Transcript of Career Conversation with Tonia Tsinman
Career Conversation with Dr. Tonia Tsinman – Transcript
Dr. Tonia Tsinman: Thank you. Thanks for giving me the chance to come and babble a little bit about where I’ve been and what I’m doing now. I kind of took this as an opportunity to go through my scientific career path to date, with the disclaimer that I’m just one person and that this is just one set of experiences. So it may not resonate with everybody, but hopefully I can jostle at least some interest or some questions that arise and maybe help you think through your own interests and what your own career paths might look like as you start to think about next steps for your future.
So, hey, I’m Tonia. Who am I? That is an existential question. So, I’ll just focus on what that means for the professional world. I’m currently a senior scientist. I’m a cell biologist and a cell engineer for a small startup here in Cambridge, Massachusetts—Brilliance Therapeutics. We’re over at LabCentral in the incubator here.
Like I said, we’re a tiny startup and we’re working on developing a collagen therapeutic for tendon and ligament repair. And so just to give you context, if you’re an athlete or if you yourself have played sports, chances are you’ve experienced or known someone or seen someone experience a musculoskeletal injury. Famously Jason Tatum tore his Achilles tendon just last year. And if you’re into women’s soccer, ACL ruptures are pretty rampant in that sport.
It turns out that our bodies, while they’re excellent at healing certain types of tissues like bone and skin and liver, tendons and ligaments they don’t really repair at all. And so what the company is trying to do is use a clever way of delivering collagen, which is the building block and the major molecule that’s found in tendons and ligaments, to be delivered after these sorts of catastrophic injuries to help expedite healing of the tissue and also help return the tissue to the same mechanical level that it was before being torn. Because part of not being able to heal a tissue means that the tissue that does eventually form and regrow has much weaker mechanical properties and that leads to impaired mechanical function for the human. So less ability to walk, jump, run, whatever, what have you.
We are a team of three over at the bench and then two people in the senior operational roles. Something that drew me to this company is that actually I was the first scientific employee that they hired. And that was really exciting for me because I’m really motivated by the fact that as we figure things out really in these first two years, what we’re trying to see is whether or not this idea that the founders had has any legs, holds water, and can we actually get it to work. And that type of discovery research is really exciting for me.
What’s really empowering for me is the fact that the experiments that I plan and execute along with my team directly contribute to whether or not we can figure out the answer to whether or not this technology will work. And that directly impacts whether or not investors want to invest in our company, whether or not we can move forward in other ways. And so that’s what gets me up in the morning—the fact that everything’s a question mark. And the only way to turn that question mark into something known is for us to put on the experiments, and that’s part of my role at the company. So that’s what I find really exciting.
How Did I Get Here?
So that’s what I’m doing now. How did I get here? Well, I guess I’ll start with my undergraduate experience because that’s really where it all started. So I did my undergrad at MIT in bioengineering many, many, many moons ago. And I picked bioengineering because I wanted to leverage the engineering degree from MIT because that’s what it’s known for. But I’ve always had an interest in the more life science side of things. So the squishy science, as my mechanical engineering friends like to call it. And so bioengineering seemed to be a really good way of merging the two fields together.
When I started, one of the first things that I did is I joined the undergraduate research program at MIT and that allowed me to get hired by graduate students in the academic labs as their research assistants. And so I started working in an academic lab basically as soon as I started. And for people who might be interested in discovery research, if there are opportunities available at the colleges that you might attend, I highly suggest checking that out because it’s the quickest way to get the fundamental laboratory skills or build on them since you’re part of this BioBuilder program—but build upon your lab skills and really get the experience under your belt that may help you land opportunities in other areas of research that you might be interested in.
So in my case, I did a lot of tissue engineering research which back in the day had this really hefty goal. The promise was that we’ll be able to regrow hearts and lungs and livers and that transplants will be a thing of the past. In reality, what I ended up doing for my graduate students is mixing some cells into some hydrogels, putting them into different shapes, which is what you see in this figure that spells out MIT. Green and red are different cell types, and then we just molded them into different rectangles to basically spell out MIT and take some cool images and publish some papers. I’m really condensing what we did and reducing it to the bare minimum.
But the idea is that there was this hefty promise and then what I ended up doing in lab really felt like a far cry from what I thought I was going to be doing. And frankly, at the end of my time in undergrad, I was pretty disenchanted with the idea of tissue engineering and frankly with the idea of academic research in general. And so I didn’t want to do a PhD. I wanted to go out into industry, be in medical device, really start building with my hands and building things that people were going to use or be implanted into people, stuff like that.
