, right? Yeah, absolutely. Which leads right into my question for Ben, which is that Ben has also worked in industry for a hospital system, for a private company and now the government. So what did you learn from each of those? How do they differ from each other? Just for full disclosure, I got fired a lot. Different things happen serendipitously. And I would say, let me first start with some of the good things. One of the things I realized just by additional way of explanation. So I initially trained here, then left was in healthcare, then in industry, and then came back. I think one thing that was immediately clear to me when I've been in different roles at different places is there are smart people everywhere and they may not always be the most obvious places. I'll give an example. So one of the most brilliant people in my entire life I've ever met, and he says to this, he'll know exactly who it is, but was someone who decided that grad school wasn't for him, became a baker, decided that, you know, baking wasn't necessarily working out and went back to kind of computer science, bioinformatics stuff, and he was in industry and just because of how much he loved it and how good he was, he didn't have traditional, some of the paths that some of us have taken out here in the audience or here at NIH or in academia, but man, he knocked my socks off and you meet a lot of people that didn't necessarily find or follow the most traditional paths. I thought that was really cool. I also loved about industry, how fast a lot of it moved and sometimes so fast that I feel like I was getting whiplash and I thought, whoa, let's slow down a little bit, but it is very neat the speed at which things can happen. Just like Joyce said in healthcare, I think one of the most exciting things is just seeing the applications of genetics at the bedside and also realizing it's not just, and for the most part, in a genetics department where it's happening at, you know, in the most volume, so it's happening a lot in, let's say, a NICU or a cancer clinic or a clinic for people with different heart issues, and that was, I thought really eye-opening that more and more genetics isn't happening by someone like me or, you know, like Amy, a genetic counselor. It's everywhere and there's good and there's bad about it, but it's really, really spreading out. Now, I want to briefly and I promise I won't perseverate or out this, but I want to talk about some of the challenges, you know, that I realize in these different settings and I just want to mention a couple. One is it's very clear and I can't speak for other countries, but in the U.S. how complex our healthcare system is. You know, different hospital systems, different medical record systems, different insurance companies, and all of that fragmentation makes people who are even all, you know, trying to push in the same direction it makes it really hard and I don't think there's any easy solutions to solve those, but that's one big issue that, you know, really came front and center to me I realized in these different roles. The other thing I realized, which I, you know, I think was one of the inspirations for me to want to come back here and beg Eric can I come back here, but was the disparities in healthcare. So someone, you know, at the exact same hospital, patient one, patient two, you know, being seen by the same physician or genetic counselor because of where that person's insurance was or, you know, what their family's income was, they could have very different access to testing, to treatments and so on and so forth. I think that's a huge challenge in the U.S. healthcare system in all healthcare systems and all throughout the world for genetics and for everything else and again, I think that's something that hopefully everybody in the room and everybody online can think a lot about and how we could help address some of those disparities. I can talk way more about this but I'm going to shut up for the sake of time Chris and everybody. We have plenty of time, it's all good. So what I'm going to do is ask the whole panel a question and anybody can weigh in and wants to and then I'm going to let you ask each other a question because that's one of the best things about NHGRI is we're all really interesting people and have interests in lots of things. So what struck me when this panel was put together is that when, as I think someone said, when you're training, I think Joyce said when you're training in academia, you're taught that that's where everybody trains and et cetera and I know that when I'm a little older maybe than some people here, but I'm a postdoc for a publishing position that I could never get back into academia and I was leaving the track and would never be able to get back in and so when I eventually became an associate professor I definitely took a screenshot of my name and the directory and sent it to my postdoc advisor but anyway, the point is that what we should think about is that I think everyone up here has what we call alternative careers back in the day. Only 8% of those people who get biology, PhDs go into tenure, track, faculty positions so really I would love for all of us to remember that's the alternative career at this point. So how do you all feel about that? Did you encounter that as you were going on your path? Did people say to you that you were going into an alternative career so to speak and how did you deal with that? I have to go down the line but I guess we will a little bit. So probably about 15 years ago I was a postdoc here at the NIH and they had symposia and workshops about alternative careers and at the time I think it was either you go into academia or you go into industry and I thought I don't think I want to go into academia I don't want to have to autoclave plastic conical tubes because I don't have enough funds to buy new ones so that happened actually and industry wasn't necessarily my direct next step and I thought well maybe I'll do something where I can take my skills coordinating and that's what led me into a position on the other side of campus which was really like a world away I have to say it's now like 15 years later and I don't think this is an alternative career what I'm doing every time we have panels like this we make them more visible so this is the norm this is a career in science all the things that we're doing right now and this is we're