Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome back to the Bench to Brevarian podcast. I am, as always, your host, Cynthia Steele. And today's guest is my friend, Doctor Erin Zook. So Erin and I met when she was a technician in a laboratory on the same floor as me, where I was working as a technician at Loyola University Chicago.
Erin then went on to get her PhD in immunology from Loyola and did a postdoc at the University of Chicago, at which point she ended up switching from academics to industry. And she is currently the juror of medical affairs at BD in surgical. And Erin and I just have a wonderful conversation. It seems like we kept coming back to two themes. One is stretching yourself outside your comfort zone and the importance of doing that both from a scientific perspective and, like, product development perspective, but also for your own personal growth and career development. And the other thing that we seem to come back to all the time was how the things that we learned in grad school do keep coming back and helping us in the future. Whether it's solving a problem, answering a question, identifying research gaps, project management, you name it. So the things we learn in grad school, it's kind of like the things we learn in kindergarten, right? They do come back and they help us out later on in life. So enjoy my interview with Doctor Erin Suk.
Doctor Erin Zook, welcome to the Bench Divorce podcast.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: I'm so excited to see you. And we'll get to how we know each other in a minute. But before, before we get to any of the real fun stuff, why don't you introduce yourself to our guests?
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Well, for those who are listening in, my name is Erin Zook. I'm director of medical affairs at Beckton Dickinson and company, working in their surgery division.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Very cool. Very cool. So I met you, I think, at the time we were both working as technicians at Loyola University Medical Center.
I was taking a gap year between my first two years of graduate school, and then I worked as a technician before finishing my PhD. And you were right out of undergrad, weren't you?
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Yes. I joined Loyola as a research technician. As you mentioned, I had taken a year before working as a research technician after doing my undergraduate, and I did a year of Americorps. So I don't know if you're familiar with the Americorps program, but it's about a year of service. It's just volunteering a year of your time, giving back to communities. So after undergraduate, I did a year with the American Red Cross teaching safety and health education classes to the Chicago community. That was my gap between undergraduate and trying to figure out what's next in life.
And I can share more about why that gap happened. But during that process, I knew I wanted to get into research, and so I got back into research through Loyola as a research technician.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Very nice. Were you always interested in immunology?
[00:03:33] Speaker B: So. I wasn't always interested in immunology, so. And as an undergraduate, I was a biology major, so I thought I was going to go to med school. I was, you know.
Yeah, that's how a lot of us start, right?
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Totally.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: You like science? You.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: You like the body?
[00:03:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's like, okay, well, what do. What do you do in science? Okay, you go to med school. So, you know, I was at the University of Illinois as a biology major, took the MCATs on the med school track. It was my last year at university where I started volunteering in a research lab.
Again, thinking, this is going to be great experience. When I apply to med school, they like to see research, volunteer experience. So started working in a lab with Drosophila and genetics and really found my people, if that makes sense, different group of individuals, they were asking the same types of questions. I was asking, like, more about, you know, what is this mechanism? Why is this happening? Not just, you know, here's a disease, here is a disease treatment, but, like, why does this treatment work for some people and not other people? So different types of questions is what I was experiencing. And then I'm like, I found my people. Like, this is. I love research. They're thinking more similarly to what I was kind of thinking. I was getting excited. So. So that's obviously what kind of led to that gap year where I worked with the American Red Cross for a year, because at that point, I decided I'm not applying to med school, so what am I going to do?
So that's what led me to, like, a year of, you know, volunteer service with Americorps. And then when that ended, I was trying to figure out, okay, how do I start a career in research?
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: And then that's when I started working at Loyola. I joined a lab at Loyola that happened to be an immunology lab. I had taken immunology as an undergraduate, which not a lot of people do.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: That's impressive. I didn't. I didn't take immunology until my first year of grad school.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it shaped my career more than I realized.
It was one of those advanced 300 level classes.
I didn't have the prereqs for it. But I had a friend who was like, I hear this professor is amazing.
He's going to be retiring. I'm going to take the class.
I emailed the professor saying, I don't have the prereqs. Do you recommend I still take the class?
Pure silence. So I decided to sign up anyways.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: Oh my gosh.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: It was a graduate school class. Like they had graduate students who were also taking this 300 level class. The exams were what you and I received in graduate school. It was, here's a scientific abstract. We're going to ask you questions and you're going to hypothesize and write responses. It wasn't multiple choice. There were no slides. There was an overhead projector where he would just doodle.
It was probably one of the toughest classes I took. But it obviously it shaped my life for me becoming an immunologist and left an impression. I mean, after probably hours and hours of crying over the class, but once.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: You got over the trauma, once you got over that.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: So when I saw, you know, a research position in immunology, I'm like, well, I know immunology. I've taken a class on it and not a lot of people had. So that helped me get that position. And I think it also definitely helped in graduate school when most of us were getting immunology for the first time.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: And we were crying about it then.
[00:07:28] Speaker B: It's true.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: So the head professor in that immunology program made me cry. She made. And when I say she, you're gonna know exactly who I'm talking about. I know you made every person in that class cry. Boys, girls, didn't matter. We all wept at one point.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: It is true. I look back very fondly, though. Like, I mean, I think graduate school is a tough time in our lives. It was definitely tough for me. I think there's many of times you can talk to my advisor and he'll tell you times that he probably remembers me crying. We keep in touch and we still talk now, but yeah, yeah, we text. We were just texting like a week ago.
So I still went to, I went to an immunology conference this year. I met up. We saw, I saw a lot of old Loyola faculty that we know. I saw my advisor. So despite all of the tears and graduate student struggles, I look back at it with a different light. Respect, fondness. And it was still a good experience. It was a great experience.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: You never realized it at the time, obviously, but now in retrospect, you think about, we were all so young.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: You know, especially, you know, if people didn't take a gap year, you start grad school, you're like 22, 23 years old. You're so young. A lot of people are living in the city for the first time. You know, they're living away from home there. People are getting married, they're having kids, and all kinds of things are happening. I mean, I remember one of the, one of the ladies in our, one of our fellow grad students in the program was, like, in labor during her histology exam. I mean, there's so much that happens at that time of life, and it kind of blows my mind now to think about how you just do it, right? I mean, you just kind of take everything that comes at you and you just. You just manage it and keep. Keep your head down, keep studying, keep working.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, you know, we're young and we're learning life and seeing things for the first time. And. And even, you know, in undergraduate, when you're studying and you're learning, it's a different learning experience, or at least it was for me. Then when you go to graduate school and they really challenge you and they challenge you in a way with questions and more questions and more questions, and the pressure is different. But I also feel that it also helps us develop that thicker scientific skin, if you know what I mean. I don't think I had that before graduate school. Hence, like, some of the tears and the crying and those things that we experience. But you really learn to take feedback, take scientific critique, which is not bad. It's not against you personally, but it's part of science and now part of our lives and our careers.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Better to get those kinds of tough questions from your advisor, your lab members of your committee, compared to some anonymous person tearing your grant to pieces.
