Jessica Tytell
Interview Posted By: Ashley Smith
1. Can you tell us a little about your background? i.e. Where you grew up, what education do you have, a summary of your resume, did you always want to do what you are doing now, when did you start to become interested in STEM, what internships/ volunteering
I grew up in Los Angeles. From as early as I can remember, I always wanted to know how things worked or how they looked inside. Even for toys I always wanted things like micro machines or the very detailed toys where you would open them up and see a whole new world inside of them. My grandparents used to take me to museums sometimes on the weekends and I always wanted to go to the Museum of Science and Industry (now the Science Center I believe), and I even took occasional weekend classes there about pinhole photography, reptiles and amphibians etc. My high school science and math programs were fairly poor but I had a great biology teacher. My parents never graduated from college and I didn't have any friends or family who were scientists so I didn't really know much about that lifestyle. But I went to UCSD for college and decided to major in bio or bio engineering because I knew I loved learning about it. I eventually decided on Molecular Biology as a major because I loved the mechanistic ideas and really understanding how things work. I didn't know anyone in science as a career (other than the faculty) but I had a good professor who told me I should do research if I wanted to be a scientist so I looked for volunteer research opportunities. I found a great, small lab at the UCSD medical center where I worked from my Sophomore year through my Junior year looking for genetic markers that could give information about certain childhood cancers. After that, I found another volunteer position at a larger lab looking for inherited genetic mutations that lead to increased cancer in people.
During college I also worked as a teaching assistant for Genetics and Molecular Biology and realized I loved to teach. All this made me think that being a professor would be a perfect job for me. Therefore, I went to graduate school. I chose MIT because it was a great school and because I wanted to move away from California for a few years and see a new perspective.
MIT was a great experience. I met wonderful friends and colleagues during my PhD studies, got to watch chromosomes move inside of living cells with really cool microscopes, learned and discovered a lot about science and the world of academia. Over that time though, I realized that life in academia wasn't what I thought it was as a more naive undergraduate and I started to feel that it wasn't the right fit for me. Academia has a large stigma with leaving it though and I was still torn. So before I left academia for good I wanted to try out another lab and another project just to make sure it really wasn't for me. I joined Don Ingber's lab at Children's Hospital Boston after I got my PhD to study how cells move and to get a new experience of academic life as a postdoc.
Again I loved my colleagues and the science I was doing but the pace was too slow for me and I wanted to see more application from my work. I finished off one really cool project and then started looking for positions as a scientist in industry. However, during my search I spoke with an old collaborator and he offered me a position building and running his lab when he moved to Harvard Medical School. It was a really great group with both engineers and biologists which I had discovered in my two previous labs was the perfect fit for me. At this lab, I got to work with and lead interdisciplinary teams to develop new imaging techniques on the microscope and new computer algorithms to help get as much quantitative information as possible from them. It was exciting and challenging to build the lab and the teams, however, I still found the pace slow and still wanted to see something more tangible than a scientific article describing my work. After many discussions and informational interviews and quite a bit of honest soul searching about what I really love and my strengths, I realized that a start up company would be a great fit for me. Luckily Boston is an amazing place for biotech and there is a huge startup community here. I started asking friends, family, colleagues to put me in touch with startups to talk to. I thought I wanted to go to a company that was developing drugs for disease but I kept an open mind and talked to anyone at a startup. Through a friend I got an informational interview with the CEO of a small startup called Firefly BioWorks that had a cool way of making tiny particles that had spun out of MIT a few years previously that they were building into a product to detect small nucleic acids called microRNAs. I thought I would only be interested in how they got funding and resources but when I looked up the technology in more detail I realized the technology was really powerful and spent my whole meeting brainstorming ideas for new products on that platform. They asked me to come interview with them, and afterwards was offered a position with them. I started there in July of 2013.
At first it was supposed to be 50% product development in the lab and 50% talking to scientists about their first product. However, right as I joined we found out that we hadn't gotten some funding we expected and instead of developing new products, we had to figure out how to prove to our investors that our current product was game changing. Therefore, as the first biologist in a team of engineers, and the only one who had a broad background in science, I went out to talk to anyone I could about their research on microRNAs and what they would need to make their research better. I found I loved this job and using their input was able to help steer the team to build a much more exciting product that could help more people. I also realized that sales in this field is much more about helping people see the value of your technology and helping them plan the right experiments to use it well. I also realized was a great impact I can have on so many labs and fields by helping people do experiments that they couldn't do without the products we developed.