And I went on the job market and I looked for jobs and I was incredibly discouraged. The landscape has changed now, but back then for any sort of scientific role that truly felt meaningful, you really needed a PhD. And I got that feedback again and again and again. And I didn’t want to do a PhD. So, there was really this hesitance for me. I didn’t know what to do, but I needed a job, frankly. And so, I applied to wherever I could.
A Transformative Experience at the Whitehead
And I ended up being a research tech in a different—whoops, sorry. I don’t know why it’s having stranger things on there. But this was supposed to be an image of what the lab actually ended up doing, which is studying cell division. And so I ended up at the Whitehead as a research tech. And frankly, when I got there, I felt a little defeated. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to be in an academic research setting anymore, but I needed a job. And this is just what happened.
And I say this candidly because at the end of the day my time at the Whitehead was the most meaningful experience that I had. It really transformed where I went afterwards because I ended up falling in love with basic science research specifically during this role as a research tech. And it made me actually motivated to go to grad school and do a PhD, not because I felt like I had to, but because I actually wanted to. Because biology all of a sudden was this beautiful thing that I discovered through the process of actually doing fundamental cell and molecular research in this lab and getting the opportunity to do so.
And so I mention this because I think one of the things that I learned and I’ll talk about this a little bit later is that it’s really important to keep an open mind, which I know is a little bit of an eye roll statement. People tell you this all the time, but what I mean by this is sometimes you don’t always get the job you want or you don’t get the opportunity that you thought you wanted. And sometimes those end up being surprisingly the most meaningful experiences you have. And so if you keep an open mind and give it a shot, sometimes what comes out may surprise you because some of the best mentors and fundamental laboratory techniques that I use to this day were things that I got during my time at the Whitehead Institute.
PhD at Penn
And so from there I decided to do a PhD and I interviewed at different PhD programs all around the country and landed at Penn in their bioengineering department and specifically in the department of musculoskeletal biology and orthopedic surgery. And so what I ended up studying during my PhD was how mechanical forces influence the development of our tissues, specifically our knee joints. So I’m showing you this little video on the top that really stresses the point that we are mechanical beings basically from the time we’re still in the womb. We kick, we move around, and that motion is incredibly important for the biology of how our tissues form. And so I studied that a little bit more in the mouse model during my time at Penn.
And this is another point that I want to stress at the end is that it’s really important if you can to work for good supportive people, and my PhD advisor was one of those people. Towards the end of my PhD I got this really unique opportunity to do an internship at NASA. And my PhD advisor let me go. And so for four months I paused my PhD and I moved down to Cape Canaveral, Florida and I worked for the NASA Kennedy Space Center doing microgravity simulation work where we tried to simulate basically weightlessness and see how cells behave in this environment where you take away one of the main mechanical cues that’s ever present in our body here on Earth. It allowed me to live my best space nerd life. I got to see rocket launches and go to the VAB, which is that huge facility that houses all the rockets that people generally think of when they think of NASA. And I had a great time and I’m really grateful for getting a chance to do that.
Choosing Industry Over Academia
At the end of my PhD I took a good hard look at what the academic path involved, which was to do a postdoc and then eventually get a faculty position, and then I looked at my wonderful PhD advisors who were faculty members and I realized that I didn’t want the life that they had essentially. So it’s hard work being a professor and it’s not that I didn’t want to do the hard work. It’s just the work that you had to do was not the work I wanted to do because by the time you’re a professor you yourself are not doing much research. You’re mostly writing grants and trying to fund the work that then your graduate students and postdocs and lab staff are doing. And that didn’t seem that fun to me.
So I kind of made the hard move for me to look for industry jobs instead and continue being a scientist in the industry setting. And so I interviewed and I landed back in Boston, which is where I’m from and where I wanted to be, at a biotech startup that was developing small molecules specifically for treating certain types of cancer by modulating RNA processing. And so even though it was a startup, it was actually a much larger startup. It was about 80 people. And I was on the discovery biology team essentially testing some of these small molecules that the chemists were making and seeing whether or not they had any impact on killing the cancer cells while effectively leaving the normal cells be and whether or not there were any opportunities to develop those drugs further into candidates.
Moving to Brilliance Therapeutics
And sometime around two years ago I realized that when I was working with the scientists at this company, something that I really admired were the scientists that were there at this company from the very beginning. So the ones that generated some of the crucial data that still was foundational in how we interpreted results and making decisions about which drugs to move forward with, set up some of the assays and pipelines that we were still using years later. And that was really exciting to me. I wanted to try my hand at being one of these pioneers, one of these first scientists to join a team and get a chance to be the driver of some of this very foundational work that you have to do when a company’s first starting out. And so that’s what brought me to Brilliance Therapeutics, which is where I am now.