You know, you have to start with friendly fire before you're really able to deal with hostile warfare. Right?
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Yeah. And not just in, like, academia, but really anywhere you go where you want to stay in science. Because we should be questioning dogmas. We should be questioning, like, what we know to be true because, you know, what we thought was true a while ago is not necessarily true today, may not be true what we know today, tomorrow, or in the future. So we can't always just be comfortable. So I don't know. So I guess, like you said, it's just getting that questioning, learning that from friendly fire, because if you want to stay in science, it's what we should be doing. We should continue to question each other.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: And I like how you said that because I've actually been thinking a lot about comfort zones lately because of this big hiking trip that my husband and I took that I was just, like, very, very nervous about for a while because that's just very outside my comfort zone.
But how you said we can't just be comfortable. You should be stretching a little bit more. You should be pushing a little bit more. You should be around people who will encourage you to think outside the box or try something a little bit different, you know, because otherwise, how else are we going to get next generation of therapeutics or diagnostics? Anything along those lines if we don't try to stretch boundaries a little bit more?
[00:12:08] Speaker B: I totally agree. I think that that's what propels a lot of us forward in science, in our careers.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: What if we could?
[00:12:17] Speaker B: What if we could? What if we could?
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Wouldn't that be awesome?
[00:12:21] Speaker B: And that's where a lot of, like, the innovation stems from.
It's just that type of mentality, that type of thinking. And again, it's the innovation that's going to change, you know, every day and move us forward.
[00:12:35] Speaker A: So, yeah, agreed. So back to grad school, because I asked everybody this question on those really tough days when you young Aaron Zook was in tears, what did you fantasize about just leaving and doing instead?
[00:12:50] Speaker B: So I have to admit, I don't know if I really dreamt about leaving for another career so much as dreaming about winning the lottery.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: I like that. That's a good answer.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: But I have thought about it because one of my first interviews in industry, one of the off the wall kind of questions I got was, if you weren't a scientist, what would you be doing with your life? Yeah, totally. And I'm like, okay, so if I were to answer the question now, I would, it was still be the same answer I gave back then during my first interview, which I got pushed back, that maybe it's still sciency, but I said I would like to train dogs, like therapy dogs.
That being said, I have two dogs and they're spoiled and they don't always listen to me. So I don't think I'd be a very good trainer. But, you know, we were talking about pets, and I love animals. I love dogs. I feel that would be rewarding. Maybe still science tangent and health tangent related, but I think that that's really cool.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: I love that answer. Most people come up with some kind of a service based answer. Like Sarah Sharkey says she was going to be a dog groomer.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:14:09] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. She said, you know, that just seemed like that's not going to be an easy job, but that's not going to be this hard, you know, and I get to be with cute dogs, you know, or one of my favorite answers, Jacqueline Duvall in one of my episodes says she was just going to open a sandwich shop. And I've heard that a few times. One of the, the chair of ophthalmology at Case Western actually told me that, that when he was getting his PhD, he dreamt of just opening a sandwich shop because there was nowhere where he could get a good sandwich on, like his broke. His broke budget, you know, like, there was just no good cheap sandwich place. He was like, that's it. Forget it. I'm done with this. I'm just going to open that sandwich shop and I'm going to feed the other grad students, you know, and I love that.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Also very service based to feed others, so.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Exactly. And because honestly, no one. Nothing bad's going to happen if you add too much mayo or mustard. Like, that's not going to destroy weeks of work. It's going to be okay.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: Yeah. No, and I'm a fan of both mayo and mustard, so the more the better.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: There you go. Agree.
So when you finished at Loyola, did you think that you wanted to go into industry because you ended up doing a postdoc at University of Chicago? And that's a pretty serious place.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Yeah. So when we were in graduate school, I think they're doing better around this now. I think in graduates school nowadays, they're bringing in other career information sessions, or at least I've participated in some since I've left graduate school. But. But when I was in graduate school, I don't really remember anybody coming in and talking about industry. It was this kind of black box. We didn't talk about it. No, nobody.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: A shameful secret.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And nobody really understood it. And some of our professors and mentors that I still talk to, I don't know if they still understand all the aspects of industry. So not knowing really what else was out there. I wasn't against looking for careers in industry. I wasn't against potentially pursuing a traditional academic career as we were taught when we defined tradition versus alternative, which, again, is not the norm, and we discussed that.
So I, in an attempt to try to explore opportunities out there, I did a traditional postdoc, not shutting the door one way or another, but knew I still liked science. Had heard that even if you want to go into industry, a postdoc experience is beneficial.
Full disclosure, I've hired people without postdoc experience. So I don't always think it's necessary.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: I think it depends on, like, the role, what you're trying to do and things like that. But I enjoyed my postdoc experience. I'm glad I did it, but it wasn't really, I'm 100% dedicated one way or another on my career path so much as any time to kind of think, explore. And I know I love science, so in the meantime, I'm just going to pursue a postdoc. And I, it was at the University of Chicago where I started talking more to people who were considering and applying to jobs in the Chicago area because that's where I'm based and looking for more of the industry experience. So we started talking about job interviews, we started talking about resumes, learning more about it.
I also, at that time I was joined women in bio in the Chicago area. So there were like, in person networking events at pharmaceutical companies. So going to these places, talking to people in industry, learning more about the roles that are out there.
At the time, I still didn't have a full understanding of all of the different roles in industry. I don't think you really grasp some of it until you're in it. True.
