Sharing knowledge & thinking about next steps (June)
Stories, experiences & learnings in the US - part 8
Early June, my partner left and went back to Belgium. I still can’t believe how fast these months have flown by. With June and July left before heading back to Belgium, I switched back to work mode at the Berkeley Lab.
When coming to the US as a Fulbright Scholar, I had three main goals: (1) advance our research, (2) improve the usability of our tools and (3) exchange knowledge and engage in the local (entrepreneurial) culture. In June, I had one such opportunity to exchange knowledge, by talking to a US-based research lab that focuses on phage therapy. I was able to talk about my doctoral research and ongoing research, how AI tools can benefit the phage therapy field, and what outstanding limitations and bottlenecks I am still seeing.
For me, this Fulbright project really cemented the importance of sharing knowledge with one another, and that is why I always love to engage in such opportunities to give a talk or present my work. If our collective meta goal as humans is to improve the world for everybody, then openly sharing knowledge should be the standard, because knowledge fuels innovation, and the more open knowledge is, the more it can broadly fuel innovation.
This is very clear today in the world of AI research and development. A lot of research is shared and projects are made open source, inviting everybody to dig deep, learn, and build on top of one another’s work. But in most fields in science, including the phage therapy field, (fully) open source is not the standard. One example related to AI in phage therapy is the collection and availability of phage-host interaction data. That data is crucial to develop predictive models for phage therapy, yet several groups around the world are busy collection their own data, in their own ways, without properly looking into how their data could be useful to others or whether they are repeating work that has already been done. A more useful alternative way would be to set up standard protocols in advance and then distribute the data collection work across the different groups that would benefit from it.
In June, I also started thinking about what to do next, when I got back to Belgium. Typically, people ponder on the very binary choice between academia or industry, but like Erika says, those are not necessarily the only options when it comes to doing research! You can do research at an academic institution, at a national laboratory, at a research institute, in a startup, and so on. A few months earlier, I did apply for a longer post-doc position in Belgium, but I didn’t get that, so that door was closed. And the longer I was living and working in the Bay Area, the more I was fired up by the entrepreneurial energy here, so I started looking for a way to have that in Belgium. But actually it wasn’t super easy to find that in Belgium, while also finding something that matched with my specific expertise and what I wanted to do. Fast forward a good three months, now I just started working at a small startup called SwiftPharma! We use plants to make a variety of therapeutic proteins in a sustainable and affordable way. I’m super excited to contribute to this mission and to continue developing my skills in computational biology and apply them in a new setting!
Up next, I’ll write about July! My final month in the US, enjoying the summer in California and having my family visit :) See you then!
Dimi