My current professional interests center around marketing strategy, with an emphasis on customer acquisition and retention using community building strategies.

Marketing and Communications

My interest in marketing is driven by my passion for community building. Since my first experience in marketing and social media management, at Letters to a Pre-Scientist, I’ve realized that people are loyal to a company when they feel included in its mission. This has remained the backbone of my marketing philosophy, even as my skills and responsibilities have expanded to also include website and blog content creation, digital advertising, and web accessibility.

I currently work as the Marketing Programs Manager for the Protein Division of Fortis Life Sciences. I’m responsible for demand gen strategy covering portfolios including antibodies, nanobodies, and recombinant proteins.

I previously gained experience in Sales as a Field Application Scientist at Taconic Biosciences. In this role, I built brand loyalty among scientists in industry and academia by providing technical support to design and successfully perform their experiments using Taconic’s animal models. Prior to that, as the Marketing and Communications Manager at Addgene, I was responsible for paid ads, marketing analytics, and branding. I implemented a data-driven marketing strategy for the team that complemented our inbound marketing approach to content. In both roles, I supported scientific fields such as immunology, neuroscience, and oncology.

I also work on B2B marketing (both paid and owned) in the tabletop gaming industry, currently as a freelancer for Tabletopia, and I am currently on the Marketing Committee for WEST (Women in the Enterprise of Science & Technology), where I work on website, newsletter, and social media engagement.

Public Engagement

Intersecting my interests in science and marcom is my involvement in informal science education programs, which I’ve been a part of since 2015.

I first joined Letter to a Pre-Scientist, a STEM mentorship program for middle school students facilitated by snail mail, as a mentor. I’ve also at various times been the Social Media Manager, Chief Brand Officer, Advisory Board member, and currently serve on a Board committee. In these roles I’ve supported community building of this growing nonprofit through telling the stories of our teachers, students, and STEM professional volunteers on the blog and e-newsletter and showcasing our support for engaging girls in STEM through a shortlist nomination for the Nature Awards for Inspiring Women in Science.

I’ve trained and engaged in community science education at museums around the world. In Pittsburgh, I was a Science Communication Fellow at Phipps Conservatory and Botanic Botanical Gardens, where I was trained to and subsequently led an outreach booth to explain how tumors evade the immune system and the benefits of immunotherapies. In Paris, I was selected to represent the United States at a week-long international science communication training, the Week of International Young Scientific Talents. I shadowed museum staff at Cité des sciences to understand the intentional design behind museum exhibits, and subsequently published an article on NatureJobs about what I’d learned about using informal science education to drive diversity in STEM.

Science

I previously worked behind the bench for 8 years, where my research focused on basic and translational cancer immunology. I earned a PhD in immunology in 2018 from the laboratory of Walt Storkus at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where my research focused on cell-based cancer immunotherapy and cytokine biology. Previously, I worked in the laboratories of Ned Lattime (Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey) and Catherine Sautes-Fridman (Cordeliers Research Center – Paris, FR). See my scientific publications.

Throughout my research career, I used mouse models for preclinical immuno-oncology studies in colon cancer, breast cancer, and fibrosarcoma. I used the MC38 syngeneic colon cancer model to develop and characterize a dendritic cell-based immunotherapy driven by expression of the Type-1 cytokine IL-36 gamma. The major focus of my research was then on understanding the physical organization of tumor-infiltrating immune cells (TIL) following treatment. To study this, I used immunohistochemistry to profile immune and stromal cells in the tumor microenvironment. I then used various software tools and wrote scripts to understand the position of immune cell subpopulations in relation to each other and the vasculature. I also studied TIL using flow cytometry and ELISA to further understand their phenotype and cytokine secretion. I applied these findings in a translational setting by imaging FFPE human colorectal cancer specimens to reinforce the relevance of this work to human disease.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Over the past 6+ years, I’ve been involved in numerous efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM. Since 2015, I have been involved with Letters to a Pre-Scientist, a nonprofit organization that runs a pen pal-based STEM mentoring program for middle school students in high-poverty communities in the United States. I am serving as a mentor for a seventh year, was previously the social media and branding officer, and currently serve on the Governance Committee.

At Addgene, I co-founded the employee-driven DEI Committee in 2020. We focused on providing awareness and education about topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion that impact employees both at work and in the rest of their lives. I organized discussion groups on topics such as privilege and intersectionality, led the team that developed an inclusive demographics and climate survey, and facilitated our monthly committee meetings to build engagement around DEI. Approximately 1/3 of the company participated in DEI Committee-led discussions.

In my role on Addgene’s marketing team and at Letters to a Pre-Scientist, I have driven efforts to make our digital content inclusive using the principles of universal design.