Because of this new product and some other introductory work that I started with another company, we were eventually acquired by a reagents company called Abcam this January. It's a much bigger company and has lots of great resources and teams. Everything is different again but now I can focus on working with scientists to continue to help sell our product and help get it applied in labs around the world. There are applications from drug companies to diagnostics where our product that we built could be game changing so I'm hoping to help spread the word and continue to help improve and grow it as well.
2. What exactly IS your job? What do you do on a day to day basis?
(Partially covered above). My job is different every day which I love but overall is about learning more about the biomarker field, meeting scientists, explaining our product and technology, helping them decide if our product is the right fit, helping them design the best experiments first to test then to utilize our technology and coordinate our team and theirs to help them adopt it. I also bring suggestions and thoughts back to the biologists and engineers in the lab and help determine what we should build next based on what I see most people need that current technology can't do.
3. How does STEM relate to your job?How do you use the information you learned from your degree in your job?
I had a really broad research background (which is not too common these days). In academia it was seen as a lack of focus but in my current job it's vital. I talk about all different fields of biology every day and I have to be able to understand their science, understand if and then how our technology could help their science, and brainstorm the best experiments moving forward.
4. Have you faced any discrimination/ challenges being a woman in a stem field? If so, how did you deal with it? Do you have any advice for up and coming women in STEM?
I have faced several challenges as a woman in STEM. The nice thing about biology is that there are lots of women. The bad part is that even as a well represented group there are stereotypes and biases that are pervasive and not always obvious. I've had professors tell me my male colleagues research was more urgent, been brushed off and taken seriously because people assume I'm younger and therefore I guess less knowledgeable than I am. I'm forceful and assertive when necessary, which is ok in men but I'm told I'm aggresssive and combative by those same men sometimes even when I'm being much more polite than they've been. I'm also a friendly Californian in the east coast so I'm often taken as not serious because I smile a lot.
Lots of these unconscious biases come up all the time and they're very hard to confront and can slow you down. I think many things are getting better but there are still issues.
5. What is the best and worst part of your job? What do you look forward to in your job on a day to day basis? What do you wish you could change?
The worst part of my job is people's assumptions about me because I'm in sales that I'm stupid or don't know science. I look forward to meeting the people (most people really) who do take me seriously because I can help them do better science and discovery things they couldn't without our technology and without my expertise. I wish I could change people's assumptions about who leaves academia and why and about who takes which jobs.
6. How do you balance your work and personal life? Any secrets or advice you’d like to share?
No secrets. Try your best. Be honest with yourself and your family. Make sure to take time to yourself and get a change of perspective occasionally. Science is a lifestyle and it's easy to work too hard, but your more creative and do better if you take breaks. Have hobbies and be committed to them. Also, if you want to have kids find a partner who really understands that being a partner means that they support you fully. When we first got married, we made a deal that we would always make sure we were home together for dinner on Friday nights no matter what. Other nights I could get stuck in the lab or have work etc but that was our time to be together. With kids it's even more complicated. My husband and I have traded being the primary care giver. When I worked in academia and he started a new job, I did more. Now that I work in a startup and I travel more and he's settled in his job, he often takes the kids to and from school and does most of the errands as well. If we weren't a team I couldn't do my job. In addition to that, he's the cook in our family so I don't have to rush out early to cook. I think that's the most important thing. Too many women work like it's the 21st century but support their families like it's the 50s without enough help from their husbands.
7. What do you define success as?
Making the world a better place. Helping others. Getting back up every time you fall down.
8. What is one personality trait that you think is universally important for a successful career?
Tenacity
9. Who was a mentor to you throughout your career? (can be more than one!) What did they teach you? How did they impact your life?
I had lots of great mentors. I TAd for great professors who taught me all sorts of great lessons. I guess though, the most important people were the ones who made me see that I have to live my life in a way that fits me and I should worry less about what other people think or expect.
10. What do you think is the best advice you've ever received ? What advice would you give your younger self if you had the chance? What’s one piece of advice you can pass on to us?
