By Janaina Pereira On November 11th, the iJOBS program hosted an event focused on the global company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). With this panel, we had the opportunity to hear from panelists holding different positions in the Human Genetics and Functional Genomics Departments about their projects and career paths in computational biology, genomic statistics, and genetics at GSK. 
GSK is one of the world’s leading healthcare companies with the vision of helping people to “do more, feel better, and live longer.” The company has over 95,000 employees across the globe, and last year delivered around 3.8 billion consumer healthcare products, 2.3 billion medicines, and 770 million vaccine doses. The company is well known for its vaccines, consumer healthcare and pharmaceutical products, which include the first vaccine for meningitis B called Bexsero, and expert recommended brands such as Sensodyne, Parodontax, Poligrip, Voltaren, Panadol, Otrivin and Theraflu. The event started with Dr. Alison Acevedo discussing her career path as a Computational Biologist at GSK. Dr. Acevedo is a Rutgers alumna; she finished her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering, within Androulakis Lab in June 2019, and started working at GSK in July 2019. Her Ph.D. work focused on computational and statistical methods to analyze high-throughput genetics data, and she has used these techniques to analyze cis-regulatory data for targets across therapy areas and identification/characterization of cell lines at GSK. Dr. Acevedo also discussed her hiring experience in the company. She was first contacted by a GSK recruiter through LinkedIn to apply for the company Future Leaders program. The Future Leaders consists of a trainee program in which you can rotate within three departments to increase experience and gain first-hand knowledge in the field. The program is offered in different countries and covers diverse areas such as business operations, sales and marketing, manufacturing and supply, and research and development. Unfortunately, Dr. Acevedo was not selected to participate in the program. However, she had cultivated a relationship with the GSK recruiter that led to the opportunity to apply for the Computational Biologist position in the department of Human Genetics. Important advice alert “be[ing] kind to your recruiter” as they can contact you about different job opportunities. She also mentioned that the hiring process consists of three phases: a phone interview with Human Resources, a technical phone interview with your potential manager, and an onsite interview (consisting of a presentation and a series of meetings throughout the day). Dr. Acevedo precisely explained how the company is encouraging the employee’s career growth by offering in-house training, the opportunity to participate in a variety of related-field conferences, and by offering a “10% Program” in which the employees can spend 10% of their time in a project of their interest. Next, Dr. Dawn Waterworth, Senior Director of Human Genetics Department at GSK discussed her career path. Dr. Waterworth did her Ph.D. in Human Genetics from the Imperial College of London, held a Postdoctoral position in the same area at UCL, and worked as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. In 2002, Dr. Waterworth transitioned from academia to industry through a position as a director at GSK, leading the genetics projects for cardiovascular, metabolic and dermatological diseases in the drug discovery and development department. Dr. Waterworth holds an outstanding curriculum, which includes being recognizing as the top 5% of scientists in GSK and author of over 150 publications. She focused her presentation on the projects being developed within different teams in her department, which include genomics analytics and computational biology, applied genetics, genomic data strategy and pharmacogenomics team focusing on target identification and validation. She also mentioned that the group is interconnected and the members can experience working in a variety of fields from immune system diseases to infectious diseases. She finished her presentation discussing a case study of GLP1R (a target of albiglutide), which gave us an idea of the importance of working as a group to answer real questions. We next heard from Dr. Diptee Kulkarni, the Genetics Therapy Area Head at GSK. Dr. Kulkarni is a licensed physician with a Ph.D. in cancer molecular biology and genetics from Rutgers University. Before joining GSK, Dr. Kulkarni was a Postdoc, as well as a Research Teaching Specialist, both of which were at Rutgers University. Dr. Kulkarni started her presentation talking about her group, which is focused on genetics in oncology. She briefly presented some examples of how genetics is applied to cancer drug discovery and development such as identification of oncogenic somatic BRAF mutations to medicine and identification of drug safety and efficacy by using genetics approaches. The last panelist was Dr. Johannes Freudenberg, Director of Computational Biology Department at GSK. Dr. Freudenberg started his career as a computational scientist and later on did a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics at the University of Cincinnati. After he fished his Ph.D., Dr. Freudenberg worked as Research Associate at the University of Cincinnati and later as a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Eight years ago, Dr. Freudenberg joined GSK as a Scientific Investigator and now he holds the position of Scientific Director of the Computational Biology department and is a GSK Fellow. Dr. Freudenberg started his presentation talking about the Computational Biology group, which is responsible for supporting the company’s drug discovery pipeline. Dr. Freudenberg walked us through the pipeline steps from target identification to the clinical trials and mentioned the contributions made by the Computational Biology group to the pipeline, which includes the use of machine learning and AI (deep learning) technologies. He finished his presentation with examples of recent projects in computational biology, such as meta-analysis of the human gene expression in response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection and lung microbiome studies. After the panelist presentations, we had the opportunity to ask them questions about the company and industry, in general. I was impressed by how the audience had come prepared for this panel. Some of the audience members had already applied for a job position at GSK and others came with their printed resume on hand. 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Image source: https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/31-things-you-should-remove-from-your-resume-immediately[/caption] I have selected some discussed questions to share with you that I believe are important for a career at GSK and industry as a whole. Audience: What is the difference between Future Leaders and the Fellow program? Dr. Waterworth: Future Leaders is a smaller program than the Fellow program. The idea behind the Fellow program is to include 5% of the GSK R&D scientists and you have to be a GSK employee before applying to the program. Audience: Which skills should I improve during my Ph.D. that can be important to apply for a position as computational biologists, statistical geneticists or geneticists at GSK? Dr. Acevedo: Most of the skills I used during my Ph.D. were carried on to my job position. However, you can improve some of your skills in R and Python, get familiar with available databases, and have a good knowledge of high throughput screen approaches as well as pathway analysis approaches. The computational tools and databases that you used during your Ph.D. can be skills that you can carry on to your future job position. Audience: Are you looking for people that work with plants, for example? Dr. Kulkarni: The things that we are looking for are the tools that you are using to answer your question in the plant field, for example. The questions are not that important but the skills that you have developed to answer those questions are really important and are the things that we look for on a candidate profile. Audience: Is it important to have a Postdoc experience before applying for a job at GSK? Dr. Waterworth and Dr. Freudenberg: It is not extremely necessary. We, for example, came with different experiences: some of us worked as post-docs but others didn’t. GSK is hiring people for different position levels. Audience: Is it difficult to transition between careers or departments in the company? Dr. Freudenberg: It is not difficult to transition between careers or departments in the company as GSK offers plenty of opportunities to work in collaboration with other departments. Audience: Which skills can be learned in academia that could help with the transition to industry? Dr. Waterworth: Communication skills are key skills in industry. You have to be able to talk about your idea and project to a diverse audience. Overall, I really enjoyed participating in this panel. I not only learned about the GSK global company but about the industry field in general. I enjoyed listening to the panelists and I absorbed their advice coming from experiences in different career stages, from the directors to the recently hired employee, everyone had contributed with extremely important information. I will certainly take their advice on my path on transitioning from academia to industry. I confess that after this panel, GSK is on my list of the top dream companies to work for. If you want to have the whole experience, please check out the podcast of the event.
This article was edited by Huri Mücahit and Helena Mello.