We are excited to share the second episode of our new series:
Public Sector Players with our guest, Andy Karas ‘84, Mission Director of USAID Tanzania.
Check out the latest episode (36 minutes) and keep an eye out for new episodes each week.
Opportunity Expires June 30, 2020
Opportunity Expires June 30, 2020
Genetic Counselors provide professional genetic counseling, education, and emotional support to patients and/or families, particularly those who have a familial history of birth defects or genetic disorders, or who may be at risk for a variety of inherited conditions to help them understand and adapt to the medical, psychosocial, and familial implications of genetic contributions to disease. Genetic Counselors are responsible for analyzing and interpreting family medical histories and genetic test results to assess the chance of disease occurrence or recurrence; facilitating the understanding of a genetic diagnosis; providing education about inheritance, testing, management, prevention, resources, and research; making referrals for social services for families who have members with birth defects or genetic disorders, or who may be at risk for a variety of inherited conditions; and counseling to promote informed choices and adaptation to the risk or condition. Genetic Counselors also provide teaching and consultative services to other professionals and health care students.
Opportunity Expires June 30, 2020
Working very independently and under very general supervision from a manager or Principal Investigator, provides support to clinical research studies. May be responsible for the following activities: making independent judgment of suitability of potential participants for clinical trials, developing and implementing patient recruitment strategies, recommending changes to protocols, and overseeing the work of more entry level staff.
Opportunity Expires July 31, 2020
We are currently seeking candidates to investigate mechanisms of iron-altered hematopoiesis within the Iron Research Program of the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute, the research branch of the New York Blood Center. In particular, candidates will study the impact of iron overload and deficiency on the pathogenesis of human hematological diseases. The candidate will perform cutting-edge research that integrates human biology and hematology with novel therapies using innovative technologies and approaches including classic molecular, cellular, and biochemical techniques, as well as modern imaging techniques, sequencing and single cell analysis techniques, bioinformatics, and preclinical in vitro and in vivo models.
Opportunity Expires July 31, 2020
Our lab focuses on understanding how neural circuits in the brain mediate behavior (https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/labs/hattori/). We are particularly interested in answering questions such as how learning occurs and how motivation influences behavior. We employ a multidisciplinary approach that includes neural recordings, optogenetic manipulations, molecular genetics, and computational modeling, and use Drosophila as a model. Your responsibilities include assisting with experiments and maintaining common lab functions.
What if a single injection could lower blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides — for a lifetime?
In the first gene-editing experiment of its kind, scientists have disabled two genes in monkeys that raise the risk for heart disease. Humans carry the genes as well, and the experiment has raised hopes that a leading killer may one day be tamed.
“This could be the cure for heart disease,” said Dr. Michael Davidson, director of the Lipid Clinic at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.
But it will be years before human trials can begin, and gene-editing technology so far has a mixed tracked record. It is much too early to know whether the strategy will be safe and effective in humans; even the monkeys must be monitored for side effects or other treatment failures for some time to come.
The results were presented on Saturday at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, this year held virtually with about 3,700 attendees around the world. The scientists are writing up their findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed or published.
What if a single injection could lower blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides — for a lifetime?
In the first gene-editing experiment of its kind, scientists have disabled two genes in monkeys that raise the risk for heart disease. Humans carry the genes as well, and the experiment has raised hopes that a leading killer may one day be tamed.
“This could be the cure for heart disease,” said Dr. Michael Davidson, director of the Lipid Clinic at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.
But it will be years before human trials can begin, and gene-editing technology so far has a mixed tracked record. It is much too early to know whether the strategy will be safe and effective in humans; even the monkeys must be monitored for side effects or other treatment failures for some time to come.
The results were presented on Saturday at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, this year held virtually with about 3,700 attendees around the world. The scientists are writing up their findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed or published.
The researchers set out to block two genes: PCSK9, which helps regulate levels of LDL cholesterol; and ANGPTL3, part of the system regulating triglyceride, a type of blood fat. Both genes are active in the liver, which is where cholesterol and triglycerides are produced. People who inherit mutations that destroyed the genes’ function do not get heart disease.
People with increased blood levels of triglycerides and LDL cholesterol have dramatically greater risks of heart disease, heart attacks and strokes, the leading causes of death in most of the developed world. Drug companies already have developed and are marketing two so-called PCSK9 inhibitors that markedly lower LDL cholesterol, but they are expensive and must be injected every few weeks.
Researchers at Verve Therapeutics, led by Dr. Sekar Kathiresan, the chief executive, decided to edit the genes instead. The medicine they developed consists of two pieces of RNA — a gene editor and a tiny guide that directs the editor to a single sequence of 23 letters of human DNA among the genome’s 32.5 billion letters.
When it comes to getting your first job out of school, finding the right fit should be just as important as finding employment.