You don't have to know what you want to do for your whole life - that's a long time and you'll change. Just decide what you want to do for the next few years and let yourself grow. That took a lot of the pressure off and made it easier to not get paralyzed making career decisions.
I grew up in Los Angeles. From as early as I can remember, I always wanted to know how things worked or how they looked inside. Even for toys I always wanted things like micro machines or the very detailed toys where you would open them up and see a whole new world inside of them. My grandparents used to take me to museums sometimes on the weekends and I always wanted to go to the Museum of Science and Industry (now the Science Center I believe), and I even took occasional weekend classes there about pinhole photography, reptiles and amphibians etc. My high school science and math programs were fairly poor but I had a great biology teacher. My parents never graduated from college and I didn't have any friends or family who were scientists so I didn't really know much about that lifestyle. But I went to UCSD for college and decided to major in bio or bio engineering because I knew I loved learning about it. I eventually decided on Molecular Biology as a major because I loved the mechanistic ideas and really understanding how things work. I didn't know anyone in science as a career (other than the faculty) but I had a good professor who told me I should do research if I wanted to be a scientist so I looked for volunteer research opportunities. I found a great, small lab at the UCSD medical center where I worked from my Sophomore year through my Junior year looking for genetic markers that could give information about certain childhood cancers. After that, I found another volunteer position at a larger lab looking for inherited genetic mutations that lead to increased cancer in people.
During college I also worked as a teaching assistant for Genetics and Molecular Biology and realized I loved to teach. All this made me think that being a professor would be a perfect job for me. Therefore, I went to graduate school. I chose MIT because it was a great school and because I wanted to move away from California for a few years and see a new perspective.
MIT was a great experience. I met wonderful friends and colleagues during my PhD studies, got to watch chromosomes move inside of living cells with really cool microscopes, learned and discovered a lot about science and the world of academia. Over that time though, I realized that life in academia wasn't what I thought it was as a more naive undergraduate and I started to feel that it wasn't the right fit for me. Academia has a large stigma with leaving it though and I was still torn. So before I left academia for good I wanted to try out another lab and another project just to make sure it really wasn't for me. I joined Don Ingber's lab at Children's Hospital Boston after I got my PhD to study how cells move and to get a new experience of academic life as a postdoc.
Again I loved my colleagues and the science I was doing but the pace was too slow for me and I wanted to see more application from my work. I finished off one really cool project and then started looking for positions as a scientist in industry. However, during my search I spoke with an old collaborator and he offered me a position building and running his lab when he moved to Harvard Medical School. It was a really great group with both engineers and biologists which I had discovered in my two previous labs was the perfect fit for me. At this lab, I got to work with and lead interdisciplinary teams to develop new imaging techniques on the microscope and new computer algorithms to help get as much quantitative information as possible from them. It was exciting and challenging to build the lab and the teams, however, I still found the pace slow and still wanted to see something more tangible than a scientific article describing my work. After many discussions and informational interviews and quite a bit of honest soul searching about what I really love and my strengths, I realized that a start up company would be a great fit for me. Luckily Boston is an amazing place for biotech and there is a huge startup community here. I started asking friends, family, colleagues to put me in touch with startups to talk to. I thought I wanted to go to a company that was developing drugs for disease but I kept an open mind and talked to anyone at a startup. Through a friend I got an informational interview with the CEO of a small startup called Firefly BioWorks that had a cool way of making tiny particles that had spun out of MIT a few years previously that they were building into a product to detect small nucleic acids called microRNAs. I thought I would only be interested in how they got funding and resources but when I looked up the technology in more detail I realized the technology was really powerful and spent my whole meeting brainstorming ideas for new products on that platform. They asked me to come interview with them, and afterwards was offered a position with them. I started there in July of 2013.
At first it was supposed to be 50% product development in the lab and 50% talking to scientists about their first product. However, right as I joined we found out that we hadn't gotten some funding we expected and instead of developing new products, we had to figure out how to prove to our investors that our current product was game changing. Therefore, as the first biologist in a team of engineers, and the only one who had a broad background in science, I went out to talk to anyone I could about their research on microRNAs and what they would need to make their research better. I found I loved this job and using their input was able to help steer the team to build a much more exciting product that could help more people. I also realized that sales in this field is much more about helping people see the value of your technology and helping them plan the right experiments to use it well. I also realized was a great impact I can have on so many labs and fields by helping people do experiments that they couldn't do without the products we developed.