And I think one of the things that’s really—how should I say this?—that’s very rewarding is that with the power of hindsight, you realize that all of these steps that you’ve taken along the way that at the time may have seemed pretty random or maybe not exactly how you planned end up feeding back and being some of the things that are really helpful for me at being effective at my job. So in my current role, I still very much use some of the things that I learned in my PhD. I also draw upon skills that I did as a research tech at the Whitehead and I certainly use some of the knowledge that I gained from working in biotech in different ways.
Words of Wisdom
So with that I just want to share some food for thought and some very abridged words of maybe wisdom that I have, although I don’t claim to be particularly wise—just things, realizations that I’ve had along the way.
This career journey is a marathon, not a sprint. And one that I’ve been trying to remind myself even now is that this whole career journey is a marathon and not a sprint. It’s kind of an eye roll statement. People use it a lot but it really is true. I think especially if I think of myself back in high school and college, it always seemed like in high school I was always rushing to get the best test grades I could to get the best GPA I could to get to a good college. And then I got into a good college and I killed myself to continue to study and work really, really hard to get the good test grades because I needed to land a good first job. And it always seemed at the time that I needed to work as hard as hard as hard as I could. And I’m not a proponent of saying you don’t need to work hard. You absolutely do. But I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that you cannot kill yourself over every single step in the path because you’re going to burn yourself out. And burnout is real and it’s really important to avoid because it kind of sucks out the passion and spirit that you may have for whatever it is that you like to do. And so you have to protect your mind from that burnout. And one way to do it is to remind yourself that each one of these things that you think is crucial to do is only one small part of a much larger journey. And so to pace yourself, I guess is what I’m trying to say, if that makes any sense to anybody.
Who you work with matters more than what you’re working on. The other thing that goes along with something that I said about my opportunity at NASA is who you work with and who you learn from is sometimes, actually oftentimes, way more important than what you’re learning or working on. And what I mean by that is that you can be in a Nobel laureate lab, in a person who’s generating just this magnificent research. But if the people that you’re working with are total jerks, then you’re not going to be in a permissive environment for you yourself to do your best work. And sometimes we don’t get a choice with who we work with. Sometimes we don’t have the option of which job we have to pick. We just have to pick something. And that is sometimes how the cookie crumbles.
What I’m saying is that if there ever is a time when you’re choosing between, “Oh, this seems like the right opportunity on paper, but I have this gut feeling and something about the people I’ve talked to seems off” versus “This might not be the most prestigious opportunity, but I feel like these are the people that I can really learn from”—listen to that gut because I think who you work with is really, really important. And that’s who you’re going to get mentorship from, and that ends up propelling you forward sometimes more than the actual job itself.
Ask questions and think critically. The other thing that I will say is that I’ve gotten feedback even to this day that one of the things that I do well is ask questions. And I do realize now that I think it’s one of my most powerful learning tools, asking questions, but also questioning the information that comes your way and making sure you know how to think critically and make your own conclusions on things. Again, maybe this is a no-brainer because people may tell you this all the time, but I just wanted to stress this point because especially now as we enter the age of AI and generative information, it’s sometimes hard to tell reality from computer-generated thought. It’s ever more important to make sure you understand for yourself and if you don’t, know how to ask the questions to convince yourself of what’s true and what’s not.
Understanding matters more than grades. I also wanted to—this I guess also goes back to the previous point—you know it’s kind of ironic that when you’re in school you’re oftentimes your understanding is evaluated based on a grade whether or not you get A, B, C, etc. And so it’s very easy to be motivated by getting that good grade. And I’m not saying that people shouldn’t study or do their homework or whatnot, but I wanted to remind maybe myself as well that after you graduate from your last higher education degree, whatever, the real world does not operate on good test grades. That is not what you’re evaluated on anymore. And so even if you didn’t get a good test on something, if you feel like you really took away understanding and information from a class, that is really, really important and shouldn’t be underrated.
When I interview people for research associate positions, even now, what I often look for is people’s ability to think critically through a scenario or reason how they would do something, not necessarily whether or not they know a particular formula or a particular pathway. Because contexts always change and so knowing how to get intuition and understanding makes you a much more adaptable individual and that can I think only be a good thing. But again, this is just my opinion.