But really, that kind of was my thought process and doing a postdoc and then my experience of learning more about the different potential opportunities out there while at the University of Chicago.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: And tell us more about women in bio.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Yeah, so the local chapter here, I don't, I actually need to reconnect on that because I joined and I was part of it for probably about two years. And then as I got into industry, I kind of got into my position learning and kind of stepped back from some of the opportunities there. But I have somebody who is on my team now who's a very active member in women in bio. Oh, very cool. So while I'm not a member now, there was a networking event where she's like, you need to come. We're going to go and we're going to talk about our roles at our company and what we did. So I kind of started dipping my toes back into it, and so I want to get more into some of that. But really it was just a network of women in different pharmaceutical and medical device industries across the Chicago area, and really doing a lot of what we were talking about when we were connecting of just a lot of what opportunities are out there, I know that they do a lot of connections with the different industry companies here in the Chicago area makes sense. And we actually have a.
One of our employee like resource groups has a connection with women in bio, so I know that they're always doing events together. So nice. It's really. It's a really great experience to learn more about different roles that are out there and what it means to be an industry, talk to people who are living it day in and day out of, and also giving outreach to the community in the meantime.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: That's wonderful, because I think besides not being encouraged, as we talked about, our PIs and our mentors were not exactly encouraging when it came to industry based positions. And I always like to emphasize it's not necessarily coming from a bad place. It's just this is not something that they knew about.
These were career scientists, and they had a vested interest in training us to also become career scientists, and they just didn't really know about any of the other options, which, again, we want to emphasize, the alternative these days is getting an r zero one and getting tenure. It's. The alternative is not going into industry way more than that.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: 100%. Yeah. And I agree with you. It's not a bad. It's not coming from a bad place. It's just like, this is their career path. They're very passionate about it. And the reason I think we didn't get exposed to industry is just because people didn't know it and our professors didn't know it. And as I said, I keep in touch with some of our mentors and professors, and I share some of what I do at work on a day to day activity. And I still think they don't necessarily understand it, but that's like. I think they get it to some degree, but not as fully as the career path that they took. And that's.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: Well, medical affairs, if I may, medical affairs is very much like this 30,000 foot view of the entire. Like all aspects of the product from the mechanism of action, which our mentors would be able to dive deep into every phosphorylation event, to insurance coverage and application of the product in however many hundreds of different clinical scenarios, and gathering all that data and looking for patterns and everything involved in medical affairs, it's so different. It's just a different way of thinking and looking at a product other than we did this. We answered this question, we disproved the null hypothesis, we published, and we moved on.
And honestly, I wish that there was a little bit more discussion in graduate schools about the importance of thinking about what happens next.
If you are working on a product that you think could be translational, there really should be more communication about what else you should be thinking about. And I talk about dosing and the patient experience all the time on this podcast, because if this is an eye drop, for example, that's my world. If it's an eye drop that someone's going to have to take four times a day, it's never going to happen.
If it burns, if it melts your cornea, no one's going to. You're never going to get past the most basic of pre ind work. So it's almost a disservice to people to just leave it at the bench and never even get people thinking about how this could potentially translate.
[00:23:27] Speaker B: I agree, and I think for individuals who are thinking about careers in medical affairs, all of those things you mentioned are important to think about. But it's making that translational leap with your research of what is the current workflow, clinical practice, what are people doing today? How can we improve on that? And like you said, if you're, you know, have a treatment that you have to do four times a day, eight times a day, every hour, that might not be something that's practical for the way treatments work for patient's lifestyle. So it's really understanding clinical practice and the utility of what's happening in that practice now. And how do you improve that along the way? Because, again, you know, there could be great options out there, but if it's not practical, it's going to be very hard to bring that forward.
[00:24:24] Speaker A: Or if it's too expensive, it's not going to happen.
So after your postdoc, were you able to get some interviews through these connections that you made at UFC, or how did that start coming about?
[00:24:38] Speaker B: How did that start coming about?
[00:24:40] Speaker A: So did you just apply or did you have connections?
[00:24:45] Speaker B: Oh, so I think mine, I did have some connections. So through University of Chicago, for those who I knew who had transitioned into industry, I did lean on them for here's my resume. How does it look? Is this like a resume that would be, you know, would it go over well in industry? What could I improve on?
If I knew somebody at a company, I would ask them to, hey, can you refer me for the job? Because referrals go a long way when you're, when you have an open position and you have hundreds of applicants applying. If there's somebody internal within the company who has referred someone, it definitely goes a long way.
But a lot of the applying I was doing was more just research and cold applying, if I'm being honest, because I had known people who had started making that transition. But my networking industry wasn't that broad yet at the time.
Now that being said, it doesn't mean that networks and connections don't matter because I didn't know it at the time. But I later found out that with my first industry position that I attained, the person I replaced was a former Loyola grad and did their dissertation in one of the immunology labs at Loyola.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: Oh my gosh.
[00:26:10] Speaker B: So I didn't find this out until after I got the job and had been there for a few months. And I can't confirm that this person maybe saw my resume, saw a Loyola connection, saw a network connection and pulled my resume out.
I don't know because I didn't have the opportunity to ask. But I will say that her dissertation supervisor was one of my referrals or one of my, like, hey, feel free to reach out to these people if you want to, you know, learn more about me. So I do think connections matter.
Again, I can't confirm that. That's how I got pulled out of the pile.
[00:26:51] Speaker A: But couldn't have hurt.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: It couldn't hurt. It definitely couldn't hurt. Because when you know, applicants who have come through, if you have an understanding of their background, their education, their experience, I mean, there's, you can say, okay, I've been through. I know this university, I know these professors, I know the publications in this area. I know this lab that they come out of. So you start to get an idea of what kind of background that person might have. And, you know, I think that those things can help at least get your resume pulled out of a pile and put in a smaller pile for consideration.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: Do you think that's because you've, you got your PhD in Chicago and then you continue to work in Chicago. Do you think that's a benefit to staying. To staying put? Because now, as you say, you go to a place like Estella, so you go to a place like BD or Abbvie in Chicago. You know, they, they know Loyola. They know there's what, six or seven major graduate schools in the Loyola area. I'm pretty in Loyola area Chicago.
I mean, they know everybody, right?