Because of this new product and some other introductory work that I started with another company, we were eventually acquired by a reagents company called Abcam this January. It's a much bigger company and has lots of great resources and teams. Everything is different again but now I can focus on working with scientists to continue to help sell our product and help get it applied in labs around the world. There are applications from drug companies to diagnostics where our product that we built could be game changing so I'm hoping to help spread the word and continue to help improve and grow it as well.
2. What exactly IS your job? What do you do on a day to day basis?
(Partially covered above). My job is different every day which I love but overall is about learning more about the biomarker field, meeting scientists, explaining our product and technology, helping them decide if our product is the right fit, helping them design the best experiments first to test then to utilize our technology and coordinate our team and theirs to help them adopt it. I also bring suggestions and thoughts back to the biologists and engineers in the lab and help determine what we should build next based on what I see most people need that current technology can't do.
3. How does STEM relate to your job?How do you use the information you learned from your degree in your job?
I had a really broad research background (which is not too common these days). In academia it was seen as a lack of focus but in my current job it's vital. I talk about all different fields of biology every day and I have to be able to understand their science, understand if and then how our technology could help their science, and brainstorm the best experiments moving forward.
4. Have you faced any discrimination/ challenges being a woman in a stem field? If so, how did you deal with it? Do you have any advice for up and coming women in STEM?
I have faced several challenges as a woman in STEM. The nice thing about biology is that there are lots of women. The bad part is that even as a well represented group there are stereotypes and biases that are pervasive and not always obvious. I've had professors tell me my male colleagues research was more urgent, been brushed off and taken seriously because people assume I'm younger and therefore I guess less knowledgeable than I am. I'm forceful and assertive when necessary, which is ok in men but I'm told I'm aggresssive and combative by those same men sometimes even when I'm being much more polite than they've been. I'm also a friendly Californian in the east coast so I'm often taken as not serious because I smile a lot.
Lots of these unconscious biases come up all the time and they're very hard to confront and can slow you down. I think many things are getting better but there are still issues.
5. What is the best and worst part of your job? What do you look forward to in your job on a day to day basis? What do you wish you could change?
The worst part of my job is people's assumptions about me because I'm in sales that I'm stupid or don't know science. I look forward to meeting the people (most people really) who do take me seriously because I can help them do better science and discovery things they couldn't without our technology and without my expertise. I wish I could change people's assumptions about who leaves academia and why and about who takes which jobs.
6. How do you balance your work and personal life? Any secrets or advice you’d like to share?
No secrets. Try your best. Be honest with yourself and your family. Make sure to take time to yourself and get a change of perspective occasionally. Science is a lifestyle and it's easy to work too hard, but your more creative and do better if you take breaks. Have hobbies and be committed to them. Also, if you want to have kids find a partner who really understands that being a partner means that they support you fully. When we first got married, we made a deal that we would always make sure we were home together for dinner on Friday nights no matter what. Other nights I could get stuck in the lab or have work etc but that was our time to be together. With kids it's even more complicated. My husband and I have traded being the primary care giver. When I worked in academia and he started a new job, I did more. Now that I work in a startup and I travel more and he's settled in his job, he often takes the kids to and from school and does most of the errands as well. If we weren't a team I couldn't do my job. In addition to that, he's the cook in our family so I don't have to rush out early to cook. I think that's the most important thing. Too many women work like it's the 21st century but support their families like it's the 50s without enough help from their husbands.
7. What do you define success as?
Making the world a better place. Helping others. Getting back up every time you fall down.
8. What is one personality trait that you think is universally important for a successful career?
Tenacity
9. Who was a mentor to you throughout your career? (can be more than one!) What did they teach you? How did they impact your life?
I had lots of great mentors. I TAd for great professors who taught me all sorts of great lessons. I guess though, the most important people were the ones who made me see that I have to live my life in a way that fits me and I should worry less about what other people think or expect.
10. What do you think is the best advice you've ever received ? What advice would you give your younger self if you had the chance? What’s one piece of advice you can pass on to us?
You don't have to know what you want to do for your whole life - that's a long time and you'll change. Just decide what you want to do for the next few years and let yourself grow. That took a lot of the pressure off and made it easier to not get paralyzed making career decisions.