For many, that means working for an organization that values an inclusive and diverse workplace culture. In this fantastic panel facilitated by our friends at Monster.com, we hear from LGBTQ+ professionals from some of the country’s leading companies, who discuss the importance of finding a company that values your identity as much as your work. Watch to learn how to network with fellow LGBTQ individuals, get tips on coming out at work, find a company with mental health resources in the workplace, and learn about the importance of finding a mentor.
We know there are unique challenges facing the class of 2020 in the job market, and we hope this webinar can provide the information you need to help you find a job that fits you. We encourage all students to view this excellent panel presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXqrKeX2scI
Featured Speakers:
Workshop Sponsor:
As doctors and nurses across the United States continue to gather outside hospitals and clinics to protest police brutality and racism as part of the White Coats for Black Lives movement, LaShyra Nolen, a first-year student at Harvard Medical School, says it’s time to take medical schools to task over racism, too.
The fight for equality in medical education isn’t new, says Nolen, the first black woman to serve as Harvard Medical School’s student council president. But she’s hopeful that the national conversation around racism in society will force hospitals and medical schools to address racism within their own institutions.
“It wasn’t until over a week of riots that people started to pay attention,” Nolen says. “We bring black med students to these institutions, and they fill quotas, and they make institutions look good. But we’re not protecting them. We need to protect them.”
Studies show that students of color and those who are LGBTQ are more likely than other classmates to experience mistreatment during their training. Research published earlier this year in JAMA Internal Medicine, for example, suggests that minority students are more likely to face discriminatory comments, public humiliation and inappropriate sexual advances during their medical education.
Nolen has been heartened by the outpouring of online and in-person activism she’s seen, ranging from Twitter testimonials to opinion pieces in major medical journals. She’s been involved in efforts at Harvard and nationally to combat racism in medical education.
But there is much work to be done, she says.
The JAMA Internal Medicine study of more than 27,500 medical students in 2016 and 2017 found that 38% of students nationwide from racial and ethnic groups that are under-represented in medicine — including students who are black, Latino or Native American — reported mistreatment. That’s compared to only 24% of white students across the U.S. who said they had been mistreated during medical school.
The results raise questions, the study authors say, about racism in medical education and its implications for the persistently low numbers of people of color who become doctors.
“If these small disadvantages accrue throughout medical school, it could be contributing to keeping certain populations out of medicine,” says Katherine Hill, the study’s lead author and a medical student at Yale. “Discriminatory comments can have a negative impact — both on the people who are targeted, and on bystanders.”
All students are invited to attend a virtual information session for the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine on Thursday, July 9th from 5-6 p.m. ET. We look forward to the opportunity to share information with you about the School of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) as well as provide an overview of our admissions processes. We look forward to sharing details with you during this session as we continue to navigate the upcoming admissions cycle with the coronavirus pandemic in mind.
Please RSVP no later than Wednesday, July 8th. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
We hope to see you on July 9th!
Jeffrey Wieland is currently a Product Manager at Facebook. Previously, he served over 11 years as the Head of Accessibility at Facebook. He graduated from Middlebury College in 2005, with a BA degree in American Civilization.
Thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Can you give us an overview of your career path? Specifically, what motivated you to start the Accessibility Team at Facebook and how did your role at the company change through the years? I graduated Middlebury with a degree in American Civilization and followed the Pre-Med route on the side. However, I thought it would be helpful to gain some professional experience before making the big decision of what to do in the long-term. I serendipitously moved to California for a change and a good friend convinced me to apply to Facebook. This was when Facebook was still a small company looking to grow; there was still no such thing as a news feed.
I was initially hired into the small Customer Support team, what we now call User Operations. Over time, I found new opportunities to grow and learn. After a year on Customer Support, I helped Facebook start a User Research team in Design. I eventually worked there for three and a half years and researched why users were using our products and the challenges they faced. In this role, I gained an introduction to the concept of accessibility, which is building technologies for people with disabilities.
There were two primary motivators for starting the Accessibility team. The first stemmed from the belief that it aligned with the company’s mission of connecting everyone in the world. We wouldn’t be successful on that mission unless we invested in accessibility and ensured our technologies were accessible to everyone on the spectrum of abilities. The second motivator was more personal: this was a way for me to still engage with the medical and health field while also working at the intersection of design, technology, and user experience. Ten years later, the team has grown into a world-class multi-disciplinary team – it’s been an amazing career journey.
We would like to hear about projects you’ve been involved with. I was wondering if you could share some specific experiences and products. On a related note, if we want to see more products aimed at the public good, what considerations should we take into account? One of the major challenges for accessibility is scale. For vision loss or blindness, enabling access to visual media is really critical on the web today. So then the question becomes, how do you translate visual media into a format that would make sense to someone unable to see the content? How do you do that when you’re taking in millions of user generated photos? This challenge is not exclusive to Facebook, this goes for any product with visual media. But it was an important issue for Facebook since so much of what people are sharing is visual.