normalizing it every time we talk about it so I actually have a master's in public history which is taking historical scholarship and trying to make it accessible for public audiences and when I got it it was a fairly new term I think it was only in the first few years of it happening and there was a lot of debate about it a lot of historians with PhDs didn't like this field and thought it was unnecessary and we're trying to cut funding we were the only public history program in the state of Maryland and that was true for most states and I had a lot of professors constantly trying to talk me out of it and trying to get my PhD and I remember just feeling frustrated like I'm reading this historical scholarship I was working in a field that a lot of scholarship hadn't happened yet and I was like it's all happening amongst the same historians and then there submitting journal entries and the same things and it's like the same arguments they're cycling through and I was like it feels so important as a public historian to get that out there and stop the cycle and I think that as soon as I came here even being intimidated without a genomics background I think there's a lot of intersections with science communication and I felt like you know I mean science communication is blowing up too but I think that's true that you don't need to have a PhD on these topics and I think the more people are learning that the more you see more people becoming more passionate about this work and how important it is in terms of career path right you know no one has a linear path there's always the versions for me in particular I don't have a PhD I just so happened to work in a zebrafish live in my undergrad and when I got there you know it's like a zebrafish and I didn't take it seriously I was like what is that how does a fish relate to a human and then after a couple years you kind of start to put things together and I'm like oh I didn't know they have similar processes their brain is similar to ours their eyes similar to ours and then when I got here it was kind of at the beginning of the core I think it was the second year the core was open then I kind of got the gravity of the animal model of what it could do and again it was intimidating because you dropped full of brilliant people I mean some of the most brilliant people have ever been in their life and you have to kind of catch up and it can be intimidating but once you slowly catch up and you figure things out then you start to open up your mind to figure out like oh I can solve this problem oh I know how to do this I can try this I didn't know I can do this either so there is no one way in I think opportunity kind of presents itself at different times and it's your choice to take it or not and I'm very happy I took this opportunity instead of being in academia because it doesn't sound fun that's it sorry it can be fun I can take a stab as well I mean one thing that I you know heard from some of the other people too is like finding a place where you know you can use your particular skills or interests right so and I think Jen Wojcik had said this earlier on about like how loud work was probably not for her you know because like your clothes get bleached and I did think like after many years of this I'm like I'm not particularly good at loud work nor do I particularly love it and even after I went to 23andMe where I didn't have to do loud work anymore you know I was trained more as molecular biologist so I did a lot of PCR I spun a lot of things in centrifuges right like and but it became very clear to me very quickly that human genetics was going the way of statistical genetics and I was like crap I don't know anything about statistics you know you know am I going to go maybe do another postdoc do this sort of thing I was like I could or I could try to lean into some of the other maybe skills or interests that I have you know I'm like I like working with other people I like trying to communicate science to other people and as it turns out like running a group of scientists in a company actually required me to do that so I think you know there's definitely like and I think you I've heard this multiple times just like there are different kinds of roles and I think we talked to I talked to a lot of people in the company who are just kind of like well they started off doing one thing but then actually decided that they have an interest in something else so just as an example like a lot of the research associates that we have have moved on to roles in marketing product business development some of them have become software engineers and so really like I think there's just so many different ways that you can go and I think part of the journey is trying out different things and finding out what really works for you sure so I guess for me I went into a profession that most people had never heard of so whether that was my own family my friends the random person sitting next to you on an airplane when someone asked what you do and you say I'm a genetic counselor for a lot of people they've never had a reason to interact with a genetic counselor they don't know anything about it whereas if you say you're a doctor a nurse a social worker people have an idea of what that is so I think that that was how I kind of saw my career as being a little bit different and then even as a genetic counselor working in research was not kind of the mainstream path I started my career in ophthalmology which there were very few of us at the time that I was working in ophthalmology but I think that there's so much opportunity that comes with that and now there are so many genetic counselors who work here at the NIH there's a lot of genetic counselors who work in ophthalmic genetics and it's been really rewarding to see the profession grow I guess the only thing I would add I apologize I'm not really going to answer the question I'm just going to reflect on some of the responses or just add something adjacent to it perhaps and it's one of the things that I love perhaps the most about genetics is that it's always changing and if one wants you don't have to do this but there are always opportunities to go into new areas new computational areas new types of lab assays new ways to look at or think about patients clinically and so there's tons of opportunities it can be really intimidating my poor teenage daughter is often the one