Tara Peterson: One High Schooler's Journey from BioBuilder into a Biotech Career

Ever wondered how high school curiosity can evolve into a successful career in biotechnology? In this podcast, our guest Tara Peterson shares her unique story of how her high school apprenticeship program at BioBuilder shaped her career. Listen as she reveals the differences between her high school classroom and the BioBuilder program, and the program played a crucial role in kick-starting her journey into a college STEM major and now a career in science.

Tara reveals how her work with BioBuilder, including a poster presentation, paved the way for an internship at LabCentral, opening up even more exciting opportunities in her career. Tara majored in neuroscience systems and behavior Temple University, but found her first job depended on her knowledge, confidence, and love for the techniques she learned at BioBuilder. 

In our final discussions, Tara provides a detailed look into her experiences in synthetic biology and lab operations at LabCentral. She shares her insights about the projects she worked on, and how her journey from high school to college has shaped her career at Novartis. Tara's story is an inspiration for young scientists, demonstrating how the right experiences can build confidence and shape a successful career in biotechnology.

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Transcript

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 0:01

Hello and welcome to another episode of Life Changing Science, the BioBuilder podcast. I'm your host, Zeeshan, and my guest today is Tara Peterson. Tara is currently at Novartis after a successful undergraduate career at Temple University. Tara became part of the BioBuilder family as a rising high school senior at Melrose High School. She was in the first ever class of high school apprentices back in 2016. Her BioBuilder apprenticeship led to a summer internship at Lab Central and she was hired back there the summer after her freshman year at Temple. Tara is a rock star and BioBuilder was an early and important part of her career journey into college and career pursuits in biotechnology. Let's hear all about this journey and dive right into this episode.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 0:45

So in 2016, you're a high school senior. You know stressful time SATs, applying to college, thinking about your majors, a lot going on and the same year, BioBuilder launched the first high school apprenticeship program. So how did you hear about it? What you got you excited about it? Yeah, let's start off there.

Tara Peterson : 1:07

Yeah, absolutely. So it was in the spring of senior year, which is a really special time in high school because all of the college applications have already been sent out. So you're just kind of waiting for things to come back, which is super stressful too, but it's nice to. It's a nicer time in other ways because you're not actively like making decisions or picking a major or anything. And I, sort of uniquely, had picked out my major when I was 15. So I didn't spend too much time thinking about that either. I already knew I wanted to be an neuroscience major, so it was pretty focused, pretty a dead set on that. So that was really exciting.

Tara Peterson : 1:45

So I heard about BioBuilder through. I believe it was my AP chemistry and former AP biology teachers I think both in the same day had mentioned it to me. Yeah, because I think I was taking another class with my old AP bio teacher, miss Scott she was, I think she was the one in the end that mentioned it. So it was a pretty last minute scramble get your application out the door. So it was due the same day. So that was very exciting. I immediately heard about it and loved it and was like, yes, I'm doing this, no chance that I would pass up this opportunity. So I applied, had the recommendation from Miss Scott, our bio teacher, and was really excited when I got in.

Tara Peterson : 2:27

What really interested me about the program is that I already knew I had a strong interest in science, neuroscience in particular and I was really curious to learn about, like biotech and that industry was very new to me and spent a lot of time learning about what it's like to work in a lab and in the area. You know a lot of different companies and a lot of different names like floating around. You know it's a hot spot, but as a high school senior you don't know that much about it. So, like what it takes, what it's like and the opportunities to do an internship even before I had started college was amazing. I thought, yeah, I'd absolutely love to get that experience before I even go there, so it was really appealing to me.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 3:08

Great job getting the application in on the same day, luckily, it wasn't too, I have to say.

Tara Peterson : 3:13

it was fortunate that they didn't make it super complicated and burdensome. It was a relatively short application, which I appreciated.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 3:21

Yeah, that's always good. And how long is the apprenticeship program? Yeah, I just want to dive deeper into the length of the program, what you learned, some of the opportunities you had during the apprenticeship.

Tara Peterson : 3:34

Yeah, so I believe it was from March until May of 2016. And so we met twice during the week, once on Saturdays, which I mentioned that I couldn't get to, so it was three times a week, but I only went twice. Twice during the week, after school on MIT's campus and we just met in one of their classrooms and for, I think, a couple hours in the day. Natalie taught us basic lab math skills, how to be a good lab citizen, how to properly do serial delusions All these really core, foundational skills that, even though I didn't get to do the lab work that the other students had been doing on the weekends, it really gave me a good foundation, a good idea of what skills were needed and what kind of work I could do.

Tara Peterson : 4:22

She also talked a lot about concepts that we hadn't gone into as much depth in and that were a lot more recent. What is a plasmid? What does that do? What's the importance and significance of that? What is gene editing? Things that we didn't really get to do much education with in high school in the classroom. That was really valuable.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 4:43

Yeah, nice. So I presume, first of that, that would have been such a cool experience going into MIT and talking with other biotech students and a great experience to have as you're finishing up high school. What do you think were some of the key differences? How was the BioBuilder's or classroom different from your classroom at Melrose High School? Yeah, something new.

Tara Peterson : 5:08

One of the main differences was that this program provided a stipend. So it was yeah, so one of the main differences was that this program provided a stipend. I'm like school, like where you feel like you're being dragged there and like I liked school enough, but you know it's so early in the morning sometimes.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 5:21

I know I do.