[00:27:57] Speaker B: I think that there's some advantage there, but I think, and maybe you can attest to this, but I think just the industry world is small regardless. So I think by now, you know, we've been in it for, for a while. I think I've been in industry for maybe around ten years now while my network in Chicago is tight. And yes, the companies here know University of Chicago. They know Loyola, they know all of the different major universities here and they can. That says something. Right.
But I also think that in industry, there's a lot of opportunities for movement. Like, even within companies, you have locations on the east coast, you have locations on the west coast. So people are always going, I think, back and forth in different areas. And even in my short ten years in industry, I've seen people leave and I've seen them come back and I've seen them work in other organizations and other collaborations. So I think it goes back to a thought I always had even when we were in graduate school, is you think science is big, but I think in the end of the day, the community is still, in some regards, small, where you never know who's going to be reviewing your grants. You never know who's going to be, you know, seeing your resume or maybe on an interview panel for industry or just somebody that says, oh, yeah, I know Aaron. I know this about Aaron, or. So it's just, don't ever burn bridges, I guess, is, you know, like, important because it's, it's a big world out there, but at the same time, I think that paths always recross. So it's just, you know, good thing to keep in mind.
[00:29:45] Speaker A: You are 100% right. You never want to burn bridges. I always tell people, just be nice to everybody. Just be nice to everybody because you never know who is. I don't know who's listening. You know, you're doing a poster presentation. You never know who that person is. You know, maybe they. Maybe they could be your next boss. They could be someone reviewing your grant or your, your next manuscript, or they could be the person that helps you get to that next level that you want to be at. I mean, I.
And that's why conferences are so exhausting, because you're just on. Yeah, all the time.
[00:30:26] Speaker B: You.
[00:30:26] Speaker A: You cannot.
I know, at least for me, I feel like. I feel like I cannot let my guard down until I am, like, back in my hotel room and, like, the makeup comes off and I can just, you know, slouch finally, because you just never know who you're talking to or who you're interacting with or who's watching. And so important. And before you go on, just that point about never burning bridges, I've seen it happen, you know, I've seen people get another option, another job avail available to them, and they're just so eager. And this is another thing we don't learn about as scientists. We don't learn how to quit jobs. We don't learn how we don't learn office etiquette. I mean, I joke all the time, but, like, labs are an HR nightmare where I did my PhD. I mean, it was all in good fun, but oh, my God, I mean, an HR person would have, like, gotten all of us fired, like, just removed.
[00:31:30] Speaker B: From the, yeah, wouldn't always fly in the corporate world, some of it, but.
[00:31:37] Speaker A: I, but, but we don't learn how to write a good email, how to write a cover letter, how to do any of these things. And so the people that I knew who ended up burning bridges essentially quit on a dime, went to a competing company, didn't, like, left a voicemail, you know, like, didn't set up a meeting and have a conversation like an adult would and give their two weeks or give an opportunity for someone to get back to them or even have the conversation about how maybe you're not happy in this position anymore, you know? And instead it was just the ramifications were really striking. And in a lot of ways, especially at, like, like you're saying these, like, smallish communities where like, a particular disease state. Yeah, you cannot afford to burn any bridges in those areas because people, the north remembers, people remember.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: People remember. And, you know, I've seen plenty of times, just in my experience, of, you know, individuals going to other companies, which is great, maybe they go to a small startup, but things get acquired and then you're back with people that you knew before. And so again, it's just, you know, having the respect, I think just having the respect for yourself, having the respect for the people you work with goes a long, a long way.
And I think that is just, I mean, I think it's just common courtesy. Going back to what you were saying with conferences too, of, like, always being on, it's exhausting. But I also think that we owe it to ourselves to, you know, be authentic, too. I will be 100% be who you are, like, be your authentic self. Be nice. Don't get me wrong.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: Unless your authentic self is terrible, then maybe don't do it.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: But I think sometimes, like, you know, we're scientists, and I will always say that, you know, inside, I always feel like the awkward scientist, like I am like the introvert sometimes things that I think are funny because I just have an odd sense of humor, a little quirky, may be like people might not always, you know, understand, like, everybody's sense of humor, but I think at the end of the day, you know, you're being nice, be respectful, and be yourself because, you know, it's, we spend so much time at work that I think it's really important to, you know, accept people for who they are, respect all the different backgrounds we come into, accept all of the scientific quirkiness that we all bring to the table because these different backgrounds experience interactions.
Diversity is what makes, like, companies great. It's what makes work great. It's what, like, fosters innovation. So I guess, you know, embrace that quirky scientist in you, if that's. That's who you are.
[00:34:38] Speaker A: No, I. I completely agree with that, Erin. I would never tell anybody. I would never tell anybody otherwise. I guess what I mean by just always feeling like you have to be on is just to always try to put that best foot forward.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: And, you know, definitely embrace your quirkiness. I mean, I like finding buttons around, around the conferences I put my little buttons on and everything. My flare, my.
So many pieces of flare. Yeah, you know, my office space flare, you know, but. But at the same time, I guess I just always feel like I can't fully exhale and just, like, stop putting my best foot forward, you know, until I'm in, like, a little bit more of a private place or with people that I'm just really good friends with. And I can just, you know, kick, quite literally kick off my shoes sometimes because trying to wear heels all day in a conference is terrible. And, you know, just try to relax a little bit more.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: But no, it's. And I agree with that. I think after a full day of conference, even after a full day of work meeting, and now as we come out of COVID we're back in the office, sometimes we have more face to face all day workshops.
It's exhausting and it's great. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy meeting with people, but as I said, I'm an introvert. So my social battery, by the end of those days, a full person to person communication, whether it's a conference, whether it's a workshop, it is exhausting for me. My social battery is done.
[00:36:10] Speaker A: You're on.
[00:36:12] Speaker B: I just want to sit in quiet. Like, I don't want to necessarily. Some people are the opposite. Like, I worked with some people just this week, and I was having a conversation and they were saying, like, how energized they are after being in a room with people and doing a workshop all day long. I'm like, that's great. I'm going to go home, and my husband's probably going to ask me five questions, and I'm going to tell him, not now.
I need. I need, like, 45 minutes to myself just to, like, reset, decompress, and. Yes, I love that.
