In this role, I managed team of 14 technical support scientists servicing customers in eastern parts of the Americas, including workload distribution, time-off arrangements, and HR interactions (promotion or disciplinary actions). I regularly met with other team leaders to discuss working relations and improve workflows and systems and presented findings to director to support larger company growth efforts. I also provided support to technical support team members as the resident expert on internal system errors.

In this role, I continued to provide customer support, but my primary focus was providing support to technical support team members, developing SOPs/guides for that team, and leading onboarding training for >10 incoming team members.

In this role, I provided pre-sales scientific support to researchers looking to outsource their sequencing work. I was responsible for relaying relevant product knowledge related to Illumina sequencing, documenting project details (data entry), and coordinating the logistics of sample arrival/movement. I was involved in producing educational materials for the debut of our customer interface, presenting an informational webinar on logistics of sample shipment, and training incoming team members.

In this position, I was part of an internal semi-automated validation lab servicing the company's global cotton and soybean research teams. My day-to-day included large-scale extractions, qPCR to determine number of gene copies, analyzing, and then reporting result using the internal LIMS system - each step being performed at the 96-well plate scale. Beyond this, I was also responsible for reagent preparation and inventory management as needed.

This position encompassed my master's thesis research as well as my graduate teaching assistantship. My research focused on small RNAs of a pathogenic fungus and its corn host and their interactions through qPCR and differential expression from sequencing data. My assistantship involved preparing the laboratory portion of this molecular biology course, which demonstrated methods from cell culture to nucleic acid extraction to Southern blotting. The course was a required course for many graduate students and all undergraduates in the program, and I assisted both spring semesters (the only times it was offered while I was a student), a total of 5 sections of 30 students each. I was also directly supervising an undergraduate researcher who I trained to assist with my thesis research (and to propagate tobacco lines).

This summer, I was part of research with FDA scientists related to scombrotoxin (histamine) poisoning in tuna. One of our focuses was simulating long-term storage of tuna salad preparations at different temperatures, with the goal assessing both bacterial growth and histamine presence to inform the FDA's safety recommendations. The other focus was assessing activity of decarboxylase enzymes to understand potential toxicity of Photobacterium spp. isolated from local scombroid fish populations.

Over the 3 academic years I was part of this lab, I worked with a PhD candidate to understand bacterial co-infection and transmission in ticks using two animal systems. I primarily assisted in rearing ticks, DNA extraction, and PCR testing for both bacteria for the two large scale animal studies (resulting in a publication). Also, as part of this study, I perform histological (FISH and IHC) and TEM analysis on slide-mounted tissue samples, which I defended as an undergraduate thesis (also part of the eventual dissertation). And finally, I participated in the annual collection of the ticks for longitudinal population infection study for the local area (resulting in another publication). Outside of lab work, I was also tasked with leading the technical training of three other undergraduate research assistants and one veterinary research student who joined the lab during my tenure.

This semester I worked with a PhD candidate to produce genetic data which we used to generate a phylogenetic map of host-parasite-microparasite interactions of tick-infested iguanas. Most of my time was spent extracting DNA from ticks (collected from iguana populations from PhD study), amplifying relevant genes, and analyzing sequencing results

This summer I worked with a PhD candidate to perfect an artificial environment for studying yeast endocytosis mechanisms - primarily producing artificial cells with fluorescent lipid membranes and breeding a yeast strain producing a dual His-tagged HOPS protein for improved extraction yields. Outside of this, I spent a lot of time growing up yeast strains, extracting proteins, and performing Western blots to verify extraction success.