that has to point out errors that I'm making when I'm coding these days her mind just works much faster than mine these days but the fact that there are always new challenges I think is just amazing when I was a medical student I was shadowing a geneticist and someone who I still think I put it up on a pedestal and I think that's the reason I want to go into genetics the way he approached patients and how compassionate he was and I remember him telling me we were seeing a patient with autism and I remember him saying oh there's this brand new super cool test that the child has autism and that may not ring a bell for everybody but for those of you who aren't aware that's the equivalent of saying oh man look at this brand new animal a tyrannosaurus rex it's this ancient history and so things change so quickly and even now when we talk to people like Adam Philippi from the screen what's coming up next the technologies is so different than it is or was even a couple of years ago yeah thank you so I'm going to give you a chance to ask each other questions what do you want to know about careers at NHGRI and genetics and genomics can I ask a question of Amy? so Amy I think one of the things that I've always admired the most perhaps or one of the things I admire a lot about the genetic counseling field is how it's exploded and expanded into so many areas clinical research and just the number of genetic counselors that is expanding so for those of us in other genetic careers physicians, people in the laboratory lots of kinds of clinicians what's your advice or what do you think genetic counselors did right to be able to seize the moment to allow the growth in such a dramatic and impressive way sorry I put you on the spot but whatever I'm just curious about their thoughts yeah no that's a really great question you know I think that there are so many skills that we are taught as genetic counselors just translate into different areas so the ability to communicate effectively with patients and their families translates to the ability to communicate effectively with your colleagues with people working in different areas of genomics than you so I think that a lot of the counseling skills and also the scientific understanding and the ability to kind of as we advocate for our patients advocate for the role of genetic counselor and the value added in these different practice areas maybe allowed us to penetrate industry and lab and to your comment earlier just the way that things have moved when I graduated from genetic counseling there were very few genetic counselors in lab settings and again that was an alternative career which now is no longer so it is remarkable just how much things have changed and then again the opportunity that comes with that where it's not uncommon for someone to start in clinical practice go to the lab maybe return to clinical practice go to research and that's part of what makes the profession so exciting Jen I have a question for you if people don't know our NHGRI social media is award winning and I think a lot of that has to do with a lot of the things that you put out I'm wondering when you're putting together some of your posts are there ever any sort of concepts that you find are difficult to relate to the public in that form? Yeah I think there can be a lot of challenges with trying to make something engaging and accessible but it might be a more complex topic and some of the I would say some of the more fun campaigns I've put together are some of the ones that have been hardest like informed consent for example I think that's such an important thing to get through is how it's required but how essential it is to science and I think that was such a big part of being on social media and engaging with our followers and building trust is to talk about some of these topics and diversity and genomics research and even some of the more current science that has come out and I just think but I think research aside it is the more kind of social issues that can be the hardest to kind of meet our followers where they are and own up to things like the history of eugenics and scientific racism in this field and what we're doing to acknowledge that and address it and so I think from what I've heard from other government accounts I mean I hear them say that they envious for using memes but I hear more so that they envious for being able to talk about these things explicitly and how they wish that they could work with their staff more to encourage them to be more up front with their voice on social media and so I think trying to work hard at building and engaging voice is more than just being friendly and fun it's knowing when to address something and knowing when to say we messed up and we're trying to address it and we're trying to move forward or the field has so much work to do and here's our role so yeah it's a really it's a challenge but it's important and we have an amazing communications team that I just love working at it with constantly so you set us up for the next question which is maybe y'all can tell us what the best part of your job is what's the part you like about it the most and I'll go first and say I really like working with trainees I have students again, post-baccalaureate students so if you are a student who's in undergrad and you're not quite ready to commit to grad school you're trying to figure out what you want to do we have a two-year program at NIH called the post-baccalaureate trainee and that is a great opportunity to spend two years working in a lab and get training and get positioned to go into grad school so that's what I like the most but anybody else? I think one of the things that I like the most wherever I've worked is getting groups of people and we've talked to one point I want to make is we've talked about all these separate entities and we're saying here's academia, here's industry here's NIH, here's others I think one of the most fun and exciting times is getting people together from these different groups and sometimes people have a foot on each side working together around to address common problems and I think more and more in genetics and in healthcare and biomedicine in general to solve some of the big challenging questions that's what it takes just the numbers to do it and the numbers of different types of people thinking about things and so working together it's not always