Kick off the shoes, take off the makeup, and just sit.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: Yep. I love that. So, I guess. Tell us about your career in medical affairs. So you. Your first job in industry was as a researcher. Correct. And then you. Then you moved on. So a lot of people ask me how that. How that works, because they. They worry that if they start in one department, they may end up kind of stuck in that area. So how. So tell us how you did it.
[00:37:13] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So my first industry job was with Astellas, and I was in their bio analytical group, so I was really leveraged my immunology skill set. So they were really looking for a strong immunologist who understood flow cytometry, who understood Elisas, who understood Le spots. And this role would be developing assays for clinical trials. So we have biomarkers, and what biomarkers should we be measuring? What time points? What are the best assays to do that? How do we develop those assays and then teaching those assays to other groups? So that as a clinical trial progresses and you go from a phase one to more global study or phase three, and you have, like, hundreds of patients and you need more people to do the assays, it's not one person anymore.
So that. That is what first got me into more of, like, the clinical side of, you know, industry and research and started my career path down medical affairs. And hopefully, for any of the younger scientists listening, just even that experience shows, like, how. What we're doing in, you know, graduate school postdocs, the assays, the troubleshooting, how those skill sets can transition very nicely in. Into industry.
But that's how I first got familiar with, like, you know, what is, you know, what is an MBA? What is an Ind? What kind of information needs to go into these things? And how do you work with people who are designing clinical studies? How do you work with people who are executing clinical studies?
How are we capturing the data? What kind of database, like, all of these other questions that you. These are all of the positions in industry that I'm, like, didn't know about, right, until you start to get into it. So, you know, that's when I had an opportunity to really start looking deeper into medical affairs and applying more strictly into those medical affairs roles. So leveraging those bench top skill sets that we had to get my foot in the door in industry, knowing that I wanted to eventually step away from the bench, get more into the strategy around medical affairs, the strategy around evidence, the strategy around designing clinical studies, really understanding the impact there. You know, you mentioned it before, in medical affairs, you support these products throughout their life cycle. So, and you know so much about it from the mechanism of action and, and all of the signaling and forward, but it starts in innovation and you still support these products through lifecycle management. So we have products that have, you know, been on the market for decades, but there's still evidence that, you know, that we generate for them and there's a strategy behind that. And how do we maximize that evidence?
You know, we, you look at a global company and you're trying to go to so many different markets, so many different countries.
Are you going to do a clinical study for every single one of those countries? Or is there a way to streamline ways to get evidence and maximize a clinical study, which is very expensive to get the biggest bang for your buck and use that data to get into different markets? But also, you know, you are in medical affairs, you know, as well, is that I, data is also changing. We have all these different analytical data captures and how is real world data being utilized. And so it's a really interesting time, I think, in medical affairs, as we just think about these things and data is an evidence and evidence based medicine and evidence based research of what we do. It comes from so many different pathways. It's not just clinical studies, it's preclinical, it's benchtop, it's real world patient charts. There's just so much information out there. And really having a deep understanding of all of those pathways and how to synthesize this information and create the strategy to support the products, it's fun. So that's kind of my transition into medical affairs and obviously why I'm so passionate about it.
[00:41:33] Speaker A: Yeah, well, medical affairs is fun.
I always think it's so cool. And also it's a story, right? I mean, you know, and you're describing it so well, how this one thing, this molecule, this inhibition of this one, like, again, I go back to phosphorylation event, but inhibiting any of these receptors, how that can lead to this type of therapeutic outcome, but also potentially how it can lead to these side effects and what would be serious and what's not going to be serious. And then I, long term, what's that going to do to a patient clinically? Is there something else that you need to worry about or is there other things that you need to keep in mind, other prescriptions that need to come through in order to treat some of those side effects? And then, you know, ten years down the line, I mean, to have decades of data is a remarkable thing. But then also keeping in mind, what are your competitors doing? Because it seems like people are always, and companies are always trying to invent these new metrics. You know, if you don't win on efficacy, do you win on safety? If you don't win on safety, do you, like short term? Do you win on safety long term? You know, in terms of, like, patient satisfaction? You know, you could do surveys for that. You could do surveys for the surgeon's experience or the ophthalmologist experience, doctor. There's. It seems like there's just always these new metrics coming up because companies are constantly trying to one up each other. And so to have this knowledge base that's starts at the cell and these subcellular events and goes all the way out, that is a tremendous power to have and a huge asset for a company, and it's 100%.
[00:43:13] Speaker B: And this is why we do what we do, right. This is why we love medical affairs.
[00:43:20] Speaker A: Totally.
So then did you. So, I guess, what have you dabbled in in terms of medical affairs? Because most people think of medical writers and they think of MSL. So I guess what goes into your day to day and what have you dabbled in?
[00:43:34] Speaker B: So when I first joined medical affairs, so I kind of talked about the little transition of, like, the benchtop research and then working and being supporting clinical trials. When I. When I first moved into, like, a full medical affairs role, it was more purely research than strategy at that time. Still very junior in industry, still very junior in medical affairs. The strategy was really set at a higher leadership level, but it was. Here's the strategic research questions that we need to answer. How can we answer these? And diving into data that's out there, diving into the literature, looking at innovations out there, looking at ways to solve it. So, again, very research heavy, which, again, very translational. It doesn't matter what type of research you're doing, but very translational for the way we approach research as graduate students. Right? So understanding what makes the studies we're looking at, the innovations we're looking at, where are the questions? What are the key questions that need to be answered?
What makes certain studies better than others? So when you start, when you're diving into innovation and you're trying to figure out the best innovation, you're trying to understand, you know, research that's out there, what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses of the different study designs? Again, very much what we were doing and what we learned to do during graduate school and those skill sets that we developed totally. So that was more of just like a principal medical affairs role, just very research heavy. And then as I grew my medical affairs career and started taking on more, more strategic roles, where, again, talking about more of the, how are we integrating our evidence into our product development? How are we thinking about the evidence? What evidence do we need? What evidence gaps do we have? Is there other applications for this product that we haven't thought about? Are there, you know, what are we hearing from the field? Like, what's coming back to us, from our customers, from our patients?
What are they experiencing? Are there, like, other benefits? Are there other claims that we should be thinking about? Are there other, you know, any safety things we need to watch out for? So starting to pull that strategy in and how we think about our products. And like you said, like, what's next for the products?
