Senior Principal Data Scientist Advises You to Work in Public

Name: Eric Ma

PhD: Biological Engineering, MIT, 2017

What was your main area of research?

I studied influenza evolution and ecology. Specifically, I wrote a computer program that identified influenza viruses with shuffled genomes and systematically confirmed that genome shuffling was correlated with host switching events.

What is your current job?

I am a Senior Principal Data Scientist at Moderna in Boston, Massachusetts.

I am a team lead. We help make discovery science run at the speed of thought.

More specifically, a lot of interfacing with scientists, figuring out what are "analysis bottlenecks" that we can help make faster, or figuring out what are ways that we can use machine learning to improve their science or contribute to better design of experiments and that sort of stuff.

So it's a very broad range. It is basically everything from experiment design with laboratory scientists through to software development and CI/CD and machine learning and interfacing with Docker, writing a lot of code. Those are a lot of the day-to-day responsibilities.

We do presentations. We also do have a lot of culture of writing that I'm trying to build and contribute, you know, like help develop at this company. So hopefully it will help us make our work better.

What is your favorite thing about your job?

I get to do science still :)

What is the most important skill you developed or experience you had during your PhD that now helps you in your current position?

The ability to work with laboratory scientists as a computational scientist

How did you build the skills necessary for your current role?

A lot of "learning on the job".

The teaching certification at MIT was very helpful in industry as well.

How did you find this position? What were the career steps you took to get to where you are now?

Hiring manager reached out to me.

PhD graduate ➡️ Novartis ➡️ Moderna

If someone is interested in a similar role, what would you recommend they start doing now to prepare?

Get good at coding

Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia?

I decided I didn't want to spend most of my time writing grants. It wasn't a hard decision.

What advice do you have for someone getting their PhD and looking to pursue a career outside of academia?

Build a public profile. For data scientists-in-the-making, I think it helps to have work done in public.