easy because there can be the more folks and the more questions the more complex it gets but that gets really fun is doing these big projects that can address some of the big questions Can I ask a question of all the panelists because you all do such amazing work I'm curious what you're most excited about like what topics in your field that you're most excited about working on so I'm involved with our genome technology program and so I think seeing how the technologies are changing they're changing so quickly and there always these new funny names for some really serious technologies that enable us to explore the genome learn more about how that relates to different phenotypes and proteins that they're translated into so it's how fast the technologies are changing and how they're being applied and we see a lot of the technologies that may start off at our institute at genome going off into other areas maybe they're applied to cancer maybe they're applied to infectious diseases so seeing those changes in those applications is really always exciting to me For me, since I work on the bench I get to use the technology which is really cool if you like new toys we get to use it we get to try it out and being intramural as opposed to extramural we don't have the same physical strengths to try different things so it's phenomenal we get to try everything if it's new, if it's brand new, if it looks cool we'll try it it doesn't always work but we'll definitely try it so that's the best part I am most excited about the research study that I work on which is amazing it's called Identify and we essentially are trying to generate the evidence needed to inform professional guidelines to change care for pregnant people who receive results that could suggest that they have an occult malignancy so it's a study that is going to impact what happens when these results happen in the clinical environment and it also provides proof of principle that we can use blood tests to screen people in the general population for cancer that otherwise we might not have a way to screen for so it's really exciting to imagine the ways that this is going to transform care not only in the prenatal setting but then more broadly yes, an occult malignancy is maybe a tumor that you have that you have no other symptoms of so we enroll people who are seemingly completely healthy and discover that they actually have cancer despite not having symptoms yet and I'll answer before passing it on I am very excited and a little afraid because this is really complicated because I work on autism at looking at the interface of genetics and environment so autism is often thought of as the most highly heritable mental condition and at the same time we know that there are environmental contributors and we know that one person with autism does not look like another person with autism it's just such a wide net and yet the statistics just came out that one in 36, 8 year olds meet the diagnostic criteria for autism in the US so it is extremely common as well and very complex so just as a scientist that means there's a lot to dig into there and I love meeting people in the community and hearing their experience and I'm trying to answer both of the last two questions which is one of the things one of the things that brought me to 23andMe and what do I still love about it so I love science and I love scientists and I love working with such like a curious and like mission-driven group of people and that's really across the company in all sorts of different functions and it's really like that mission that brought me to the company to begin with which is this idea of really just trying to empower people with science and genetics about themselves and helping them use that information to make better informed decisions about their lifestyle or the care that they are taking where I want them to feel like they can be a peer to their clinical care team and really be engaged with them on like what's best because they feel smart informed because they got these genetic results and they can understand them too so I think that I'm super excited about the potential of really making people feel like they understand science and they are good at it and they can really have an impact with these experts on their own lives So again I'm going to cheat and I'm going to answer twice if that's okay so from two of the different hats I wear so for my own research group one of the things that I think is just mind boggling and I think everybody reads about it all the time but are all these that I know the term isn't all that well-liked but these artificial intelligence tools that are so much more powerful can be applied to so many different data sets in such cool ways I'll leave it at that but I just think it's going to be transformative for every aspect of genetics just about the second thing and I think about the patients that are walking a couple hundred yards from here NIH and AHA has a great history of is this tradition or you know this path where we really try to understand head to toe no pun intended you know the manifestations how a genetic condition affects a person which can sometimes not always but can sometimes lead to direct treatments through some of the things like we saw the drawings of gene editing and you know and there's gene therapy and other direct molecular treatments but I think that's just one of the most amazing things is that now conditions that I was diagnosing or I was helping diagnose in medical school and residency you know more and more there are getting to be treatments for them that are becoming available either on a research or sometimes a clinical basis and I think you know that's just amazing and so exciting when I put on my clinical director hat in terms of all the studies I support here at NHGRI that's good, that's a good question it's almost like you do that for a living so it's hard to follow up on that excitement but I do want to ask one of the burning questions that I know everyone wants to know how many fish are we talking about at any one time? At least over a million are in there in the facility I wouldn't be surprised, we have a lot of fish if you haven't been able to see the facility should come over but we give tours FYI but you know it's a massive facility that you have to really see to understand the scope of what's really down there what's your favorite of the million