Vertex Pharmaceuticals

During my 6-month co-op at Vertex headquarters in Boston’s Seaport, I was mentored by two senior scientists, both working in different areas of chemical biology. Dr. Matt Wilson was performing proteomics work to limit off-target effects of a drug for myotonic dystrophy type 1, while Dr. Payal Chirania was performing SEC-MS to optimize drug screens.

Here I quickly learned that taking notes was crucial, because there should be no scenario in which you have to ask a senior scientist, who is being pulled from the lab to a meeting and then back to the lab again, the same question twice. This built the habit of always keeping a notebook on my person whenever in the Vertex building, which later translated into my Notion research notes for my future projects, accessible from my phone 24/7.

The Western

The best example of how this notebook helped me was when Dr. Wilson taught me how to perform a Western blot. I took careful notes on exactly what he was doing with his fingers when loading gels and transferring them to the membrane. Because I studied his technique closely, his patience in answering my questions, and his kindness in his critiques, I was able to get a perfect Western first try, and never had a bad one after that.

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Learning to Show Data

The foundations of my data visualization skills are all owed to Dr. Chirania. Due to the nature of her work, she would have to wrangle and present thousands of data points in easy-to-follow figures as part of her daily work. These skills rubbed off on me as I learned to make the most of Excel’s graphing functions to efficiently display data.

I also learned to keep track of the data I collected by immediately putting it into graphs and then directly into a running slide deck. This running deck would ensure a narrative was followed between experiments, with each slide title stating the main takeaway of the data, and large text below the data showing the question that arose from the results, which would inspire the next experiment and be answered in the results described in the following slide. As much as I wish I could show the slide deck, Vertex had to keep it for confidentiality purposes.

All of her lessons were incorporated into my final poster, where she showed me how to use space to effectively tell a story. Maybe you can see how my poster at Vertex inspired my award winner.