Figuring out what you don’t want is valuable. The other thing that I’ve learned throughout this time is figuring out what you don’t want to do is a valuable step in figuring out what you do want to do. So, if you ever feel like you got an experience that feels like a total bust or it completely didn’t go the way you wanted to, it’s important to remember why because having that information is sometimes really helpful in making a future decision. And so that’s something that’s really helped along the way.
Just as an example of that, I talked about NASA and going down for the internship. I had a great time from the point of view of being a space nerd. But from the point of view of research in a federal institution like NASA, it was actually—I learned that it was not the environment that I wanted to be in. There were a lot of things that didn’t fit my style of work and I realized that as I looked for a job in the future, I probably should not consider jobs within the NASA research venue. And the only way I would have known that is by doing that internship and figuring out what I didn’t want essentially.
Everyone is figuring it out. And finally, I think again I’m always reminding myself of this as well, everybody is figuring things out as they go. And so a lot of people can put on a face of knowing exactly what they want to do. And I could have given this talk about how I went from MIT to where I am now in a very confident way that made you feel like I had everything figured out and this was exactly how I wanted things to go. But in reality, it is almost never like that and that’s okay. And so if you’re feeling uncertain, that’s okay and most people are too. So, just don’t forget that I guess because I think it can make you feel very alienated when in reality it’s the experience I think of most people.
All right. So, that’s kind of all I had. I sort of blew past that, but I was hoping that maybe people had questions and we could spend more time on that.
Moderator: Thank you so much for sharing your journey going from your exposure to tissue engineering at MIT all the way up to doing your work now focusing on developing collagen therapeutics for muscle injuries. This is wonderful. I certainly echo the sentiments of finding talented and supportive mentors who can help uplift you, but also you can help support them along your journey, and also the sense that at each stage you don’t necessarily have to have everything figured out as yet. I think for students, especially as they’re learning and growing, it’s important for them to become open to new possibilities and to allow those experiences to continue to shape their interest and grow. So, that’s very wonderful. I’m not sure if any of our students have any burning questions.
Q&A Session
Student (Ammarah): So I am interested in pursuing civil engineering plus a career. So I’m a sophomore right now. Are there any specific AP or elective classes you think are must-haves before graduating high school?
Dr. Tsinman: I think that’s an interesting question, mostly because just keep in mind that I graduated high school in 2009 and so I have no idea what’s even offered in high school now. But I would say that having the more biology-based classes, chemistry and biology-based classes, whichever ones you can I think is a good place to start. But I also think it’s really awesome that you have interest and you should absolutely take classes and find opportunities. I wish I had any to list, but I don’t really know what’s available for high school students specifically.
But also just keep an open mind. I would say that when I was in high school, I wanted to do physics mostly, frankly, because my dad was a physicist and my uncle’s a physicist and my cousin’s a—like my family is just physicists. And it was like, it took me a while to come to terms with maybe I actually don’t want to do physics. So just keep an open mind and you’re in a stage where you can explore all sorts of topics and so it’s good to pursue if you feel like you have an interest but also don’t shy away from exploring other stuff that you may not have thought was interesting before.
Ammarah: Okay. I also have one more question. So, how much do you think AI will affect this career?
Dr. Tsinman: Oh, baby. I think the honest answer is that literally nobody knows. There’s a lot of fear-mongering out there and it’s really unclear. And so I think you can’t guess based on what the AI capabilities are—the AI capabilities keep changing every 3 months. So I think the best you can do is just still for right now follow what your interests are and adapt as they go because I think it’s really tough to make choices based on these strategic moves down the line because it’s an ever moving target more now than I think it ever has been before.
I guess just one addition to specifically the cell therapy and biomanufacturing space—I do think that generally the science-based roles are fairly safe for now because I think especially wet lab roles, it’s going to take quite a bit of time to replace everybody with robots essentially, which is what it would take to completely overhaul the life science industry and the wet lab research. And I think that is still a ways away, although you know, who knows.
Ammarah: Okay. Thank you.
Instructor (Joe): Hi there. I’m Joe. I’m the Thursday instructor for the class. So I had a quick question. You talked a lot at the beginning with your company about the importance of the mechanical properties. I come from a biomedical engineering background too, so I’m interested in that. Do you do any sort of testing with tissue samples, whether that is from cadavers or anything like that? So you have design parameters for your collagen. Is it that far down the line? Is it still kind of earlier on in development? I’m just curious.
Dr. Tsinman: Yeah, that’s a great question. So actually the way that this company has—the data package that this company raised funding on comes from a tissue mechanics type study done in rats where a certain type of collagen was delivered during the healing of a rotator cuff injury in a rat and basically showed that if you deliver this material it can significantly enhance the mechanical properties of the healed tendon by I think 50 or 60%. So a significant margin from what exists right now.
