What’s Up, Doc?

Welcome to “What’s Up, Doc?” ! This informational interview series is designed to support the professional development needs and career exploration efforts of U-M Postdoctoral Fellows. Each episode features a former U-M Postdoctoral Fellow who will discuss their experience transitioning into their career of choice and share advice to help you navigate your own postdoctoral journey. Created by a U-M Postdoctoral Fellow, for Postdoctoral Fellows, in collaboration with the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs.

Path to entrepreneurship with Dr. Daniel Wilinski 04/02/2026

Exploring Biotech Frontiers with Dr. Rita Avelar 03/09/2026

Exploring Biotech Frontiers with Dr. Rita Avelar Join us in this insightful episode as we sit down with Dr. Rita Avelar, a lead scientist at CircNova. Discover her inspiring journey from academia to the forefront of biotech innovation. Dr. Avelar shares her experiences transitioning from a postdoc at the University of Michigan to leading groundbreaking research in RNA therapeutics. Learn about the unique challenges and opportunities in the startup world, the importance of networking, and how diverse experiences can shape a successful career in science. Whether you’re an aspiring scientist or curious about the biotech industry, this episode offers valuable insights and advice. Tune in to explore the dynamic world of biotech with Dr. Avelar! “[…] there’s definitely a supportive environment and communication that has to happen between you and your postdoctoral mentor in order for them to even know how to help you.“ Dr. Rita Avelar Guest Rita Avelar obtained her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Pathology from the University of Michigan in 2023. She completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan in 2025, and is now Lead Scientist of Research and Translational Discovery at CircNova. With her team, she aims to leverage their NovaEngine™️AI-platform to discover novel and more durable non-coding RNA therapeutics, to target the undruggable and unlock new treatment options for patients with unmet clinical needs. Resources , book by John D. Krumboltz and Al S. Levin Transcript Anne-Sophie Bohrer Hello everyone and welcome to ‘What’s Up, Doc?’, an initiative developed by the University of Michigan Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ is a professional development interview series created to support the career exploration effort and professional development needs of current U-M postdocs. You will hear from former U-M postdocs discuss their own postdoc experience and share advice on their experience transitioning into their career of choice. We hope you will get the answers you want and need to make an informed decision about your own career. I am Anne-Sophie Bohrer Maurinne Bonnet And I am Maurinne Bonnet. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Today our guest is Doctor Rita Avelar, who completed her postdoc at the University of Michigan in 2025. Rita is now the lead scientist of research and translational discovery at CircNova in Ann Arbor. Welcome Rita and thank you for joining us. Rita Avelar Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. Maurinne Bonnet Hi Rita, welcome. Before we dive into what you actually do in your new job, could you please introduce yourself and, with a bit of your background, how did you end up doing your postdoc at the U of M? Rita Avelar Yeah. So I started my postdoc right after I graduated from my PhD, also at the University of Michigan. I did my PhD with Doctor DiFeo in the pathology department and it felt like the right fit for me to stay a little longer to continue the project that I had during my PhD to see it published and also to expand my expertise from this lab and actually leverage their collaborations at the time, which actually led me to the job that I have today. Anne-Sophie Bohrer So you work for CircNova. Can you tell us a little bit about that company and what they do? Rita Avelar Yeah. So CircNova is actually a biotech that is located in Ann Arbor here in Michigan. And what we do, we use our AI driven drug discovery to accelerate the development of RNA therapeutics. So what that really means is that we are using our proprietary AI Nova engine technology in order to help us predict the RNA structure, binding affinities and biological function to help us engineer new medicines and therapeutic approaches and hope to treat human disease. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Very cool. So like I said earlier, you’re the lead scientist. So can you tell us a little bit about what this role entails, what it’s like, what it looks like day-to-day? Rita Avelar Yeah. So as the lead scientist, what I really do is to establish and direct all CircNova’s experimental biology programs and platforms. So what I really do, and what I’m responsible to do, is to bridge the molecular biology in human disease with the drug discovery to accelerate CircNova’s pipeline from early stage innovation to hopefully translational discovery. So my day-to-day really is to help design, execute, and oversee the wet lab research. So I seek to validate all the RNA therapeutics that are generated through our AI and then advance the discovery platforms and introduce the therapeutic programs that we have in collaboration with other biotechs as well as academic institutions. Anne-Sophie Bohrer So it seems that you collaborate with a lot of people. So how many people work at CircNova? Rita Avelar Yeah. So we actually are a smaller biotech right now. We’ve been around for about two years and right now we are a total of 11 employees. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Okay, cool. So you have a startup label, I would say. Rita Avelar Correct yeah. I think we’re just finally trying to transition from startup to actually biotech. Maurinne Bonnet You know what it would take to actually transition from startup to biotech? Is this just the number of people working there, is it in terms of funding? What does it take? Rita Avelar Yeah, so I’m learning a lot about this being in the startup and the biotech world you get to wear all these different hats and you’re no longer just elite scientists, you’re also, you know, the manager and the project manager, and you know, like the investor interface representative, right. So you have all of these different functionalities that you never really got to explore before during your PhD. So from my understanding, it really is devoted on exposure and funding basically. So we have seed rounds and depending on where we are at the moment and how much we’re able to fundraise and how far our platform or our product, right, is being put through is what defines us as a biotech instead of a startup. Maurinne Bonnet So if we come back to like when you were a postdoc and you approached your like transition into this career, how did you actually navigate your transition from your postdoc to your new role? And especially, I would be interested in hearing how did you approach that conversation with your PI? Rita Avelar Yeah, that’s a really interesting question because I believe it’s very different from multiple people and in different labs. So when I joined the DiFeo lab for a postdoc, we both knew and agreed that, you know, I needed to transition into a new role soon enough, just because I had been with Annalisa for a quite a while as a research assistant and then as a PhD student, and we both knew that staying within her umbrella was going to possibly jeopardize my future career just because I needed to explore other avenues and make sure that I can actually flourish as a scientist in different environments. So we both had that perception from early on. The reason why I really stayed as a postdoc is because she was an expert, and the lead expert in micro RNAs, which was something I had never explored during my PhD. And it made sense for me to leverage that expertise from her. And so until I actually got that foundation and taking a lead role in the lab in the micro RNA field, it didn’t feel right to move on from my postdoctoral career. And so that conversation started from the very beginning for us since I started my postdoc with her, so that was an easy, you know, transition for me to tell her what my goal really was for those that don’t have that relationship with their PIs from the beginning, right? I think it’s definitely a conversation that should happen during interviews, because then they know the expectation that you have from the beginning and there’s no surprises. I think what really helped me was to connect with multiple different people and Dr. DiFeo was always very helpful in the reach out to the groups that she had as part of their collaborative environment. And also going to conferences really helped me explore what I wanted to do next. So that conversation was pretty standard for me. And as the postdoc lead scientist that I had been the senior scientist in that lab for a while now, I was able to communicate to, to Dr. DiFeo that I wanted to collaborate more with industry partnerships so that I could have that transition eventually and move from academia into more of an industry setting. She established those communications and I was going to be the lead scientist in the DiFeo lab for CircNova and eventually a position was open and became available and I was able to actually transitioned from my postdoc job into the CircNova job. Maurinne Bonnet I think it’s a, it’s a very good point, like having this conversation as early as possible with the PIs so, like you said, both know the expectations and your PI can also try to be supportive, either by connecting you with people or either you know, just give you the space and the time you need to explore career options, network with people, and stuff like that, yeah. Anne-Sophie Bohrer I would actually add too that it’s important to have that conversation early on, like you said, because you might absolutely love working for your PI in their lab but you know, you know you’re going to gain, like, so many much more skills and expertise and all these things, but essentially talking with your PI early also allows you to realize whether or not your PI is the great mentor support you’re going to need for that transition. And if they’re not, that’s fine, but at least you know it early on so that you can, like you said, go and find other people to talk to. Like, you know, have informational interview, which is kind of like what this podcast is about, but also like, start networking to find those people that have those connections to really help you long term, when you’re ready to transition into your next career. Rita Avelar I couldn’t agree more and it was really interesting for me specifically because I transitioned from a graduate student role to a postdoctoral role in the same lab and actually watching my PI adjust to my new needs and my new role was actually really (in) telling on how important that mentorship and support is to adjust with you and your role. The biggest reason why I think I recommend to talk to your PI right away is so that they know what you were looking for because some opportunities come from random conversations that they’re having at like not only conference, but even sometimes just, you know, during class or doing, doing any other type of interactive scientific, you know, communication. And they’re like “Oh, I know someone that is actually interested in following that career, I should put you in touch with that person”. And if you never mentioned it before, you are not going to be in the back of their mind when these opportunities come about. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Yeah. Rita Avelar I tried so hard to find a job that like fit exactly my skill set and that’s exactly my dream job and what I wanted to do, and I talked to the right people, I have the right, you know, networking and it just never happened. And you know, this random collaboration that happened through a different graduate student doing a poster presentation, you know, and when they reached out to Dr. DiFeo, she was like “Oh, I know someone who’s interested in doing that”. And she would have never known, she would have never thought about me or, you know, she didn’t even, she could have not even taken that opportunity with that collaboration because she didn’t think of someone that could take over if she had too much going on in her lab. And so I think that really speaks for, like you said, there’s a balance and there’s definitely a supportive environment and communication that has to happen between you and your postdoctoral mentor in order for them to even know how to help you. Maurinne Bonnet It’s, it’s actually very true and as we are conducting more interviews for the podcast, something we’ve learned about people transitioning is sometimes they’re transitioning into their career with intention; that’s the career they wanted, the job they wanted, but most of the time is some kind of like you were at the right place at the right time, it’s kind of serendipity or luck. And even, even if you don’t know what you want to do, we still encourage you to talk to your PI because they can ask you some questions and, and by answering those questions that help you, you know, figure out your career or like they can direct you to the OPA or the OGPS office. Anne-Sophie Bohrer You mentioned that you had that conversation saying you wanted to transition from academia to industry. So my question is that now that you’re working in a startup, was it your initial plan? Like did you know what it was going to be like or was it again, like happenstance, complete coincidence that you ended up there? And if it is, what were the things you leveraged from your training to get you the job essentially? Rita Avelar That’s a great question, actually never really brainstormed about that particular thought, so I would say that first of all, biotech or the startup world is definitely something that you learn in the theory, but practically completely different I would say. I knew to expect, you know, like you’re going to have to wear different hats and the company starts kind of like small and you have to be there supportive of each other and different people will have different expertises that they will leverage in different scenarios and situations. But it’s so much more than that, right? Like startups are really just new and they don’t know what to do, and maybe they, they can be the 3rd or the 4th try of a CEO because they’re also learning how to adventure through their network, right? Like our CEO is an exceptional fundraiser, but also she came from the automotive industry, so how is she in the biomedical field, right? Like you just get these completely different exposures that you never really thought about and I’ll tell you like you really have to have a very talented team to come together and to work together in order to be able to succeed, and we are really the example of that. And I don’t say that just because I work there, but it’s just, like, amazing how these completely different talents that come from different backgrounds can come together and just be amazing at what they do. And you know, like my background is pure biology, and actually protein biology and oncology, and now I’m doing RNA biology and it’s completely different, you know, disease setting and neurophysiology and need to leverage AI which I had never had exposure to, right? So you can’t really train for this. You kind of just go with the flow and you just have to be really open minded and willing to explore and to just risk. And that’s what I really like about the startup world is that every day is different. You don’t really have a set expectation and it’s going to go that way every time. Obviously, with that comes, you know, risk and that risk for us postdocs is something that it’s definitely outside of our comfort zone. When you know when we leave Michigan and we have OPA has been incredible for me specifically, OGPS, and as a graduate student, I leveraged so much of the Rackham opportunities as well. So it’s a little different and I’m a little bit more used to that, having that support and in the biotech world, you’re kind of just like are out for yourself and for me as an international postdoc, that risk sometimes is a little bit scary just because you never know what’s going to happen. Funding is very volatile, and it can happen that you’re not going to be able to continue in that position for a lot longer. And that’s a little scary because it’s less stable and, you know, having to work my visa situation with my working permit is definitely something that I need to keep in mind and that was a lot more stable at the University of Michigan. But I work with incredible people, and they’re very willing to, to see me through in this role and that’s what I have for me that a lot of people unfortunately don’t have. And I am honestly rediscovering my whole career and it is nothing what I expected. As a PhD student I actually did an internship at Merck, so I knew I wanted industry then and that’s really when I had my first taste of what it felt like to be outside of academia. And I that’s what I wanted to do, that’s what I thought I wanted to do. I wanted to go into industry, I wanted to go to big pharma to have a stable job, you know, a nine to five that would still give me security but wanted to explore and be independent in my research career. And when I interviewed for the biotech and really asked each person what they would do in their day-to-day and how they would leverage their scientific ideas, I fell in love with it and I just, I honestly do not regret it at all. Maurinne Bonnet So you said like you, you did an internship at Merck. And so, what are the main differences you see between, you know, kind of a big pharma like Merck or a big company and CircNova and what made you choose a small company versus going back to Merck or, or another big pharma? Rita Avelar Yeah, that’s a really great question. I asked myself that question almost every day just because, like, something big, as big as Merck, right? Like I said, you have a lot of financial stability or at least more than the biotech world. And I would say the programs are a lot better established so you kind of get hired for a discovery program that you know, at least initially, what the main overall goal of the company is right and these companies are very well established and they have been doing this type of work for a really long time. What I love about the big pharma is the type of people that you learn from, right? Like you have very experienced people that have done this for a really long time. They are very well knowledged in what drug discovery is, what the oncology opportunity really looks like, right? And you have scientists from all over the world and from all kinds of backgrounds you have, you work with chemists and with the pharmacology group and the in vivo group, so you really are this giant group of people that you really learn from. In the biotech, right, you start small and what you don’t know, instead of reaching out to an expert that is in your group, you have to just go and figure it out yourself. So that was scary in the beginning, you know, like, because I have an oncology background in proteins. Why would I know RNA in neurophysiology, right? It, it, it just like you become an expert in such a niche field that you’re comfortable with, then you kind of forget that you have a PhD and you can adventure yourself through other expert fields. So that is something that I thought I wouldn’t thrive in, and I was definitely wrong, because I think that actually has challenged me. Me and Maurinne talk so much about this. It’s like, do you really know what you want to do? Are you really going to be good at it? Are you going to be able to thrive in that environment? Is it scary to go a little bit out of your comfort zone because you’ve been doing this type of research for so long? And in my case, I rediscovered myself and I kind of felt like I was reaching a plateau in my career where I was really good at what I do, and I have excellent hands to execute the experiments that I needed, but I actually missed using my brain a lot more, you know, like I needed to push myself outside of my comfort zone to rediscover myself as a scientist. Maurinne Bonnet You know, it’s very funny what you just said, because I also do some consulting for a company that actually work in the exact field I’m supposed to be an expert in, according to... /episode/index/show/dbd41c70-6419-40b2-96cc-dc4202415383/id/40370550

Building a Career in Tech Transfer: Insights from Dr. Megan Griffin 03/09/2026

Building a Career in Tech Transfer: Insights from Dr. Megan Griffin Megan Griffin holds a BS in Biotechnology and Molecular Biology from Michigan State University and obtained her PhD in Developmental and Molecular Biology from the University of Cincinnati. She completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan in 2020 and later was an U-M Innovation Partnerships fellow from 2020 to 2022. Megan is now the Assistant Director of Licensing at U-M Innovation Partnerships. In her role, she guides U-M innovators through the process of protecting their intellectual property and commercializing it through licensing to an interested company or creating a new startup venture. Resources Transcript Anne-Sophie Bohrer Hello everyone and welcome to ‘What’s Up, Doc?’, an initiative developed by the University of Michigan Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ is a professional development interview series created to support the career exploration efforts and professional development needs of current U-M postdocs. You will hear from former U-M postdocs discuss their own postdoc experience and share advice on their experience transitioning into their career of choice. We hope you will get the answers you want and need to make an informed decision about your own career. I am Anne-Sophie Bohrer Maurinne Bonnet And I am Maurinne Bonnet. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Today, our guest is Doctor Megan Griffin, who completed her postdoc at the University of Michigan in 2020. Megan is now working at the University of Michigan Innovation Partnerships as an Assistant Director of licensing. Welcome, Megan, and thank you for joining us. Megan Griffin Thank you for having me. Maurinne Bonnet Hey, Megan, it’s a pleasure to have you today. So as Anne-Sophie said, you are currently working at Innovation Partnerships, so for some, some of us who are not familiar with that, could you briefly tell us more about this office, what are its main missions, what what are you doing there? Megan Griffin Sure. Yeah. So Innovation Partnerships was recently rebranded, used to be the Office of Technology Transfer here at the University of Michigan. And we rebranded really to capture a wider array of things that we do. So we’re sort of divided into 3 branches. I work with the licensing team, we have a ventures team and we have our corporate and foundation research alliances team. So collectively, all of these groups work closely together, and our overall mission is really to help faculty or students or staff, whoever at the university that has innovative research, get that research out to the public. So really our our core mission statement is that we want every piece of research at the University of Michigan have the opportunity to impact the world. So we do this by helping to protect intellectual property that can be in the form of patents or copyrights or, you know, sometimes we can license things without protection, and then we also will try to get it to the world, either through licensing that to companies, help people create their own startup companies, uhm connect people with funding resources, that’s another thing we do. So we have a couple of internal translation funds that we manage that are meant to fund the gaps in research to get it to a point where it’s ready to be commercialized. And we also have investment funds for creating startup ventures. Uhm, so it’s kind of, you know, overall the overarching goal of our office. And if you want to know more about the specific branches, I can get into more detail. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Cool. Well, that’s really interesting. Uhm, so clearly you’re still somehow and somewhat involved with the science, uhm, but you’re not at the bench anymore, you’re not in the lab anymore. And so can you tell us a little bit about your background and really what led you to choose to pursue this career? Megan Griffin Yeah, absolutely. So my background is in life sciences, I got a PhD at the University of Cincinnati in molecular and developmental biology. As I was wrapping up my graduate career, I was starting to think about what I wanted to do overall and I hadn’t really quite settled on a career path. That was the first time I heard of tech transfer and I thought” Huh, that sounds kind of interesting, let me find out more.” So I met with the tech transfer office at the Children’s Hospital where I was doing my research, and sort of found out more about the career, but at that point I was about to graduate, it was a little late to get involved with them, uhm, and they told me that, you know, some schools have these internship opportunities available that you might be able to do if you choose to do a postdoc or something like that or maybe you can directly apply. So I decided to do a postdoc to keep my options open, so to speak. I hadn’t totally ruled out the traditional route of, uhm, you know, trying to get a professor position, uhm, but I was sort of leaning against it, so I decided to take a postdoc opportunity here with University of Michigan. And I knew going in that the university had this internship opportunity for graduate students and postdocs with what was then the Office of tech transfer. Uhm, so I started my postdoc and sort of that knowledge in the back of my mind and kept my eyes and ears open for any postings or any knowledge about this internship opportunity. So about a year into my postdoc, I got an e-mail, uhm, I forget who it came from, probably the, you know, postdoc affairs, about different opportunities and saw that they were hiring interns, so I applied and was fortunate enough to get that position. Uhm, so I did that for the rest of the duration of my postdoc, uhm, concurrent with that position. So this was like a 10 hour a week remote position, uhm, and got me some exposure to this career path. I really enjoyed doing it, decided that I wouldn’t be sad if I never looked at a pipette again, uhm, as much as I love bench research, I was kind of ready to step away. But I didn’t want to lose, like you mentioned, this is related to science, I, I didn’t want to lose that, you know, learning about cutting edge research and I really liked everything that academia had to offer, uhm, so this seemed like a good fit for me, where I get to learn about all the exciting research, use my training to sort of decipher what that knowledge means, uhm, but then sort of meet the business arm, uhm, and try to translate that research into a commercial product or, you know, in, in my sweet spot of my background in life sciences, uhm, I spent a lot in the area of therapeutics, so drug development, how can we treat patients better with a variety of diseases. Maurinne Bonnet So we’ll come back later with Anne-Sophie about like your day-to-day life, and I think what, what I’m really curious about is so when you decided to join the U of M, is it because you knew there would be this fellowship or you actually decide to join the university to join a specific lab? Megan Griffin Yeah, so it was a combination of things. Uhm, knowing that the fellowship existed definitely helped my decision, uhm, but I, I was mostly focused on finding a postdoc that fit my career interests, as well as, you know, fit my personal life. So I didn’t, I applied for multiple postdocs, uhm, and some of my other interviews, I asked about tech transfer and if there were any opportunities there to, you know, volunteer, shadow, get involved with the office, just to explore the career. And, you know, there’s a variety of levels of things that other universities, but I, I grew, I was born and raised, well I wasn’t born here, but I was raised in Michigan and I have family nearby, so that helped in my decision to come back to Michigan for a postdoc. And the lab that I joined, uhm, was Jordan Schaefer’s lab with Michigan Medicine and studied thrombosis. My graduate work was in blood vessel development, so it was sort of an adjacent area. Uhm, I did my graduate work with zebrafish as a model organism and joined the zebrafish lab here, uhm, so it was a good fit in a lot of ways: fit my area of interest for research, fit my geographically preferred location and I knew that this fellowship existed. Maurinne Bonnet That makes a lot of sense, yeah. Sounds like it was a good decision. Megan Griffin Yeah! Maurinne Bonnet So, uhm, you, you said that you got this part-time fellowship that takes you up to, like, 10 hours per week. So, uhm, how did you kind of manage the logistics between your bench work, you know, fulfilling your duty as a postdoc, and also working at the Innovation Partnership office? And did your PI support you in that? Megan Griffin Yeah. So, uhm, my PI was very supportive in order to have additional work because it is a paid internship, you have to have approval, I think as a graduate student and perhaps with a postdoc. So they just ask that your PI sign this letter of support, that they know you’re doing this, and they’re, they’re okay with it. Uhm, and fortunately, my PI was very supportive, I, you know, came to him and said “There’s this opportunity, I’m interested in this as a career. This will only take up to 10 hours a week. I understand that I need to get my research done in the lab as well. And you know, I won’t, I’ll make sure it doesn’t interfere.” and he was very on board with “Oh yeah, you should follow your career interests. The career development is very important. If you’re interested in this happy to support you, uhm, trying it.” So that was sort of step one. And then in terms of balancing the workload, the part time fellows help with sort of invention intake analysis, so when an invention comes to our office, we get this sort of one-pager form that summarizes what the invention is, and we have a handful of fellows with a variety of backgrounds. So, uhm, somebody in my role, a licensing manager, will request a fellows report and once that report is requested, it gets assigned to a fellow based on their area. That fellow then has one week to complete this templated report and the report has sections that talk about the background of the invention and, you know, just sort of summarizing the background knowledge in the field, uhm, market analysis – who would use it, what competitive products are, or what companies might want to use it – uhm, any market statistics you can find. And then it has a few other sections: one is to sort of to write an abstract about the technology, uhm, and then one that is most useful for most people in our office is this priority section. We asked the fellows to look into what intellectual property might exist, and that can be in the form of patents or papers or anything they can find online. Uhm, and they sort of compile all this data into this templated report and e-mail it back to the manager of the fellows’ program. So all that is a lot of work, but all you need is a computer and an internet connection so it can be done anywhere, anytime. It was always a remote position even before COVID, uhm, so it was easy to sort of squeeze into my evenings, or I could do a little bit on the weekend, or if I had, you know a really long experiment and not much other stuff going on in the lab that day, I can even work on it and, you know, during my quote-unquote “normal business hours” since we all know that postdocs aren’t traditional, you know, 9-to-5 jobs (laughs). Uhm, so and these reports were easiest to get done in chunks of time so I didn’t need 10 hours all at once to do it, but it was helpful if I had at least one or two hours to get a chunk of work done. So it was not too hard to manage, uhm, and it was the nature of the internship is, uhm, it did not necessarily have an assignment every single week. It just depended on what came into our office, so I might have an assignment three weeks in a row and then I might not have one for a couple of weeks, uhm, so I didn’t have to devote an extra 10 hours every single week, it just sort of depended on what the work, workload was like. Anne-Sophie Bohrer And, and I assume then that anyway they were very mindful in not assigning you several projects at once, right? Megan Griffin Correct! Anne-Sophie Bohrer Like mindful of your time and also of your abilities, right, you’re just learning. Megan Griffin Yeah, yeah. We would only ever get one assignment at a time, and that single report was meant to take 8 to 10 hours of time. Uhm, and the project, you know, we understand that people, life, life happens, right, uhm, so our fellows were always free to request weeks off, like “Hey, I’m going on vacation, please don’t assign me this week” Maurinne Bonnet Uh-huh. Megan Griffin Or “I’m really busy in lab, can you please not assign me something for one or two weeks” and, as long as that wasn’t, you know, super frequent. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Every week. Megan Griffin Yeah, it’s pretty accommodating to request that. Anne-Sophie Bohrer How long did this, so we’re talking, you initially said internship and now we talk about fellowship. Are you mentioning talking about the same thing and how long was the internship for? Megan Griffin So yeah. That’s a great question. So sort of using them interchangeably, uhm, so I guess this is probably would be more of like the internship uhm, that I did. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Okay. Megan Griffin And this was part time, so I did this until I, uhm, ended my postdoc. So we asked the part time, so we called them part time fellows, so we asked our part-time fellows to commit at least one year to the program, and that’s just because there’s some time and investment in training and things like that. We don’t expect these fellows to come in knowing how to do patent searches and stuff like that, so there’s a little bit of training. Uhm, but you’re welcome to stay for as long as it makes sense, uhm, and for me, I enjoyed it, I wanted my career to move towards that direction, so I started about a year into my postdoc, I was postdoc for four years, so I did this for about 3. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Cool. Megan Griffin And then the, from there I moved to a full-time fellowship, still with our office. So that’s where I sort, might be confusing the two (laughs). So I did this part-time fellowship, moved to a full-time fellowship and that was where my postdoc ended. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Okay, cool! That’s great. After your fellowship with Innovation Partnerships, then you were hired and you started there as a licensing manager and now you’re an assistant director of licensing. So can you explain really what this initial role was about? Uhm, what was the average day in the job like? But also, how different it was from the fellowship you were just coming off? Megan Griffin Yeah. So maybe I’ll take one step back. So I explained there is this part-time fellowship and then full-time fellowship. So I’ll just briefly mention in the full-time fellowship, uhm, that was kind of similar to the part-time role, uhm, and that I still did a lot of these fellows reports, but I was full-time with our office. Uhm, when I started it was 2 weeks before COVID, so we went remote of course, and then we came back hybrid and in that full-time fellowship, uhm, the responsibilities are a bit more expanded. So our full time Fellows will get to sit in on meetings with patent lawyers, with faculty, with our internal meetings and sort of just learn about more aspects of the job, and they might be asked to do more specialized projects based on who needs help with what. Uhm, so I did the full-time fellowship for two years, uhm, it was from 2020 to 2022, I was part of our inaugural group of full-time Fellows, so a new program when I joined. We’re still doing it, uhm, we have about three fellows at a time in life sciences, medical sciences, depends on needs. I did end up with a full-time position with our office, that was not a guarantee. It just sort of depended on what positions were available. So I’m, uhm, assistant director of licensing is my official title, and I work with the therapeutics team. So what that means is that my role is to help people at the university, uhm, get their inventions properly protected, the intellectual property, and also try to find licensees for their technologies or help them create their companies. So there’s two main buckets of things I do, one it deals with intellectual property protection, one deals with licensing. So functionally, what this job entails is, uhm, every day is a little bit different. So, uhm, my day is managing my portfolio of technologies, so I get faculty assigned to me that are in my field and we sort of work with repeat customers so to speak. So I will work with the same faculty whenever they submit something into our office, just because that, you know, you’re sort of familiar with their background as a whole. So some technologies will get an invention submitted to our office, and it’s a really cool idea, but it’s a little bit early, so some things are very active. Other things are, uhm, you know, this is ready, let’s talk to a patent attorney, let’s get a patent filed on this as soon as possible, so I’ll coordinate those meetings and give approval to the patent attorney who actually writes drafts, but work with the faculty to approve that draft and get things filed. Other things are even more mature, where we’ve already gone through this whole process and there, it’s ready, and it’s ready to exit the university. So then I will try to help find a licensee, whether that is, uhm “Hey, we have a connection at this company, let me reach out to my contact” or more frequently, the faculty will come with the connection of their own. So I’ll help set up meetings, get non-disclosure agreements in place so they can talk more freely about the science and then if things are going really well, help negotiate licensing deals so, uhm, you know sort of where the business side comes into play. I’ll, I’ll work with whoever the licensee is on financial terms and legal terms and things like that until we come to a, an agreement and they can license the technology out to a company, uhm, or if your faculty is like “I really want to start a company on this, I think that would be super cool” then I’ll connect them to our ventures team, uhm, and help them get, gear them towards the correct resources to get them launched. So it’s still kind of a broad overview, it’s it’s my day, is very variable. It just depends on what’s going on. So it’s, uhm, it’s hard to describe the typical day. But it it keeps things interesting. I like it. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Yeah, it sounds very interesting. And it sounds like you were working with really a broad and very various array of people who have, like, very different backgrounds, very different interests in getting the project to the finish line. So yeah, that’s really cool. Megan Griffin Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Maurinne Bonnet OK, so that that might be actually challenging to like jump in meetings with like scientists, lawyers and you know manage the fellows. So I guess that the next question we have for you would be what would you say are two or the three greatest challenges you have faced in this position and, uhm, if you can also tell us about your biggest reward in your position, whatever this is, that you, you know, keep waking up every day to go to work. Megan Griffin Sure. Yeah. So you sort of alluded to one of them already, but I think one of the greatest challenges is just, uhm, self-organization so you know like we sort of talked about, there’s a lot of different parts of this job, a lot of different technologies, uhm, and just making sure that I stay on top of what needs to get done when, prioritize correctly and not let things slip through the cracks because that, that can happen easily. Uhm, and then another challenge., fortunately, most everyone that I talked to has a good demeanor and we can... /episode/index/show/dbd41c70-6419-40b2-96cc-dc4202415383/id/40370415

From Bench Science to Sales with Dr. Emily Sherman 03/09/2026

From Bench Science to Sales with Dr. Emily Sherman Emily Sherman holds a BS in Chemistry from Ithaca College and obtained her PhD in chemical biology in 2020 at the University of Michigan. She then completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan in 2021. Emily is an Account Executive for Takara, a life sciences regents company, where she started as Territory Manager. She manages a portfolio of clients across multiple states in the midwest, ensuring customer satisfaction and managing the sales cycle. As a fun fact, Emily has spent several months sailing around the world as a passenger on a ship in 2015. Resources (Indeed, Oct. 2, 2025) Transcript Anne-Sophie Bohrer Hello everyone and welcome to ‘What’s up, Doc?’, an initiative developed by the University of Michigan Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. “What’s Up, Doc?’ is a professional development interview series created to support the career exploration efforts and professional development needs of current UM postdocs. You will hear from former UM postdocs discuss their own postdoc experience and share advice on their experience transitioning into their career of choice. We hope you will get the answers you want and need to make an informed decision about your own career. I am Anne-Sophie Bohrer. Maurinne Bonnet And I am Maurinne Bonnet. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Today we are joined by our guest, Doctor Emily Sherman. Emily obtained her Ph.D. in chemical biology from the University of Michigan in 2020 and completed her postdoc in the Michigan Medical School in 2021. After her postdoc Emily joined Takara as a territory manager, where she is now an accounts manager. Welcome, Emily, and thank you for joining us. Emily Sherman Thank you guys for having me. I’m excited to chat. Maurinne Bonnet Yeah. We’re so excited to have you here. So, Emily, like Anne-Sophie said, you are currently working at Takara. So I guess the first question would be, could you briefly tell us about your company? What are you guys doing there? Emily Sherman Yeah, for sure. So Takara Bio is a Japanese company, we have a wholly owned subsidiary in the U.S. called Takara Bio USA. So you know we think of like Thermo as kind of the Amazon of the life sciences reagents company. Takara is like a smaller vendor in that same space. So at the core, we’re an enzyme company, so a lot of people know us for things like polymerases, cloning, Next Gen. sequencing, but we’ve really expanded into a lot of other areas like cell and gene therapy. Kind of anything molecular biology we have reagents for so, we have thousands of products all across kind of the life sciences. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Great. So Emily, let’s go back to 2021. When you transition from a bench position to a sales role. So how did you choose to pursue this career and when did you make that choice? Emily Sherman Yeah. So you know what’s funny is sales was really not on my radar at all admittedly. When I was, you know, in my training for PhD and postdoc, I didn’t even really know that it was an option, to be honest with you, my, my only experience with sales reps in the lab would be like, you know, the pipette people, the gloves people, that kind of just come barging into the lab and (laugh) ask you who you’re getting your plastics from. And, you know, they leave a flyer or something and leave. So a recruiter actually reached out to me for my current role, and honestly, when she first called me and asked, you know, Iis this something you ever thought about as a career?” I was kind of like, uhm, no (laughs). Like honestly I was, I was not sure if I was interested and she was like “You know, just let me send you the the job descriptions, what kind of person Takara specifically was looking for.” And they were interested in, like, someone with a science background, a Ph.D. So, you know, it was, it was really tough times. Like, I defended my Ph.D. in 2020 and I I did a postdoc with my mentor kind of knowing he was just opening his first lab and he really knew the whole time that, you know, I was really just looking for my next position. Uhm, so I was kind of job searching, it was during the pandemic. It was just a really tough time to find jobs, much like it is now to be totally honest with you. So you know this recruiter reached out and I was like “You know, at least you know it would allow me to stay here in Michigan.” I was looking to move into industry and I did not want to move to the coast. So a lot of times, if you want a career in like R&D in biotech space, you kind of have to move to like San Diego, San Francisco, Boston, maybe New York. And I really wanted to stay here in the Midwest and it’s a lot of, like, small startups and it’s kind of tough to find positions in, you know, the Ann Arbor area specifically. So that’s why I was open to this recruiter when she talked to me and I looked through the job description. When I looked at the salary, quite honestly, uhm, all of those things I was like, you know, this sounds like something that I could could take a leap for and worst case scenario, you know, if I hate it, at least I can spend a year or so, like making some good progress, paying off my, my undergrad student loans. (laughs) So it was definitely a leap of faith and, like, not something that I was planning for, but it has worked out. I’ve been here for like four and a half years now and I’m really loving it so. Maurinne Bonnet That’s a very nice story. So it sounds for you it was not necessarily a whole plan about like transitioning into sales. But if somebody is listening right now and they already know they would like to transition into sales, how do you think they should navigate their transition? Are there any opportunities that you might be aware of that you can combine that with your current pos doc to be more ready and prepared for these type of roles if no recruiter is coming after you like in your case? Emily Sherman Yeah, you know, I will say I do feel like I got lucky with kind of the timing and having this recruiter reach out to me. Uhm, and I’ll just as a side note, I will say I remember, you know, being a postdoc and Ph.D. student listening to these kind of same kind of career panels and like every time the answer from the candidate was always like, it’s always very serendipitous how these people end up in their roles. And they’re like “Well, I don’t really know how I got here.” But, uhm, you know looking at other people, I guess that have these type of roles, the only other thing I would say that could potentially be useful, particularly if you’re really interested in like climbing the ladder so to speak, like the corporate ladder thinking of being like a VP or CEO or something like that, uhm, in this space, having an MBA or some sort of formal like business education could be helpful. Or maybe something along the lines of like I know the tech Transfer Office does some fellowships and training programs and things of that sort, so that could also be useful. miLead consulting, I know that’s something that some of my peers did. And that that could also be useful. I could see how that could help. Maurinne Bonnet Yeah, that’s great. Great idea. Thank you. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Great. So as I mentioned earlier, your role within the company evolved since you first started. So you initially started as territory manager. Can you explain what this role is, what it means? Uhm, but also, what was an average day in the job is or was like at the time, really right after you transitioned after your postdoc? Emily Sherman Yeah, for sure. Uhm, so for anyone who’s unfamiliar with these sales role type of positions, they can come under a variety of names. Some companies would call it a territory manager, some people call it an account manager, account executive, key account manager, maybe regional account manager. Something along those lines. Essentially what I do is I oversee a territory. I cover Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana and a small portion of Ohio, and so all of the institutions, of course, academics like University of Michigan, Michigan State and beyond, as well as like small biotech companies, government, biotech and pharma, hospitals, diagnostic companies, all different kinds of accounts, large and small in my territory are managed by me. And so what that means is I am their primary point of contact for just about anything that they may need from Takara. So that could look like anything from just sending someone a simple price quote. Uhm, it can look like managing contracts with the larger institutions and universities. On my day-to-day meetings with labs or individual customers, it could be like giving product recommendations, answering, you know, small questions like “Is X product compatible with my sample type?” or “Will this work for this experiment?” Just kind of connecting those dots and helping point people in the right direction. So really, you know, my responsibility is to kind of take care of all of these accounts, all of our customers at all these different accounts, uhm, as well as, you know, to be the expert on our products I guess I would say. So we have thousands of products, which is a lot, but, you know, my job is to kind of be familiar with all of them so that I can make the right recommendations and things like that for my customers. So it’s kind of like running your own little business, you could say like my territory is you know, it’s up to me what I want to do if I want to focus on certain account types, uhm, you know, targeting things for growth, that sort of thing. It’s it’s really up to me how I choose to do that and to grow my business, which is really fun, you know. It’s a it’s a challenge, but it’s a fun one and it’s fun to sort of work for yourself. Like, I do have a manager, and of course I work for Takara, but I also like work for me, which is fulfilling, I would say. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Cool. Thank you. Maurinne Bonnet So you you said that it sounds like very fun to to to do this type of job, but also kind of challenging and so I would like to follow up on that. I think we’re interested in knowing what would you say are the greatest challenges that you have faced in this position? And because it sounds also fun. What what are the biggest rewards of your job? Emily Sherman Yeah. So you know, it’s very different from bench work for sure. Maurinne Bonnet I can imagine. Emily Sherman And I will say that was one of my biggest, uhm, hesitations with taking this job is like, you know, I’ve just spent so many years doing research. I had done all kinds of teaching like written grant done all this hard work over the years and I’m like, am I sort of throwing this away (laughs) by by switching over to, you know, a career in sales? There’s maybe like, a little bit of a stigma about going into sales, specifically. I feel like my brain is challenged every day, for sure. Uhm, and the, you know, some of the big differences would be like now I feel like when I was at the bench, one of the hardest parts was like keeping up with the literature, reading papers and keeping up with everything that’s going on in our field. I don’t really do that anymore. We do some journal clubs and things like that from time to time. But now it’s more like keeping up with our own products as well as like our competitors’ and like other companies in our space. So, first and foremost, I have to have at least a basic understanding of all those; the very popular products that are used a lot, I have to have a deep understanding of. As well as just being able to understand what’s kind of happening in the broader market space, like what other you know, systems and technologies our customers are using, what kind of problems they might be seeing. And just staying, like overall informed, I would say is a challenge because everyone’s always, you know, pushing the boundaries, launching new technologies, things like that, and it’s much like research, it’s a lot to keep up with. And the other thing is, you know, I manage a pretty big territory. So, you know, just talking about this role in general. If you are in this type of role for Thermo, you might just cover like University of Michigan. We’re more mid-sized, so I cover four states like I said, and then if you were to work for an even smaller company, there are other reps that I’ve met that cover like the whole country or half the country. So that’s kind of the range of what you could be working with. Uhm, and so my territory is somewhere in the middle but it still feels pretty large because I have about a hundred accounts and it’s just a lot. A lot of people, a lot of different customer types, anything from like a CEO level to like a graduate student doing all kinds of different projects and just switching your brain back and forth (laughs) in those ways can be, can be tough. So it’s a lot of quick learning and like staying, staying up to date on things. Maurinne Bonnet Yeah. Thanks for sharing all of that. That’s very interesting to learn more about your job. So I think for people in the audience now that you finally convinced them that, you know, a sales job is amazing, uhm, what, what would you say are the skills, either technical, transferable, interpersonal skills, that you did leverage from your graduate and postdoc trainings that help you to learn your first job, and that you think are like really essential to succeed in your career and you know, be comfortable in the job you’re doing? Emily Sherman Yeah. So something that a lot of people told me that I believe to be true is that really getting your Ph.D. and even part of your postdoc, you could say, although a postdoc is is a different level, but you’re really just learning to learn and it didn’t really click with me until, like, later, but it’s very true I think. You know, having a Ph.D. essentially means that you are able to, you know, come into a new project, a new lab, what have you, and you might not know how to get this project done on your first day, but you know by the end. And you know, you know what you know and what you don’t know. You know how to figure it out, what resources to use, things like that. And by the time you are done with your Ph.D., you should have that confidence that, you know, even if you don’t know everything you need to accomplish something, you can figure it out. That’s a huge part of the process, I think. And that is very applicable in my job today. Like there will be things that come up, new products or I might talk with a group who has questions about their project, and maybe I don’t fully understand what they’re doing the first time they tell me about it, but I know that with my background, I can figure it out and kind of connect the dots. So I think just having that general learning how to learn ability is very important because again, there’s just a lot to constantly be keeping up on in this role. The other thing I would say is just having good like time management, being organized. Again, it’s like a lot of different customers that we work with, a lot of accounts, a lot of products and it’s just a lot to keep track of. But again, in my Ph.D., like I was never just working on one project, you always have multiple things going on, uhm, and similarly, you just have to kind of stay organized, stay focused, make plans for yourself and like, use your time effectively to, to get it all done. So I would say those are, are the major skills. And then of course, you know the scientific background helps me every day. I will say compared to some of my colleagues who don’t come from an actual research background, it is much easier for me personally to like, make good progress with customers, understand what’s going on and like be able to problem solve having done a lot of these experiments myself, whereas someone who only has maybe a business background like the sales aspect might be easier for them, but you know the actual relating to those customers, understanding exactly what they’re looking for and what they’re doing is much harder to grasp without a science background. So that is one thing people asked me a lot is like “Do you think that your Ph.D. was necessary for your job?” and I say, hands down, absolutely. I don’t think I could do this, uhm, without it, and like, I don’t think I could work in sales for like some other industry that I wasn’t familiar with like, this is a very niche and specific area of sales and like I definitely lean heavy into the technical side of that. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Cool. Thank you. Uhm, so initially you mentioned that you were contacted by a recruiter during your postdoc, uhm, and so as we learn more about your job, your career in the sales field, can you talk about your experience with the application and the interview processes? Uhm, is there any advice that you know you can share with current postdocs who you know would like to pursue a some other career things they need to know about, but also from the standpoint of being contacted by a recruiter, in your opinion, did it make things easier or was it just a way for you to be aware of the position that you clearly would not have been aware of before? Emily Sherman Yeah, so it’s been four or five years since I was contacted for this role, but I still get contacted by recruiters on LinkedIn today and I kind of always follow this I guess my first piece of advice would be, you know, one if you’re job searching, you can turn on your open to work feature on LinkedIn, that helps people find you. But you know, it never hurts to take a call from a recruiter. The time that I was looking, I had plenty of recruiters reach out and I will say, definitely more than half of them, it was like not relevant, you know, they were looking for more of like a bachelor’s level, like maybe hiring for a technician position something that was not, not a fit for what I was looking for, and that’s OK. I think it never hurts to, you know, give recruiters the time of day because you never know when you will be looking for a position and to be connected with them, and having actually answered their message, at least, you know bodes well for you. And then ultimately, it’s up to you to decide, either once you’ve been through the interview process or once you’ve seen the full job description, whatever it may be, it’s up to you to decide if you’re interested or not, and if it’s a no, that’s totally fine. That’s exactly what I did with this role. You know, I did a phone screening essentially with that recruiter. And then as far as the interview process you asked, I believe I had three interviews with Takara folks. So the first one was with my current manager, the hiring manager. The second was with another manager on the sales team and then the last one was with our VP of sales, so my boss’s boss. Uhm, and then you know I received an offer after the third interview. And the recruiter’s advice to me, which I appreciate, was if you’re going to do the interviews, let’s do the interviews and you can decide at the end. You know, if you don’t want the job, if you’re too scared or it sounds like not your speed or whatever, you don’t have to say yes. But just get that offer in hand like it feels good to have options. Uhm, yeah, so that’s what I did. She was immensely helpful to me in preparing for interviews. Like, I’m still very grateful to this recruiter because no one has spent this much time with me, like, actually preparing me for interviews. We talked for each one, uhm, and a lot of her tips like I’ll never forget actually. Uhm, something that I recommend for anyone is like if you’ve heard of the STAR method for interviews, that’s a very good strategy. Like essentially the biggest lesson was to just like, be over prepared. You never want to be underprepared for an interview. It is... /episode/index/show/dbd41c70-6419-40b2-96cc-dc4202415383/id/40370370

Navigating Career Paths in Academia and Beyond 03/09/2026

Navigating Career Paths in Academia and Beyond In this first episode of “What’s Up, Doc?”, Dr. Kaylee Steen shares her insights on career exploration and professional growth for postdocs, highlighting pivotal programs supporting the personal and professional development of Postdoctoral Fellows at U-M. She opens up about her own journey from graduate school to her current leadership role, emphasizing the importance of understanding personal strengths and the value of skill development. Tune in to discover strategies for navigating the complexities of the postdoc journey, and finding your path in academia and beyond! “You have to commit to the process and you have to dedicate time to it.” Dr. Kaylee Steen Guest Kaylee Steen is the Associate Director of Professional Development and Trainee Support at the University of Michigan Medical School in the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (OGPS). Kaylee directs the Professional Growth, Inclusion & Well-Being team who offers a suite of services and programming for graduate students and postdoctoral research fellows. Kaylee also serves as the Medical School leader supporting postdoc affairs, including advocating for equitable postdoc policies and training. The collective goal of Kaylee’s team is to help trainees thrive academically, professionally and personally while at the University of Michigan and beyond. Kaylee holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and is one of the inaugural fellows of the University of Michigan Medical School’s Research Operations, Management & Strategy (ROMS) fellowship. Resources (U-M Postdoctoral Association Outreach opportunities webpage) Transcript Anne-Sophie Bohrer Hello everyone and welcome to ‘What’s Up, Doc?’, an initiative developed by the University of Michigan Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ is a professional development interview series created to support the career exploration efforts and professional development needs of current U-M postdocs. You will hear from former U-M postdocs, discuss their own postdoc experience, and share advice on their experience transitioning into their career of choice. We hope you will get the answers you want and need to make an informed decision about your own career. I am Anne-Sophie Bohrer. Maurinne Bonnet And I am Maurinne Bonnet. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Today our guest is Dr. Kaylee Steen who completed her postdoc at the University of Michigan in 2021. Kaylee is now the Associate Director of Professional Development and Trainee Support in the University of Michigan Medical School Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, or OGPS for short. Welcome Kaylee and thank you for joining us. Kaylee Steen Hello, thank you for having me. Good morning. Maurinne Bonnet Hi Kaylee. So as Anne-Sophie just mentioned you work at the OGPS. So could you tell us a little bit more what is the OGPS office? What are you doing? What is their main mission there? Kaylee Steen Yeah, so at OGPS, we are in the medical school within the University of Michigan, and specifically we sit within the Office of Research, but our mission is really the educational arm of the medical school. And more specifically, we focus on education for biomedical researchers. So we don’t have a hand in the medical education for MDs. We really focus on PhDs in training as well as postdocs. I oversee a team that kind of broadly focuses on professional growth, inclusion, and well-being. So we do workshops, have resources, advising, counseling to help people really with all aspects of their training and their career journey outside of the lab. So focusing on things like career exploration, professional skill building and competency building, more kind of personal development and holding events and activities that focus on belonging and really kind of celebrating our community and the different places and backgrounds people are coming from. And then, of course, overall well-being. And so we have two licensed therapist clinicians on our team that do therapy as well for our trainees. Maurinne Bonnet Oh, okay. I didn’t know about the therapy. Anne-Sophie Bohrer That’s amazing. Yeah. Maurinne Bonnet So you said you were mostly providing resources and programs, workshops for all the well-being and professional development. Would you maybe describe two or three programs that you think postdocs that are listening to us today would like to hear about? Kaylee Steen So for postdocs, I think one of our, what I’d call maybe at this point, really one of our flagship programs for postdocs is the YouCubed (You3) Leadership and Management Program. When I was a postdoc, I helped develop it with a couple of postdoc colleagues, but I was a part of that team that really thought about like, what are the needs that postdocs have in order to build an independent career, regardless of what career path they go down. So regardless if they go to academia, industry, government, nonprofit, what are sort of key common professional competencies that individuals really need to develop and hone to be successful? And so we built this eight module course that focuses on things that individuals need to build kind of within themselves. So their own competencies, things like being aware of their biases or understanding what are my strengths and how can I leverage those strengths. And then we shift into more about, okay, how do you then develop a team. How do you do more consistent interview strategies in order to pick the right candidate for your team? How do you then build trust in that team and effective teammanship? How do you manage a project, manage budgets, resources, et cetera? And so we built this You3 program, I think it was back in 2018 that we started the build of it. And we’re now, you know, moving into 2025-2026, we’re still running that program on a regular basis. And so postdocs join as a cohort. They go through this eight-week program on these various topics. We’ve also started a K99/R00 boot camp for postdocs. We did that boot camp last year as a pilot, and then we actually got a Burroughs Welcome Fund grant to build out this e-learning platform so people could either participate in live sessions as a boot camp or to try to make it more accessible for postdocs’ really busy schedules, do this more self-paced program where they get guided through all the different steps and sections of the grant. So that is being run. It’s about to start this fall. So we’re hoping that becomes a regular part of our programming. And then for more broad programming, we have other cohort programs that really focus on career exploration. So trying to figure out like, what are the things that I really love to do? What am I good at? What are the careers that are out there that could align with those skills and those values? And so we have a couple of different cohort programs that tackle that in slightly different ways. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Great. Well, that’s a lot of work. So now we’re going to go back to you and your own journey, Kaylee. So can you tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to choose to pursue this career? Kaylee Steen Yeah, so I used to think that I was maybe kind of like an oddball person in my graduate school program, in my postdoc program. But as I’ve gotten kind of into my professional groove, I’ve realized more people than not kind of have experienced what I’ve experienced. So, and I just say that as a caveat for those listening out there, sometimes I think you can perceive that you’re this like outlier, right? That you don’t quite know what you want to do or you’re sort of floundering. But really, I think it’s actually like the majority of people that have this feeling. So to kind of say that and then back up, when I was in graduate school, like most PhD students, I had to teach a couple of different semesters of courses and found that like I very much loved that process of coming up with lesson materials, learning materials, coming up with engaging ways to explain a process or, you know, a biological mechanism or something like that in an interesting way. And so I got sort of sucked into this world of pedagogy and understanding how people learn, how people retain and apply information. And so as I was getting involved in that, I took a preparing future faculty course at the University of Minnesota. I did an adjunct faculty position at a local school, Macalester College. And I thought,like, okay, this is it. Like this is for sure what I want to do. I absolutely loved teaching at Macalester. I liked the environment of that smaller school that was really focused on education. So being in the classroom and helping people learn really complex topics. But then when I became a postdoc at the University of Michigan, that was not accessible for me to be able to go and teach in a classroom and be, you know, the instructor on record, right? For various reasons. There are barriers to that. And I didn’t understand that when I took the postdoc. I figured, you know, I’m going to do this postdoc. I’m going to get a little bit more research experience so that I can go to, in my mind, I was anticipating going to a smaller university where I might have a small research lab, but it would be mainly teaching. But what I had heard from people is that the postdoc is valuable in order to kind of come up with that research project or program that you could bring to a school. So that was kind of my vision, my thought process. But again, I didn’t realize that I wouldn’t be able to teach. And so I decided to get involved in other programs that were still educational in nature. I did Developing Future Biologist. Luckily, I was in the Department of Cell and Development Biology (CDB), that is the host of Developing Future Biologist, DFB. So that was like a very easy transition to get involved in that and kind of run that program. And I found that I really liked the act of also developing a program. So we had to do big programmatic shifts because of COVID. And so I kind of took the lead on figuring out like we created these at home lab kits that we shipped to every participant to do these little experiments at home. And just kind of figuring out, like, how to solve those problems and logistical problems and administrative challenges and like managing the budget. We got a couple of grants for that program itself. So I learned that grant management side of things. And so it really opened my eyes to all of these different aspects of what I would think of like administration. And I didn’t know this at the time, right? Like that it was really administrative type work and programmatic type work. And then at the same time, I got involved with the You3 program that I mentioned earlier. So I was starting to kind of have my hand in more of this higher ed administration. And during kind of that self-discovery of realizing like, okay, there’s these other things that I like to do to help people develop, to help people grow. I’m not necessarily in a classroom, but I’m still a part of the learning process. And so it was around that same time when this administrative fellowship, research administrative fellowship, was first launched. And so I was finishing my first year of my postdoc. That was introduced. I became aware of it. And I realized, like, that could open up a lot of doors for me by just learning about this greater research administration, education administration infrastructure and get a lot of exposure to that in a very structured way. And so that was really like the turning point. I applied and was accepted into that fellowship position, which then completely opened my eyes to all the different types of ways we can support trainees, support research. You know, there’s research development, there’s, of course, educational development, there’s faculty development. There’s like so many different aspects beyond just within the classroom setting where you’re helping people develop something. And that’s the piece that I found I really liked, whether it was in the classroom, giving a lecture, giving a workshop. It was that development piece of it that I really enjoyed. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Just a quick follow-up. So you mentioned that fellowship you did during your postdoc. The name of the fellowship, it’s the Research Operations, Management, and Strategy Fellowship. Kaylee Steen Correct. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Right? ROMS. I’m just saying this so people can then look it up. So can you expand a little more really on the structure maybe of the fellowship, but also, like you said, it really expanded your horizons on really what higher ed administration can look like. So can you just explain a little bit what it was like and what you actually did during the fellowship? Kaylee Steen Yeah, so I will say my experience was a little bit unique than how a future ROMS fellow will experience this program because when myself and my other fellow, Kelly Kennaley, who’s actually now the program, she manages that fellowship as part of her job. When we joined, you know, we’re the first two fellows. There was structure, but it was also kind of made, not made clear to us, but we were welcomed in as a part of the team to continue building out the program. And, you know, for me, like, I actually love that because again, I had a chance to like have a real touch and a real hand in like developing the fellowship, how I, based off of our experience, how we thought it could be developed in a way that was like really meaningful and really impactful. With that being said, basically, kind of in a distilled version, the way that it has now developed and sort of solidified, and apologies to Kelly if you’re listening, if I get little details wrong, but essentially you go through what are called core rotations. So these are when you first start the fellowship. And these are units within the Office of Research that are kind of like the core key foundational units that are needed to run a research infrastructure, an academic medical center. So that includes things like, I don’t know what it’s called now, but at the time it was called like the leadership rotation or something like that. And that was working more closely with like the dean’s office and those individuals, kind of executive level leadership. Worked with department chairs, associate deans, things like that. Worked on a couple of different projects with them and supported some of the committees. We were very engrossed in like their meetings and conversations. You really got to see and hear what are the things that they have to address, what are their challenges, what are their barriers, how do they talk about it, how do they solve those problems. It was very intimidating and intense. And like half the time, I wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but it was a really good exposure to see like, these are the kinds of challenges that they have to deal with on a regular daily basis. So that was very interesting. And then we went on to other core rotations like IRB, so the institutional review board, the research core facilities, animal ULAM, so the animal care and husbandry, those kinds of things where you’re like, you absolutely have to have those units to run this like a major research enterprise. And so we would spend a few weeks with each of those units, work with their leadership or other staff members to kind of get an understanding of their business operations, the services that they provide. We would work on small, little projects with them just to get a little of experiential learning. But a lot of it is like shadowing, sitting in on meetings. And then based off of that experience, you also have the opportunity to do what are called elective rotations. So for instance, OGPS would be one of the units where you can do an elective rotation. And it’s, you know, again, a several weeks where you’re sitting in on meetings, doing little projects. And then what’s really cool is after those initial rotations, it’s a little bit of like a choose your own adventure where you can select what are called impact projects to get really involved with certain units or certain activities that you have a specific interest in. When I was a fellow, we had to kind of, um, seek out people. We had to like reach out to him and say like “Hey, I’m this weird fellow like that you’ve never heard of in this program. You’ve never, you know, well, like, can I work with you?” So we had to kind of like, uh, like hit the pavement in that way but it ended up being totally fine. I met with a lot of really interesting units and people and ended up doing projects with MICHR, so the Michigan Institute of Clinical and Health Research, with their team science group, and we worked on, doing these like brainstorming sessions. I think at the time they called them research jams, to help people ideate projects that they could do with a multidisciplinary group of scientists. I also worked with faculty development on coming up with tools and resources for new faculty and helping them kind of get situated and be successful in those first few years of, of their, of their career, early career faculty. So that was really interesting. I got to talk with a lot of different faculty and, like, really understand all of the challenges that they face, not just when they start, but really like throughout their whole career. And so that gave me, I think like a more intimate understanding of all the challenges that faculty have to face that I like just didn’t quite appreciate as a postdoc or a graduate student. And then I also did do some work with OGP and it was actually revamping the You3 program. So that’s been kind of like a constant in my trajectory. So yeah, so that is those impact projects that wrap up the second year of the fellowship. And then the idea is as you’re getting closer to the end, you start your job search and, oftentimes, there’s one of the groups that you’ve worked with. And if the timing works out, just so if there’s a position available, oftentimes people end up getting placed in that kind of fashion because they’ve already worked with these units or these groups on these projects, and there’s a need so you can pair up in that way. For me, it was not through a project, but I had worked with a managing director, Nadine Wong, at the Biointerfaces Institute. And it was really like just small little interactions, but I think she recognized kind of the skills I was developing in this fellowship and it piqued her interests enough where a few positions opened up that were being administered by the Institute. And so she’s just sent them my way. It was like a classic networking situation where you interact with someone, you make a good impression and they say “Hey, these jobs are like coming online, like make sure you apply for it (hint, hint)”. And so that kind of helped elevate my applications. Maurinne Bonnet Yeah, well, your fellowship sounds very broad and sounds like you’ve met a lot of people and that kind of like you just said, made you land your first job. And so as we’re hearing about your story, I think we’re wondering if you’re a candidate that, you know, didn’t have the chance to pursue one of those fellowships like the ROMS you just did, what do you think would make them competitive for those types of positions? Kaylee Steen Yeah, it’s a really good question. While it was extremely helpful and it is like a very valuable program, it by no means precludes you or excludes you from securing positions within research administration or higher ed administration. I think... /episode/index/show/dbd41c70-6419-40b2-96cc-dc4202415383/id/40369990