fish? Good question, it's Bobby we have these really cool fish that are actually transparent, we can see through them but that's probably the coolest coolest fish that we have Other question for each other I have a question for Ben so you know as we all know COVID for us was rough and you became like our doctor we would tune in like the last season finale like what's Ben going to say now how has that experience changed you how you interact with us how you interact with your patients and everyone else That's a tough question, this was not planned so I don't have a terrific answer with this I would say first of all by way of explanation I came in a few months before the pandemic hit before we were all aware of it in many ways it made my job a lot easier because everything was just laser focused on keeping NHGRIs as safe as possible, keeping the patients that we could still bring into the clinical center as safe as possible and just making sure that everything happened as well as it could, given very challenging circumstances so in many ways made things a lot easier instead of 100 priorities to try to help figure out this is number 1, 2, 3 through 99 maybe there are some other things so I would say that that made things much more straightforward and what I found more recently and I don't know what time period one would assign to it but within the last year or so as we're starting to come out of it and the clinical center is really reopening and a lot more of the studies have less restrictions for example bringing patients in and I was talking to Eric and Charles Ritimi about this the other day and all of a sudden things all the travel that happens now and all the complexities with bringing more patients in now and so having to re-learn a lot of those things I think was interesting, two good things came out of it though one is from being on the spot or talking to everybody in the town halls I had a chance to get to know folks a lot better whether they were asking me particular questions about this or that to which I would mostly say ask your doctor but just getting to know folks was good and then on just a personal level it was very hard for me for the entire world but it did philosophically give a chance to prioritize for myself what's important to me, what makes me and my family and my loved ones happy and I think that was a good reminder to myself, that's one silver lining I think about sometimes yeah thank you that's great, a lot of us relate to that I think I should take this opportunity to thank you because the first time I talked to you is when you gave us out your personal cell phone numbers to see if we had any questions about COVID and I was basically like my stomach hurts am I am I in danger I did get a lot of texts right to start by replying saying thank you for the question who is this just see some numbers up there my pleasure all questions so Joyce maybe I'll ask you a question so where do you see direct to consumer genomics going, I'm sure you get that question a lot but what would you want to share with anyone who's watching sure I mean we often say that the first part the first era I think of direct to consumer genetics was really about access making people's genetics more accessible to them you could just order it for yourself you could interpret the reports yourself because we tried to make it really as user friendly as possible and I think the next step we got this feedback from our customers from very early on is like what do I do next what are the actions I should take this information is great but like how do I use it to sort of improve my life and so I think for us a lot of it is really like how do we help people contextualize it and the other things that are going on for them and how do we help them take that next step some of that might be lifestyle changes helping them interact with clinical care as well and helping them if it's appropriate get blood tests, get screening see the right specialist and that sort of thing and so I think really it's about helping people benefit from that information as much as possible can I ask a follow-up question with a choice so I'll admit that when I've been in different venues including in a more traditional industry and I'm trying to figure out how to explain the tricky genetics concept often I'll be we would go to your website and I thought you did amazingly well 23andMe did amazingly well at explaining really difficult concepts with the results and so on so I'm just curious about your process how do you guys do that it's really terrific I have two answers for this number one I think we bring together experts in a lot of different things yes we have scientists, we have geneticists for example who specialize in making consumer products making them user friendly so I'll just give one anecdote from when I first started 23andMe and I was helping write some of these reports and there was some SNP in one of the reports and I was like hey let's just add this paragraph about how they think it might be affecting the binding site for this transcription factor and the product people were like Joyce nobody cares about that I'm like no it's super interesting they're like no Joyce they don't want that so some of it is like people have the experience to do what do consumers want but the bigger answer is like an enormous amount of user testing like you design you show it to people you ask them whether they understand it or not if they don't you tweak and you tweak and you tweak and you test and you do that a whole bunch of times and then we could demonstrate across a wide variety of educational backgrounds understanding the key concepts that we were trying to get across so you know some of it expertise but a lot of it is just like blood sweat and tears like almost all research yeah it sounds like so we're going to open it up to people in the auditorium and then online for Q&A where you can ask questions and I see Roseanne is maybe going to start us off we're on great we have an online question any advice for someone who is looking to change within genetics but doesn't necessarily have the resources to start a new training program or go the educational track I'll start and this is a because I don't know obviously the question but if I'm not going to give out my cell phone you can email me if that person online and I'm happy to provide more specific information I would say one of