It might be, you know, that it might be expansion into other countries, it might be claims expansions. There's, as a biologist, we know sometimes that you impact one part of biology and it's a cascade effect. Right? So what are the other things that could be happening and what are the benefits? What are the safety risks? And then just taking on more of those strategic roles throughout medical affairs. So it's been more of a traditional medical affairs career journey, if I were to describe it from a strategic perspective.
I didn't jump around from a medical writer to come to more of the global medical affairs role for strategy. So much has come in and then kind of grow that strategic mindset and grow my career pathway that way. But work very closely with our medical writers, work with our msls, work with scientific affairs, work with clinical affairs, and just really start to understand how you started the conversation talking about this wide umbrella of what medical affairs is and how all these roles, how important they all are.
There's so many different facets in there of how we support these different products, medical communication, different Kol engagements. And it's also important.
[00:47:30] Speaker A: And I actually like how you are positing this in a way, to say this is what we're naturally trained to do as scientists. You're just doing it in a different context. So you're looking at clinical data versus preclinical data. You're thinking about long term ramifications of this one particular mechanism of action. You're identifying the data gaps. I mean, some of these phrases that we use, like jargon that we use in industry, it still just means the same thing. I mean, go to the literature. You have a question you go to the literature, who are the key players and what are they doing? And then you contact that person and say, hey, we want to learn from you, or, hey, we would love to, love to visit you, or have you come in and get some patient data from you. It's the exact same thing that we do in the lab. If you have a mouse model or some cells that you're working with and there's some kind of missing component to your pathway, that's a data gap, and you go to the literature and you find the people who know, and then you ask them or you read their papers and you do your best to understand. And it's something that Diane Bovenkamp brought up and I think in a previous episode. And I just, I love this, which is basically when you're applying for jobs, imagine yourself as, like, the CEO of your own lab and kind of like, and I want to take it one step further, almost like the CEO of your own career, because there's things that we do as students that we just do all the time because this is part of the job. And then suddenly you think back on it that you realize, wow, no. I have managed teams. I have managed budgets. I ha, I am a project manager. I do know how to identify gaps in literature, in the literature and find the, the key opinion leaders or the Kols to answer these questions. You do know how to do all that. It's just taking that thinking and just shifting it a little bit.
[00:49:23] Speaker B: It is. And I think that's one of the key points when talking to younger scientists. And I love sharing whatever I can about my own career journey just so people can learn from it. But also those skill sets, those very translational skill sets that when you're trying to jump into industry that you don't think about. You mentioned project management, time management. Right. In industry, you know, timelines where we've got deliverables, we have things that we're trying to execute on, you know, same thing in graduate school. You've got to get certain experiments done for your next committee meeting and prioritization because, you know, we know it very well. In industry, we've got a lot of projects. We've got a lot of priorities. You have to know what's number one priority and how, how you're going to manage the to do list. But in graduate school, it's the same thing. You've got your project and you've probably got, like, you know, five other side projects of your interest and another five side projects of your PI's interest. Yeah. And so it's, you know, or it might be a colleague that needs your help with some assay troubleshooting or something like that, but it's just that prioritization. So those are some of the soft skill sets that we don't normally, you know, think about when we're trying to take that and translate it into like, our next career path. But I think those are things I always tell some of the younger scientists to, like, highlight on your resume, put into your cv, because they are so important.
And we don't think about it, we just think about like, how many paper publications have I had? How many grants did I get?
And, you know, less so of some of those other, like, very important skill sets that you absolutely develop while getting your, your PhD or going through grad school.
[00:51:16] Speaker A: And from an HR perspective, I mean, not necessarily every person knows how to translate what you're saying in your resume about, you know, I know how to do all of these essays and I have worked with these people. Not everyone can translate what that means into project management, into time management, into.
They don't understand that corralling your committee to agree on a single time to meet is practically an act of God, you know, or the amount of work that it takes to even write a dissertation. You know, a lot of that stuff doesn't translate unless you specifically say it 100%.
[00:51:56] Speaker B: And that is that. Like, you know, corralling it reminds me of the story. So when I was. I had written my dissertation, I'm defending, and, you know, this was, I don't, I don't know if they still do this or if things are more electronic now, but, you know, I printed out my dissertation. I put it in a three ring binder. This was before it went to publication and actually got pressed into like, book bindings before my. Before my open defense, before my closed defense, I gave it to each. Each of my committee members got a copy. The very first page, I probably shouldn't say this, but I'm going to share the story. The very first page, when you open it up, is, when is the committee date? When are we meeting?
[00:52:36] Speaker A: What is the room?
[00:52:38] Speaker B: And I will never forget that my close defense come and I have one committee member who's like, where are we meeting and what time? We just had your open defense. And I was like, well, I don't think they read, I don't think they opened up the binder with my dissertation.
But like you said, that, I mean, it's just that coordination so much goes into it. It doesn't mean people are always gonna follow it. But there is, like, a skill set there of just planning and coordinating, and there's only so much within our control, but it is. How many calendar do we have to coordinate, like, for our project meetings? I mean, there's a lot that goes.
[00:53:18] Speaker A: Into it, especially with outside committee members with totally different schedules. Yeah.
[00:53:23] Speaker B: Oh, and I had my outside committee member, and at this time, like, Skype and things weren't, they were just like, I don't remember if it was Skype or what it was, but something was just starting to be introduced and trying to integrate that technology. I'm probably going on a tangent, but now I'm just going down memory lane, how things have changed and how much time now we spend on camera, you know, in our, with our project teams, because we work globally, we work across the different, you know, states work, you know, different time zones and the power of the camera. And it's just completely different now than.
[00:54:03] Speaker A: You know, where we were before.
[00:54:04] Speaker B: But just, again, memory lane of trying to remember how that experience of integrating that technology, of camera into a meeting.
[00:54:14] Speaker A: It almost says to the listeners, maybe plant a little Easter egg in your dissertation just to make sure that people actually did go through the whole thing and read it.
Yeah.
[00:54:28] Speaker B: I have to say that committee member still had some really good, challenging questions for me through my close friends.
So I like to think, I hope.
[00:54:38] Speaker A: Maybe they just maybe page one and.
[00:54:41] Speaker B: Page two stuck together and they just.
[00:54:43] Speaker A: Never saw that good part. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:54:48] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:54:49] Speaker A: I don't care what it's called. They'll just take me to the data. All right. I can see that.