Mechanics, as I’m sure you know from mechanical testing, is a finicky experiment to set up. And so it’s interesting because mechanical testing is by far the best proof of efficacy that this technology could have outside of injecting it into a human and watching them heal faster. But you have to do something before then. But the tricky flip side to that is that the data usually are so variable for mechanical tests just because they’re so tricky to set up. Then you need a large amount of animals to get the statistical significance you need to prove your point.
And for a small very lean startup that has runway until basically next year, you have to do this tradeoff of what is the most compelling data that you can generate to convince yourself and investors and people who believe in your technology that this is worth moving forward with to raise more money—frankly in the cheapest way. And so animal tests are notoriously expensive and when you have to do a lot of animals it’s a scaling problem. And so eventually mechanical testing is something that we’re going to have to do. We just can’t do it with the funds that we have now. So we have to generate a data package that’s compelling enough to raise more money to then do the sort of ultimate experiment.
Joe: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense for the stage that you’re at. Thank you.
Moderator: Anybody else have any questions? If not, that’s okay. I guess I’ll jump in with one more. You talked about getting experience working with grad students during your undergrad as a really formative experience. If you had advice for any of students if they were reaching out for a similar opportunity, how did you figure that out? How did you reach out to the grad students that you wanted to work with to get into those research labs? What’s any advice for kind of initiating that kind of thing?
Dr. Tsinman: Yeah, I—sorry I chuckle because I was trying to rack my brain of how the heck I got connected to the graduate student I ended up working with and I realized it was like we rode the elevator together from the library. Like it was totally random, which is unhelpful because that’s just dumb luck.
But I will say that especially now I think things are way more streamlined. I know MIT has a whole job boards thing that’s posted especially for undergrad researchers and I think that’s probably true in other institutions as well. I also think that that type of opportunity, basically the methods you use even now, like even now as a working professional, are still the same. Maybe look at some labs that you think are doing cool stuff. Look at—usually they’ll have a teams page. You’ll see who the grad students are. Usually if it’s part of an academic institution, they’ll share their emails and cold email frankly.
And honestly, grad students—a good undergrad research associate, they’re so coveted because they are so incredibly valuable. Especially for grad students. If you can show enthusiasm and if you really, really want to do the work, I think grad students are very amenable to that.
Moderator: Awesome. That’s very helpful. Thank you. Yeah. I guess for the students, don’t be afraid to reach out.
Dr. Tsinman: Yeah, absolutely. If anybody has questions, I think someone will share my email and I’m happy to answer any more questions.
Moderator: Awesome. Anybody else have any questions, comments, anything they’d like to hear more about?
Dr. Tsinman: I just talked about asking questions. It’s so important. Don’t—yeah.
Student: I have a question. Like so in total how many years of college did that take you?
Dr. Tsinman: Years of college? So undergrad was four years and then I don’t count like when I was a research tech—I wasn’t technically in school so that was like a two-year gap—and then I did a six-year PhD. Part of that was that towards the end it was unfortunate. I basically came back from NASA in December of 2019 and the labs shut down in March 2020. And so basically a lot of the people who were in grad school around my time, their timelines kind of got pushed back a half a year to a year.
So a PhD depending on where you go—I mean it’s not uncommon to have a PhD take six years. I worked with animals and so that’s just off the bat a little bit of a longer timeline, but I probably would have been done a little bit faster had it not been for COVID and the four month internship plus then the COVID break.
Student: Oh, thank you.
Moderator: Oh, we’ve got a question in the chat. What would be the best way to contact you if we think of more questions?
Dr. Tsinman: Email I think would be great. Here, maybe I can just type—I can type my email in chat and then people can feel free to email me and we can either set up a zoom or just go over chat. That’s totally fine.
[Types email in chat]
Moderator: There it is. Awesome. Thank you so much.
Dr. Tsinman: Yeah, absolutely.
Moderator: All right. If nobody has questions I can hop off and let you guys have the rest of your time back.
Moderator: Yeah. I think that’s great. Thank you so much for your time. That was a great presentation. Thank you guys, students, for some of those questions. And yeah, we really appreciate it. And if anybody wants to reach out, please don’t be shy. The informational interview type of thing is super helpful. And Tonia, thank you. Thank you now and in advance for all the guidance and help that you’re giving to the students. We really appreciate it.
Dr. Tsinman: Absolutely. All right. Have a wonderful day everybody. Have a good class. Thank you. Have a good one.