Welcome to “What’s Up, Doc?” 03/09/2026

Welcome to “What’s Up, Doc?” The hosts of the “What’s Up, Doc?” podcast, Maurinne Bonnet and Anne-Sophie Bohrer, walk you through the genesis of this initiative and their intentions behind creating a podcast to support the professional and career development of U-M Postdoctoral Fellows. Transcript Anne-Sophie Bohrer My name is Anne-Sophie Bohrer and I am the Program Manager for Professional Development in the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs at the University of Michigan. Maurinne Bonnet Hello, everyone. My name is Maurinne Bonnet, and I’m currently wrapping up my postdoc journey at the U of M in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the College of Pharmacy. Anne-Sophie Bohrer So welcome everyone to ‘What’s Up, Doc?’, which is a new initiative that Maurinne is going to talk to us about. Maurinne Bonnet Yeah, sure. So ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ is actually a professional development interview series created by Anne-Sophie and I to support the career exploration efforts and professional development needs of current U of M postdocs. So we actually created that as an alternative and low commitment way for postdocs to engage in professional development activities. And so maybe Anne-Sophie, you can talk to us a little bit of where the idea came from. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Yeah, absolutely. So for this, a little bit of background about me. So I was a postdoc myself, and realizing that I didn’t want to go into a faculty career, I had to go through this whole existential crisis of figuring out what my career was going to look like. And I realized that by doing this, I realized that first of all, I was very much not informed about what was available to me to participate in professional development activities in my campus. But I also realized that it was going to take me a lot of time and a lot of effort to pivot and transition into a new career. And so from the bench, it took me about three solid years to really figure out what career I wanted to go into, which is the career that I am in right now. And so really, the idea of ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ was to help postdocs at U of M, essentially start their career exploration journey and specifically understand the importance of informational interviews in the process of career exploration and career transition. And so for this, Maurinne, you too have a bit of a specific journey you’re in right now that’s also contributed to creating this initiative. Maurinne Bonnet Yeah, absolutely. So actually I’m wrapping up almost my third year of postdoc and I started realizing probably like a year ago that I didn’t want to stay at the bench. I didn’t want to become a PI for so many reasons. And the same, I was like, what is out there? What type of career can I pursue? How can I use my PhD and my postdoc experience? How do I compete with people that are already in the job market? And just like when you open LinkedIn and you’re like, okay, let’s find a job. What is the keyword you’re gonna look for, you know? So same, I started doing some IDP, so personal development plan, trying to look for other alternative career. And like you said, it just takes time and effort. And then you start connecting with somebody who is, you know, has this type of job and you’re like, oh, that sounds cool. Okay, you dig more and you’re like, oh, actually I don’t like that. Okay, go back to the starting point. Let’s find somebody else in another type of career. So you contact them, try to discuss with them. And you’re like, that sounds cool, but actually not for me. And so all of these, on top of your like full-time job at the bench mentoring student, when you’re inexperienced, it takes time and effort. And like when you go home, after all of that, you just don’t want to spend more time digging on the internet and like what is out there. So I was like, if I could just put something in my ears, listening to people talking about their career, their journey, just to give me an idea of like what they’re doing and so later on I can contact them for a follow-up question, but I would have like the first idea without me doing anything. It’s just the podcast talks to me basically. So that’s how, like my background and how I thought like, we might need this like initiative and who’s better than you to do that set up the podcast with. So that’s how we started. Anne-Sophie Bohrer And it was really serendipitous that you reached out to me to schedule an advising session with me. And turns out we’re both from France. Maurinne Bonnet Yay! Anne-Sophie Bohrer So we could connect, right? We had that shared experience of coming to the US to do a postdoc, realizing we wanted to stay in the US and having to figure out what we wanted to do. And so I think it was really, right, the right time, perfect storm for us to meet and essentially have the same idea, but just meeting someone else to help us get this off the ground. So this is how ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ was born. So now what we really want you all to understand is what the benefits of listening to ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ is going to be for you. And really, Maurinne, you already touched a little bit on this. It really is a great opportunity for all of you to essentially be introduced to a variety of careers to kickstart your career exploration journey, if you’re unsure of what you want to do, or to just connect, right, understand better what a certain career is about, and also start connecting with professionals in this career. And like I said before, the informational interview process is really essential when transitioning outside of your postdoc. So we’re pretty much providing that informational interview that you can listen to when you’re at the bench or during your commute. So that this way, you are taking that first step into your own professional growth. Maurinne Bonnet And I think I would add that, you know, like you highlight the importance of those interviews and sometimes it’s not easy to stop. You’re like, so who should I contact? Like, are you just going to open LinkedIn or like open Google and say, well, um, give me the name of an IP lawyer. You know, like I can talk about patent and IP, but it’s not as so easy to contact those people. They don’t know who you are. So like cold emailing, cold calling, doesn’t work out for everybody. And some people are not comfortable doing that. So the idea of also behind the podcast for us is to provide a network, like an alumni portfolio of people who are already open to the idea to be contacted because, you know, we all share this journey at the U of M. So like you have a first point of contact and usually, and if you book an appointment with answer, she will tell you that usually after each interview, you should come home with like a few other names to be introduced to. And that way you keep going with your network and you build your network that way. So we really want the podcast by our guests to provide you this network of people you could start being introduced easily with. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Absolutely. And I think it’s really, right, essential to understand that all our guests are going to be former postdocs of U of M, which provides already that first connection, right? It’s a shared experience that current postdocs will have with all these alumni. And by choosing to interview specifically UM postdoc alumni, it’s also a great way for us to highlight a lot of the resources that are available at U of M that some people might not be aware of. So that ultimately, by listening to these episodes, we really hope that you’re going to become more aware of what’s out there. And it’s also a great way for you to just start the process of thinking of what you want to do next. Maurinne Bonnet Yeah, and that’s something I think you would hear on the first episode, but we really want to emphasize that you need to take charge of your own journey as early as possible. It’s no pressure. It’s just like finding a job takes time, networking takes time. So just, if you can start thinking about it as soon as you start your postdoc, on the top of everything else, we know it’s not easy, but that’s why we wanted this to be low commitment. Just put it in your ears before you go to bed, on your commute, like you said, and just start thinking about it. And so if you decide like, oh, this career sounds very interesting, what should I do to be a good candidate and a good applicant at the end of my postdoc in two, three, five years, whatever. So start looking at resources. If you want to be a faculty member, that’s great, but maybe you don’t have the teaching background. So you’re going to hear about teaching opportunities at the U of M. If you want to become a sales person, maybe you need customer experience. And so we have all the resources available on campus that you can look at or career fairs or stuff like that. So it’s really also like we want to give you enough time to think about your career and have enough time to take the step of like taking a workshop, taking a course or whatever you need to be the best candidate at the end of your postdoc. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Absolutely, could not have said it better. So with this, we really hope that you find these conversations valuable and informative. And with that, happy listening. /episode/index/show/dbd41c70-6419-40b2-96cc-dc4202415383/id/40368820

What’s Up, Doc?

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