By Dora Obodo
The Office of Biomedical Research Education and Training’s Career Development ASPIRE program has been hosting an internship program for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows for eight years. The internship program, an invaluable resource for trainees interested in non-academic roles in the biomedical industry, has facilitated just over 200 internships to date through partnerships with a wide range of organizations.
In particular, the ASPIRE data science internship with Decode Health demonstrates how students can break into growing fields. Decode Health is a health care artificial intelligence company that empowers pharmaceutical companies and their tech partners by delivering proactive health care innovations to advance precision medicine.
Decode Health co-founder and CEO Chase Spurlock, PhD’14, takes a hands-on approach to training by integrating interns throughout the company’s operations, ensuring that they develop in areas aligned with their interests.
“Interns have the opportunity to touch every aspect of the company,” said Spurlock, whose degree is in microbe-host interactions. “We’re very intentional about having people join us who are interested not only in being on the data team, but also seeing how Decode’s products and services come together.”
Since 2018, the Decode Health team has hosted nine successful interns, several of whom continued to pursue data science roles afterwards.
“Industry is a completely different work environment than academia because people think about and prioritize different things here,” said Darwin Fu, PhD’17, currently a data scientist at Bluesight, a medication intelligence and software company. “Seeing that during an internship really softens the transition.”
Like many of his biomedical scientist colleagues, Aaron May-Zhang, Fellow’20, senior bioinformatics scientist at Fluent BioSciences Inc., was interested in data science but had little experience during his postdoctoral training at Vanderbilt.
“My internship experience allowed me to be an attractive candidate to Fluent Biosciences because their day-to-day roles were similar to what I was experiencing in my internship,” he said. “I was able to point to specific outcomes and efforts that were highly relevant skills to the company.”
During the internship, students work on self-driven projects that can develop into pipelines to help advance customer goals. Students with highly successful projects can take on advanced responsibilities as their skills improve. Cody Heiser, PhD’23, a recent graduate from the Chemical and Physical Biology program who interned at Decode Health for a year and a half, progressed from a data analyst role into data engineering. “I got to wear a lot of different hats along the R&D spectrum in a dynamic environment where everybody has to contribute on so many different levels. The internship gave me experiences to point to and say, ‘Here are the challenges that I’ve seen in an industry space, and this is how I contributed to overcome those challenges,’” he said. Heiser is now a senior scientist at Regeneron.
For Spurlock and the Decode Health team, the ASPIRE partnership has also been incredibly rewarding. Not only do the internships provide bright, talented self- starters to the company, but they also afford trainees with necessary experiences to boost their competitiveness and foster industry- academia connections.