the things I think has been great and maybe was accelerated by the pandemic or all the online whether the MOOCs or learning courses or frankly my kids learn an amazing amount from YouTube in their more formal ways but there are tons of great formal and informal training programs for just about every aspect of genetics and maybe eventually you have to get in and actually touch a zebrafish or a pipette but there's so much you can learn through these programs many of which are free and many of which you can get formal certifications through and I found for myself and that's one of the things I did during the pandemic and things like that and so I think there are great opportunities but again find my email in the just Google Ben Salman at NIH and ask your specific question and I'm happy to direct according to your goals what those what some options might be I just want to add on like I think a lot of it is about getting your foot in the door so I might also consider looking for internships and stuff that you could get into some lab or company that came in as research associates and then recently got promoted to scientist after publishing their first papers I think there are opportunities if you're really driven to get that on the job training as you're going along so once you sort of find the right in you may take a slightly more junior position to begin with but then I think you can grow very quickly there's some value to just reaching out to people you have an area that you have even a spark of interest in reach out to them and do an informational interview talk to them about what they do and learn a little bit more and usually that leads to well what else do you want to learn about and they'll link you to someone else so that's part of getting your foot in the door talking to people finding out more about what you may be thinking you're interested in and getting more info My name is Ishaal Axino students could go to the programs why can't every grade of person go there because I want to go there and I feel like I'm ready even though I'm in second grade so why? As a pediatrician I would say there will be, I'm sure there will be more opportunities as you're older I will say they're also the opportunities they might not be as formal as if you're here after college or during med school but there are certainly opportunities through our website that younger learners can find out about. The other thing that I would say is that our educational branch has a lot of online activities and learning opportunities that people can take part in no matter how old they are from 0 to 200 from the comfort of their own home Yeah and also a lot of schools have Science Night so I went to my daughter's Science Night from like second grade through eighth grade and we did DNA extraction of strawberries so I'm telling you I've gone through thousands of strawberries so I would try going to Science Night that helps a lot too There are some really, I'm sorry I had one thing, there are some really neat programs too, the four ones like Skype a Scientist where teachers can invite scientists into classrooms and since geneticists are the coolest I would advise that your teacher find a geneticist to do that. Obviously Go ahead. Before I ask my question I'll also comment that DNA day is a great day for not just educators but also parents to get their kids involved so I'm a genetic counselor and my kids in their grade school I would go and we would build DNA strands out of candy that's a really popular one and as a genetic counselor I'm also a communicator and thank you so much Amy for talking about your experience and everybody on the panel what I really liked hearing is that everyone on the panel got to a point where they were the decision you know is this using my skills and where am I going to go now and something that is also really valuable is everybody works as a team in genomics and genetics none of us can do this alone and so my question for really anyone on the panel is when you made that decision to make a shift in your career who were the people around you encouraging you and is there anything that you would recommend to educators, parents and your colleagues to help the next generation of geneticists and genetic counselors come along I would say for college kids in particular if you want to go into science it would be a great idea to make sure you form a relationship with your professor because my professor got the phase on from Virginia State probably my biggest influence in my career path you have to you have to get to know these people and you have to be able to ask them hard questions because they will tell you the truth and that lie to you and say oh you'll be fine you have to really understand what you're getting yourself into and be able to trust the people that are giving you that information so I would highly highly highly recommend get to know them hang out, go to lunch, go to office hours you know if you really want to do it you need that and also for recommendation letters you're not going to get a good one if they don't know you so get to know your professors so I think this has been brought up a couple times of like asking for advice and also how fast the field of genomics moves but I just wanted to ask the panel if there are a particular set of skills and it can be really intimidating for people to try and get into careers in genomics and genetics but if there are any particulars like skills or your most favorite skill that you think really helped you keep up with such a fast fast-paced field be able to synthesize a lot of information quickly and that's a skill you practice over time but I think probably for a lot of us is being able to communicate with others and work with others and be able to write well and give presentations work by myself but also as part of a team and then always having your critical thinking skills sharpened and using them yeah and I would just add also being flexible and not be rigidly holding on to any ideas I think even in the short time that I've been in it things have changed you know things that I was taught in graduate school and were on my qualifying exams have no longer been shown to be true so that's one of the things I love about genetics and genomics is we so many discoveries just open up Pandora's box of holding questions so to me that's one of the things that you have to have is just being able to