There are different ways to solve this. The traditional way is by encouraging people to provide a caption with their visual media. That’s a great start but it’s not the best solution for making sure lots of photos get captions. At best, you’d see about 1% of people filling out the captions. We needed a way to provide access to the other 99% of photos. We decided that a better solution was to use object recognition technology.
Of course, object recognition technologies have their own limitations. Computer-generated captions are generally more rudimentary than narratives provided by humans. However, back in 2016, we felt that Facebook’s technologies had gotten powerful enough to provide suitable descriptions, so we started to build prototypes to see what we could detect in visual media. Based on user research, we knew information about the people in photos was most important, so we focused a lot of attention there. In the end, our system, which we call Automatic Alt Text, had coverage for over 90% of photos and could often detect many of the critical objects appearing in each photo. We continue to refine the product year over year as our technologies get better.
Why don’t we switch gears and talk about your new role in product management. Can you provide us with an overview of your new role and what motivated the transition? I’ve been working on accessibility for over a decade now. It’s been a fascinating and rewarding experience. Over the past two years, I started helping with projects in adjacent fields within the company, and I realized how much I enjoyed working on different projects with different people. As one example, I began working in the sphere of usability. Usability focuses on ensuring that products are as easy to use as possible, and accessibility is often seen as a sub-dimension of usability.
The main motivation to change positions was the opportunity to learn and face new challenges. In my fourteen years at Facebook, I will now have had four different roles – I’ve loved all of them. From beginning in customer support to now working in product management, all of those transitions have been driven by wanting to get outside my comfort zone and learn more, faster.
With the latest transition to product management, I still get to work on issues related to accessibility. I believe technology should and can be used for good. I hope to continue to make that good available to everyone.
Shifting gears into your Middlebury experience and post-grad, what were some of the most important skills you developed at Middlebury which were instrumental to your first years at Facebook? There are a lot of things Middlebury instilled in me which are relevant to my work today. One important lesson was to be curious and to ask lots of questions. Dive deep into the facts and investigate problems fully to understand first principles. In technology, I think that’s how you can best understand a problem before making up your mind on a solution to pursue.
Another important skill I picked up at Middlebury is to see things through different perspectives. I think this has been crucial for my work on accessibility. There we work on behalf of great diversity and we cannot presume to know all those experiences from our own lens. In our case, we spent a lot of time with people with disabilities in our research and product development work. This made sure that we were building with a group instead of for a group. I believe this general rule extends beyond the Accessibility team to everything people do in the sphere of products and technology.
Was there any class or professor at Middlebury who taught you these things? Oh, there were a ton. I recall a senior seminar in American Civilization with Professor Tim Spears in particular though. Tim was committed to getting diverse perspectives in the classroom and pushing the class to engage in discussion. This is an approach I take running my own meetings. I was grateful to get a chance to learn from him.
I was hoping we could address the current pandemic. How has COVID affected your work and what have been the biggest changes? There are different challenges in adjusting to working from home. One of the major benefits of being in the office is the serendipity of being around other people: have a hallway chat, brainstorm together, or work through a disagreement face to face. Finding opportunities for that same serendipity through virtual means has definitely been a challenge. Also, collaboration is generally tougher when people are all working from home. Similar to other companies, we’re thinking of techniques and strategies to make remote collaboration more effective. There are great opportunities for innovation in collaboration through remote scenarios and I’m excited to see the fruits of that.
Specifically, what are some of the strategies you use at work to deal with the current remote conditions? One strategy is to make sure we’re scheduling more time for people to check in. This is because we know we aren’t going to get the same organic social interactions we would normally get in the office. So we want to allocate more time on the calendar and in meetings to talk about what’s going on personally, not just professionally. Since we don’t have other outlets to get together and hangout after work, we’re actively making space for social connections online. These are important for team health, comradery, and collaboration.
Another strategy is to be proactive with communication. When everyone is dispersed and working from home, we have to spend more time intentionally pushing out information and broadcasting, something we often take for granted while being in the office. This broadcasting needs to reach all directions, from peer-to-peer to leadership upwards. All of these strategies are intended to build best practices to adapt to our current climate.
This article was written by Arturo Simental 20’ and edited by Xiaoli Jin 19’.
This series is coordinated by Xiaoli Jin ’19. Look for more alumni profiles each week. You can connect with Xiaoli on LinkedIn.
If you are interested to interview alumni and contribute to this series, please contact Xiaoli Jin 2019′ on Midd2Midd.
In this time of social distancing, we are all looking for new ways to stay connected, and Midd2Midd is one of them! Midd2Midd connects Middlebury students, alumni, and parents, supporting mentoring, networking, and engagement within the Middlebury community around the world. Midd2Midd is your place to make things happen. Simply complete your profile, create a customized search, and begin to network!
