Martín Koch Email & Phone Number

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

Redwood City, California, United States

Following a 10-week business development internship in which I applied my strong work ethic, passionate mindset, and eagerness to learn new skills, my supervisors offered me to stay at the company, continuing my full-time roll. My work in business analytics, market opportunity assessments, and business development at this mid-sized biotechnology company demonstrates my ability to quickly learn new skills to make an impact at a company while making lasting connections and fostering a collaborative work environment.

San Francisco, California, United States

I conduct research under the supervision of Specialist Matthew Sale within the McCormick Lab at UCSF's Hellen Diller Cancer Center. My work is guided and funded through Boehringer Ingelheim, as I collaborate with their team extensively as we test new drugs, one which is currently in multiple phase 1-2 clinical trials. My role is to design and perform experiments to elucidate the precise mechanism of the drug to help understand the mechanisms of interaction between two oncogenic drivers found in over 15% of cancers nationwide. This relates directly to my graduate career goals through its application of theoretical scientific knowledge, development of experimental procedures, efficient scientific communication through result presentation within lab and corporate meetings. Ultimately, this position grants me the confidence to hit the ground running when I start my graduate career because I know what to expect and how I can set myself up for success, something which sets me apart from other candidates.

Santa Barbara, California, United States

Worked under the mentorship of PhD student Tsunghan Yeh and PI Joel Rothman in an independent project analyzing programmed cell death following transdifferentiation in C. elegans. This role involved a full-time research position over the summer and part time during the entire school year for two years. Along with benchwork, this position relies heavily on problem solving to develop new experiments following unexpected or negative results. This experience requires a plethora of teamwork, resilience, and efficient communication amongst peers and faculty to further the development of my work. My role within the lab also involves a presentation summarizing my work during bi-weekly lab meetings and a bi-monthly journal club presentation to the lab. This research is fully funded by the NIH via the MARC Scholars program at UCSB

Santa Barbara, California, United States

As a two-year MARC Scholar, I have dramatically benefited from mentorship from members of the Latinx community. I understand the impact that mentorship can have on students, and I plan to use my experience as a mentor to become a graduate student mentor to help guide other students from minoritized backgrounds in STEM. This drive to help others through mentorship pushed me to become a research mentor for first-year Biology students at UC Santa Barbara, despite only being in my third year. Within this position, I was responsible for mentoring a group of six first-year students through weekly in-class and one-on-one sessions. I learned more during this experience than I could’ve imagined, and this experience underscored my newfound passion for teaching. I played a key role in the acceptance of multiple mentees into the top UCSB Labs of their choice. The experience of helping others achieve their goals through teaching and mentorship was extremely rewarding. I found myself excelling in my job through the performance improvements of my mentees.

Stanford, California, United States

Selected from a pool of over 600 applicants to join a cohort of 20 students each assigned to a laboratory at Stanford University. I am required to pursue my own research project while aiding my graduate student mentor on his project. The program requires a minimum of 40hrs/week of research alongside program trainings and courses such as GRE prep, graduate school prep, public speaking and networking courses, networking socials, and weekly presentations providing an update on research progress to a small group of 4 peers and a graduate student supervisor. The 8-week research program culminates in a research symposium in which the research I perform will be presented as a poster presentation to the entire Stanford STEM community in attendance of the Stanford Summer Research Symposium. Additionally, I will be presenting my work to my cohort, peers, lab members, and program supervisors as a slideshow presentation following the conclusion of the program. My specific lab work takes part in Dr. Sindy Tang's lab under the supervision of graduate student Kevin Zhang. Being the only undergraduate biologist in the lab which mainly focuses on mechanical engineering, I pioneer different methods to analyze how the single-cell ciliate Stentor Coeruleus undergoes dramatic wound-healing mechanisms following bisections using a microfluidic device developed in the laboratory. In conjunction with Mr. Zhang, I am working to identify the limitations of Stentor's wound-healing capabilities by performing serial bisections and analyzing the cell's viability and ability to regenerate post-cleavage. Additionally, I am attempting to develop a drug screen to pry further into the mechanisms the cell expressed to survive a dramatic wound such as a bisection. This drug screen includes analyzing literature for possible candidates, checking for relevance to Stentor, and applying the drug to check for an altered cell response following a bisection.