Partnership with Decode Health Expands Opportunities for Interns to Impact the Healthcare AI Industry
This article was originally published in the 2021- 2022 Annual Report
By Dora Obodo, Graduate Student
Graduate school internships are a relatively new idea. However, the ASPIRE Program within Vanderbilt University School of Medicine’s BRET Office of Career Development is leading the way in fostering these invaluable opportunities for its biomedical PhD graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The ASPIRE Internship program, now in its eighth year, has facilitated nearly 170 internships for the biomedical scientist trainees it serves. Throughout this time, the program has proven to be a mutually beneficial arrangement between the interns and the 38 participating host organizations. During an internship, graduate students and postdocs develop new skills and
domain knowledge by training in areas typically not emphasized in the lab and gaining exposure to work environments outside of academia. The organizations who employ interns find that they can increase their capacity and gain access to new ideas, while also identify and potentially recruit from a pipeline of highly trained talent. ASPIRE interns devote 8-10 hours per week for three months or longer to support the goals of a partner organization. Internship hosts represent a wide range of industries where scientists can make meaningful contributions, including consulting, scientific non-profits, medical and scientific communications, science policy, biotech business development and data science. Data science, in particular, is an increasingly popular career path for PhD-trained biomedical professionals because of its utility in almost all areas of biomedical research and the growing demand for individuals who can mine and interpret the vast amount of data being generated by biomedicine.
The ASPIRE data science internship with Decode Health is a perfect example of how an internship can serve a growing field. Decode Health is a healthcare AI company that powers an evolving ecosystem of diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies and linked technology partners. Leveraging a decade of integrating machine learning methods with large datasets, including clinical, genomic, and social determinants of health data, Decode leads the ecosystem to deliver proactive healthcare innovation that advances precision medicine. The Decode Health internships equip developing scientists with practical knowledge and industry experience. Upon completion, the interns are well prepared to make meaningful contributions within their fields.
Expanding Skills
The opportunity to gain skills and exposure becomes even more relevant as careers for biomedical scientists expand. Experiential learning is a valuable asset on the job market, and those who have it are highly sought after. This was the case for Aaron May-Zhang, PhD, Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at Fluent BioSciences, Inc. He broke into the field after interning with Decode Health. Like many of his biomedical scientist colleagues, May-Zhang had no data science or bioinformatics experience before starting his postdoc, but he had become interested in the field as he saw the exciting challenges and growth opportunities available. “I was trying to find every opportunity to diversify and understand how machine learning worked.
Decode Health had some of the best experts in the city for doing machine learning and RNA sequencing,” says May-Zhang. “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. I was able to point to specific outcomes and efforts that were highly relevant skills to the company.” May-Zhang is not the only intern to find the internship opportunity valuable. Since 2018, the Decode Health team has regularly offered internships via the ASPIRE Program.
The company has now hosted 9 successful interns, several of whom have gone on to pursue data science roles in various industries. “Industry is a completely different work environment than academia because people think about and prioritize different things here. Seeing that during an internship really softens the transition,” says Darwin Fu, PhD, Data Scientist at Kitcheck. Fu felt his experience interning with Decode Health during his postdoc in biomedical informatics was imperative to securing his current role. It gave him domain knowledge and professional skills in the start-up space which proved invaluable when he set out to pursue his career.
Decode Health co-founder and CEO, Chase Spurlock, PhD, who is a Vanderbilt University doctoral alumnus, says his team takes a hands-on approach to training interns by integrating them throughout the company’s operations. As such, he makes sure the team involves interns in areas that align with their individual talents and interests. “Interns have the opportunity to touch every aspect of the company. 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,” says Spurlock.
During the internship, students described having a self paced, flexible environment. This structure allows them to develop their skills and work on independent, self-driven projects befitting their interests, all while adding value to the team. In fact, interns are given the opportunity to move up in the company as their projects develop into pipelines that can help advance customer goals. Cody Heiser, a current graduate student in the Chemical and Physical Biology program, has found this opportunity at Decode Health rewarding. “It’s certainly been a valuable experience.
I’ve gotten 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,” says Heiser. As an intern for the last year and a half, Heiser has worked his way up from a data analyst to a data engineering role.
His work has allowed him versatility by applying skills learned in the lab to different contexts. In fact, Cody helped shape the data visualization story for a marquee Decode Health collaboration where Decode is looking to identify biomarkers for specific inflammatory diseases. Heiser notes,
“The internship has given 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 that challenge. This role will allow me to differentiate myself in the growing data science job market.”
Mabel Seto, PhD, a former Pharmacology graduate student who is now a postdoc at Harvard, saw an internship as a valuable way to test out the different facets of a field. Like May-Zhang and Fu, she participated in the Data Science Essentials module offered by the ASPIRE Program to introduce students to careers in data science. This non-credit bearing short course is run in partnership with the Nashville Software School. It teaches fundamental concepts in data science to biomedical graduate students and postdocs seeking to learn more about the programming and data analytics tools employed by data scientists. In addition, participants receive training in communication skills and are exposed to professionals in the data science industry through a series of case sessions highlighting real-world projects from their companies. As Seto’s interest in data science grew, she wanted to immerse herself further in the field. Taking on the Decode Health internship was a natural next step as she continued to explore data science as a career. In her view, “Internships, such as the one at Decode Health, are an integral part of graduate school. It helps to expand your interests by digging into a field, similar to the way one learns a language.”
Giving Back
In addition to his involvement with the ASPIRE Internship program, Spurlock continues to engage with the Vanderbilt community in numerous ways. He maintains an adjunct faculty appointment at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center as Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology & Immunology. He is also an affiliate faculty member at the Vanderbilt Data Science Institute. As the co-founder and CEO of a data-science-focused healthcare start-up, Spurlock had the opportunity to share his experience with the Vanderbilt community as the speaker at the inaugural Enabling Innovation Initiative (Ei2) seminar series in 2018.
More recently, he and his team worked directly with a cohort of graduate students and postdocs by leading one of the four data science case sessions offered in the spring of 2022 as the capstone activity for the Data Science Essentials ASPIRE module.
For Spurlock and the Decode Health team, the ASPIRE partnership has been incredibly rewarding. He described the relationship as one which provides bright, talented self-starters to the company. Spurlock also views the ASPIRE internships as providing experiences he thinks are necessary to bolster competitiveness of Vanderbilt graduates and foster industry-academia connections. The ASPIRE program gives participating companies the leeway to conduct interviews and engage with students in a way best fits to their needs. The ASPIRE program is driven to provide opportunities for Vanderbilt students to engage with the larger community where they can bring value and gain experience across a wide variety of industries.