So, speaking of putting things in your resume and speaking of, like, wording it correctly, what do you look for? So when you, when you're doing hires or when you're reviewing resumes, like, what can someone do to make themselves stand out?
[00:55:11] Speaker B: So this is a question I think we get a lot right when people are first trying to understand what it looks like to transition into industry.
First of all, what I like to say is I do not want to read 99 pages of your resume or your cv. I'm sure it's very impressive.
I also, my personal preference is not to read paragraphs. I like to have bullet points. Bullet points of that introduction of.
These are my technical skills. If it's a technical role, these are technical skills at the front to highlight to bullet point. But beyond the technical skills, here's some other skill sets. The project management skill sets of and highlighting that, but more in bullet form.
I'm not wanting to read like, essays of, like, a paragraph of, you know, you copying what was in your dissertation research into there. Highlight the key points.
You know, always, like, those keywords that are in a job search, always highlight those, put them in, and, you know, that's, there's, there's always certain things that I'm looking for. Like when I'm looking for somebody to fill some of the roles on my team, it's a lot of that I need to see that this person knows how to scientifically think critically. Think what, again, going back to, like, what we learn in graduate school, I can teach about our products.
I think that if you have the right skillset, you can learn new disease states, you can learn new areas of research, but that those skills that we get early in our scientific career in graduate school of, like, how to critically think. Again, coming back to our earlier conversation, what are the key questions in this research? I need to ask how and how do you highlight that on a resume? But how you highlight it is very different. But being able to showcase that or have a conversation about that when you're starting to have those interviews, I mean, those are the types of things that I'm looking for because, as you know, graduate school isn't like a one year thing, and it's like, great. I've got, I know how to think scientifically. I've got it down. That is a skill set all in itself, and that's why we spend so much time in graduate school. So those are the things that I'm looking for. How do you, how do you highlight that? And some of it is through publications, but that's not all of it.
[00:57:48] Speaker A: No.
[00:57:49] Speaker B: You can have, you know, you can have 20 publications or you can have, like, three really good publications and high impact journals. So it's not always about the number of publications, but publications can show productivity. They can show some of your thinking. They can show collaborations. What work did you do with your lab? What work did you do with other labs within your institution? But what collaborations did you have outside of your institution? Because that also speaks to how we work in industry. There's a lot of collaborations that go on both, you know, interdepartmental, cross departmental, across different organizations, across different companies.
So highlighting some of those, those things are also, you know, I think, important when looking at resumes.
[00:58:37] Speaker A: I agree. And I guess my follow up question would be, in a lot of ways, people feel like everyone that I talk to says that they're always looking for self starters. Right. You know, we want to make sure that we have someone who is a little bit more independent, a little bit more of an independent thinker, you know, still, obviously, you know, fits the bill and will do the tasks asked for them, but without excessive babysitting. Like, what do you think some ways, what are some of the best ways that people could communicate that? That is them. They are self starters. They are able to, you know, take a task and run with it rather than needing to be micromanaged. How can you communicate that?
[00:59:14] Speaker B: I think that that's a good question. I don't think we always nail it. I don't know if you've always nailed it. I think that sometimes that's hard for managers. Right. Because we go through these interviews and you have a short, shorter amount of time. But I think it's through some of the questions. That's how I like to get at it, because you're posing a question, and it's how they address it, how they think about it.
Some of the questions they might have had before, because they've been in this research, like, oh, I get that question every time I. Maybe they've got a standard answer, but I don't think that that always happens, especially if you're, you know, you're. A lot of times in industry you have to give a presentation, like a little symposium. I'm not symposium, but you know what?
[01:00:00] Speaker A: I'm like a ten minute, 15 minutes talk. Yeah.
[01:00:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Some of them have been like, you know, just like a 45 minutes presentation, like you would in graduate school. You just go through your research, and it's still, how, no matter what, in those circumstances, there's a question that comes up that, you know, you can see the wheels turning. You can see like, okay, this is new because everybody comes from a diverse perspective. So the person asking the question might have something in the back of their mind about, maybe it's something the company's doing. Maybe it's in a new innovation that they just read about.
I always think that in graduate school, people would always ask. They're like, okay, here you just did this 45 minutes presentation about this phosphorylation cascade, and in glaucoma. Okay, how does this phosphorylation cascade impact this cell type, which is my favorite cell type, which you know probably nothing about, because all of your research was over here. Yes, but those are the types of things that, you know, you get the wheels turning, and then you say, okay, how do they take what they just presented, put it in a different application, a different process, a different experience, and how do they think through that, and you don't have to get the answer right. You might not even know what the answer is, but it's just like, it's, it's those kind of connections and thought processes of, well, it could be this or it could be that. So that's kind of more of like getting at the independent thinker.
I think the self starter.
I'm curious to know if you've had anything that really gets at that self starter. Some of it just comes through of just, like, the projects that they've led and some of the initiatives that they've taken.
I don't know if you've nailed it on the head, if you have some additional insights, but as somebody who does the hiring, I'd also be interested in hearing your thoughts.
[01:01:49] Speaker A: I think one of my future guests coming up wrote a really beautiful article. I saw it on LinkedIn. But she also has a newsletter, and she talked about essentially highlighting on your resume and in person, highlighting the kind of like the freelance things that you've done. And so whether you, if you've, like, you write articles on LinkedIn, you have a blog, you organized committee meetings for something that you have a personal interest in. You were the president of some other society, either in school or out of school, you know, and so it just kind of shows initiative.
[01:02:31] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:02:32] Speaker A: Or alternatively, and I was going to say this before, too, it's important to be willing to toot your own horn. You know, that's something that's kind of quelled in us, right. In graduate school. You know, this is, it's all about the royal we. You know, we did all of this when you're like, nobody else was in the lab at 1030 at night doing this. That was all me. I did this, you know, but I. It's important on a resume to be able to say, like I used to say all the time.
I brought this cell type to my mentor's laboratory because we hadn't done any work in this realm before.