be flexible and learn new information and adapt I also want to add like I don't think any of us should try to feel pressure that we actually have to know all the things it's actually impossible right we all specialize and have certain things that we know better and to your point earlier like teamwork right it's us working together with other people with different kinds of specialties that kind of makes the magic and so like I gave up on trying to know all the things like ages ago right it's like filled with friends episodes and stuff so like there's not that much space for everything else but that's okay because I have friends who do know those things see friends again builds on that so I often am hiring people and one of the things I think is sometimes I have a lot of people who put their thoughts forward and it's great and then there's some people who they're trying to change careers or they're trying to go in a non-traditional direction and they get to the interview stage or the application stage and they don't make that transition in that point and so I'm just thinking if you guys have experienced that or if you have thoughts yourself about how to sort of think about that critical juncture you got your foot in the door you did the informational interview and now you're ready to actually try to apply and it might just be that one step away from the comfort zone how do you think about that part of the process I can take a stab at that too having interviewed many people over the years I mean I do think I mean you know I'm sure we've all seen it either for ourselves or friends like transitioning into a different career is a really challenging thing because a lot of times you just don't know the context of the thing that you're trying to go to I think one very common theme that I've heard in these kinds of panels over the years is the importance of a mentor and so I think somebody had mentioned networking before trying to find somebody who is willing to put a little bit of extra time into helping you navigate review your CV practice questions with you what are the standards what's common practice, common culture and where you're going because otherwise how do you know and I think this is I think one of the big causes of disparities that you see between different groups is access to mentorship and networks and that sort of thing and so you know the kinds of programs that like match people with mentors and that sort of thing I think are super valuable because that's the way you're going to level the playing field If I could just add one thing to this maybe not so much putting myself in the role of the person doing the hiring or interviewing but in the person being interviewed you know just to keep in mind that sometimes the path between point A and point B isn't straight and I definitely had my share of failures or things that didn't work out and eventually you'll get to there if it's something that you're really passionate about so I don't let a failure or something that didn't work out deter you if your goal is really doing something and I think in terms of making that transition also it's really difficult when you're interviewing not to spend any time thinking about what you need and what you want but also spending time thinking about what the organization needs and I definitely have created a number of jobs with people at the organization that has been through figuring out what they need and figuring out how my skills could fill that so spending some time thinking about what the organization needs to yeah we're going to try to fit in one more question all for bringing you know diverse careers in genetics to this panel and full disclosure I'm a clinical laboratory geneticist and we've talked a lot about what students or people who are interested in genetics can do but I would ask each of you particularly in light of the fact that in genetics we have a diversity issue and who can access tests but also and who can sit in your shoes in our shoes what would you say to people who are currently in the field what can they actively do instead of putting the onus on students or people who are interested to encourage and break through and you know open our field up to everyone I can start while everyone's getting ready so I'm sure you may know that NHGRI has our own diversity action agenda that we're working on thanks to Mr. Vince Bonham and many people working with him so to me that's a start as we definitely are kind of trying to put our money where our mouth is so to speak and actually do something about addressing that issue but where can individual people start I guess is what you're asking I'll take it back off that I participate on that program one thing that beside that you know that we can do is go out in the community and have people see us because a lot of times people have an idea in their mind of what a scientist looks like and if you look at this room it's really diverse but they don't know that so I'll say outreach is a big thing making sure things like social media gets out more and more so people can see what we are see what we do have people come and experience what researchers actually like what they think it's going to be it's also a big big big help just add on to the outreach and we'll start too early so I've gone to kindergarten classes and read a book on DNA to students so they can see that a scientist can be anyone it could be them and just showing them the different faces that are involved in this field alright I think we're over so thank you so much for asking questions everybody online and being here and thank you to the panelists we really appreciate you being willing to be part of DNA Day so I also want to thank the panelists for watching online you may not have been seen behind you there's lots of hearts although our what grade are you in? second grader is getting more hearts than anyone else from those remotely so thank you I think if we had had more space and more time we could have had even a bigger panel so if you didn't hear something that you like but you're interested in physics science, maths, statistics computational biology business public policy public health and health economics there's also spaces in genomics and the need for people with those skills so I think that covers almost everything in the sciences so thank you we're now going to complete the panel excuse the panel members we have