It was all retina. And I kind of brought the research in from the front of the eye because I needed to find something different than what the postdoc was working on. And I contacted the people to get the cell line. I learned, I went down the street to UIC and learned how to dissect tissue from, you know, and so you have to be able to, you have to be willing to take credit for that, even if other people, you know, you're trained not to, and other people will tell you, like, no, no, this was a team effort. Of course it is. But when you're in front of people and you're trying to prove that you've got. You've got initiative, that's. You have to be willing to say, no, I did this.
[01:03:45] Speaker B: And I was, you know, as you say that, I'm like, yep, I 100% agree. Those are definitely things to look for. It's. It is. You're right. Everything is always a team effort. We have teams behind us in all of our projects. But. But it is. It's showing that, like, this is a connection I made. This is something I took. These are, you know, you know, things that I expanded on or brought to the lab. And also, you mentioned it 100%, like those extracurricular activities of showing you take initiatives. We talked about, you know, women in bio. Did you have a role in women in bio? Were you in your graduate student council? Those are not things we have to do. Those are things that, like self starters, people who are really motivated, people who like leading others, who like leading themselves. Those are those little bit of extras that people do.
And I know I'm kind of jumping back and forth, but I think we do have to get comfortable in that self promoting, not just as young scientists, but I think it's a reminder to us, even in our everyday careers, it is still a team. It is still a team. But we have to highlight the amazing things our teams do. We have to highlight the amazing things that our direct reports do. And it's okay to say, hey, I also had a really good day today.
I figured something out, and I think sometimes impostor syndrome comes in. That confidence can kind of be a battle.
It's definitely something that I felt throughout my development, but I think it's so important of just, you know, like, taking time to accelerate. To accelerate taking time to acknowledge accomplishments, whether it's the whole team, your direct team, or maybe something that you just did. Awesome today, take time to reflect and be like, that was pretty cool.
[01:05:35] Speaker A: Totally. Yeah.
[01:05:37] Speaker B: Lower this, by the way.
[01:05:40] Speaker A: Yeah. I've been noticing you've got, like. I know.
Okay, that's. That's much better now. I agree. And I think especially as just continuing professionals, you know, having the extracurriculars is also really important because otherwise, I mean, if you. If you're unsatisfied in your job and, you know, you don't want to just, you know, do your job and have your family, and that's that. You know, I mean, it's one. It's important for fulfillment, but it's also, again, it's good for other resume items and, you know, talking to people who are like, I'm the president of my photography association. That's awesome. Tell me more about that. Or I'm a member of my community symphony or I do these. I mean, they make for really excellent talking points and things to kind of break the ice in an interview. Nothing. Just. It's not just for a professional purpose, but just to kind of ease you in, because having interesting stories, I think, makes everyone more exciting to talk to.
[01:06:39] Speaker B: Oh, I agree. And I think, you know, when you're in your thinking about it from, like, a career perspective, sometimes I've had some, like, team members be like, well, you know, how should I continue to develop my skill sets? Right? And you mentioned, like, those. We were talking about those extracurricular activities, and it's taking on some of those initiatives to influence without authority. Right?
[01:07:04] Speaker A: Totally.
[01:07:04] Speaker B: This is how you grow some of those skill sets so that you can advance your career and whether it's inside your organization doing, you know, associate groups or. Or other initiatives that are not part of your daily responsibility or whether it's in your community or just, like, hobbies, I have. I was just talking to somebody last week in our company, and, you know, she's also a scientist, you know, would describe herself as an introvert. And she was talking about how she joined an improv class to improve her communication, to get out of her shyness, to get comfortable speaking on her feet and reacting. And I. I spent a week with her, like, doing this training class, and I can't tell you how many times we came back to that because I'm just like, tell me more. Tell me more about how you interact with this improv group. Do you put on shows? Like, how does it feel? Because, like, you know, I'm like, this sounds so fascinating to me, so terrifying to me.
[01:08:11] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:08:12] Speaker B: But so fascinating. Like, I mean, I can see the benefits that come out of it. So even some of those hobbies, like, outside of work that we do, like, those leadership opportunities or those opportunities to just grow and stretch ourselves, going back to the beginning part of our conversation. Yes.
And I mean, look, she had something interesting, and we came back to it several times throughout the week to talk about it. So, again, it's what you said when you share a little bit of yourself with others and you find something interesting.
[01:08:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:08:42] Speaker B: You just want to keep talking to people about it.
[01:08:44] Speaker A: Oh, totally. And what a great place like Chicago to learn improv. It's like Chicago and New York are like the improv capitals of the world. So that is. That is incredibly impressive. What a fun story.
Well, Aaron Zook, it's been a delight. Is there anything else that you want to leave the listeners with? Any other advice or.
[01:09:05] Speaker B: I think this has been great, Cynthia. It's been great connecting with you and talking with you again.
I think this comes back to how we kind of started the conversation of, like, the world is small in past cross again. Here we are years later, catching up, having conversations, talking about our career.
And this is us. This is me still continuing to stretch myself and grow myself. And here be on your podcast, which is something that I would have never thought I would have done, not because of anything other than when would I have the opportunity. So.
[01:09:44] Speaker A: This is a total stretch of my comfort zone, too. And it just seemed like something I needed to do. And.
[01:09:49] Speaker B: Yeah, but I, I think just leaving the listeners, your listeners with that and just kind of circling back to that, of continuing to stretch and grow and remembering that, you know, people come back around. So, you know, just keep, keep the.
[01:10:06] Speaker A: Conversations going big time. I totally agree. And how can people find you, Erin? If they want to learn more about BD or building a career in metaphors, where can they find you?
[01:10:16] Speaker B: They can find me on LinkedIn. I'm always, I get a lot of messages. I'm happy to respond to people. I actually give a lot back to the community.
I talk to people who reach out to me on LinkedIn all the time. They ask questions about the company. They ask questions about career. Sometimes they just want to learn more about medical affairs.
Not everybody responds to those messages, but I wish I had somebody who, like, I wish I had those opportunities when I was trying to make the transition. So I try to really respond and give back that way.
So happy, happy to connect with anybody who's interested and out there.
[01:10:55] Speaker A: Wonderful. Well, Doctor Erin Zook, thank you so much for being on the episode, and we appreciate your time.
[01:11:02] Speaker B: Thank you. It's been fun.
[01:11:05] Speaker A: I want to thank Erin again so much for joining me today. It was just a joy to talk to her and thanks for listening.
[01:11:12] Speaker B: See you next time.