Tara Peterson : 5:22

This felt like a responsibility because they were giving you something back to aside from the education. Like it felt like I had a responsibility, the same way I did when I had jobs in high school. It kind of felt like having a job where I felt like committed to showing up, being on time, being prepared, paying attention. So it had this like extra level which I think really helped. I was already interested, of course, but like it kind of helped give a different atmosphere. It felt it felt more professional than high school did, if that makes sense. I think that helped set us up for the next step, which was to actually have a job in the industry over the summer as an internship, and I feel like it was a good way to like lead into that professional atmosphere that I think a lot of high schoolers might not have been exposed to.

Tara Peterson : 6:07

A lot of us have jobs, but you know, I had worked at a coffee shop before that, or a dog sat in, like things like that.

Tara Peterson : 6:13

It was a different kind of environment for that, for one reason there. The other reason was because, like I said, we were talking about more cutting edge topics like gene editing really wasn't something we discussed much, but here we had the opportunity to learn more from someone who has been in the industry We've only had a lot of expertise on these things and so it felt like I was getting the information from someone who had hands on experience, who was up to date with the current literature not that our teachers don't keep up to date either, but they just don't have the time to get into it and it felt like Natalie had the time for us so we were able to, like really get into the weeds on things that were super complex topics, for, like, I would never have expected for me to be taking on at that stage in my life. I would have thought this is college stuff, not high school stuff. That was really nice. I got a gen start.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 7:06

When I was going through the the BioBuilder's book, as I had Natalie had co-written, I was going through some of the topics I was like wait, this is college stuff, this is college stuff. So it's great that that's been. It's exciting that that's being you're being high school, since being exposed to that information which is so important, like some of the foundations of science, when you go on and study biotech at college and further on, obviously, but before I do, I do want to ask about the next step, which was your summer internship at lab central. But I just want to go back a bit. You said you had a picture near science major when you were 15. I want to briefly ask you about that was what made you decide at 15? Because at 15, I wanted to be. I think I had listed out 27 different majors that I could possibly go to at 15 different universities.

Tara Peterson : 7:58

I wish I could pinpoint like a moment in my life that I made that decision, but it it kind of came to me naturally.

Tara Peterson : 8:05

I kind of don't have a great reasoning for how that occurred to me.

Tara Peterson : 8:08

I think I was interested in human behavior and in biology from the start. My career has taken me to a different part of neuroscience, but that was my original motivation, was I did like the human behavior, but I also liked having that biological explanation, like going deeper onto a bit more of a cellular or structural level of the brain, rather than psychology, which I find is a really important field that deals with a lot of like growth, like much larger forms of human behavior, like growth behavior and in terms of how I study it, yeah, very macro, that's what I'm looking for. So I really liked that too. But I found I really wanted to get a bit more deep and cellular and like how how the brain is structured and then how that results in human behavior. So that's that's that was my original thinking with the neuroscience major, I think actually BioBuilder. There's a reason why I changed that direction after. Like that I originally was thinking I'm so dead set on behavior and I think BioBuilder there actually changed that for me.

Tara Peterson : 9:07

Yeah, Okay, and it's everything that's yeah, yeah.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 9:11

Well, that's, that's the next question, that's the next question.

Tara Peterson : 9:14

I thought you might have a follow up to that because I was going in a very dead set on studying human behavior and doing that through neuroscience.

Tara Peterson : 9:20

It still made sense to join a STEM program and to do like bench work even, but I had never thought about gene editing, gene therapy, doing cell culture.

Tara Peterson : 9:32

I had never thought that was something I would be interested in. I didn't know that it would captivate me so much, and it wasn't until BioBuilder that I learned so much about those different techniques and how they could relate to the neuroscience that I was interested in that I really started to think about it and change my path of it. I did still go to Temple p University with Neuroscience Systems and Behavior Plasticity major, which then, as it implies, still has a little bit more of a behavioral element to it. But the job I took after college, which I'm sure we'll get into, was not behavior related and it kind of brought me back to my BioBuilder and it was because of BioBuilder that I felt I had the confidence to make that change when I had been studying behavior in college, because I remembered my class in BioBuilder and I'm like no, I can do this stuff, it is accessible to me, even if that wasn't when I got my college training in specifically.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 10:25

Okay, so we're now back in the classroom during your apprenticeship program. We're towards the end. So you did the summer internship at lab central that summer, so right after you finished high school. How did that come about?

Tara Peterson : 10:41

Yeah, I think that at the poster presentation. So part of the classroom section of BioBuilder was that you were supposed to create a poster presentation on a topic of your groups choosing. So it was a group effort. We had to come up with this, I guess genetically engineered way like solution to world problem. And I actually had to look this up because I couldn't entirely remember what it was that my group did. But we did a three filtered approach to clean water and one of the layers was a genetically engineered bacteria. So we just kind of had to explain our hypothesis and it's like what's the need? Why do you need just a general scientific poster presentation?

Tara Peterson : 11:23

And I actually reread that poster recently and thought, oh, this is actually pretty cool. This is not like this is. It was very thorough. Of course we hadn't done anything practically in the lab, but just with the background that we had done and stuff in the classroom. So we were at that poster presentation. It was in the lab central lobby and so through that I didn't know it at the time but I got to interact with multiple people from lab central and with that they expressed interest in having me be their intern to Natalie. And then Natalie told me and she was like you're gonna work here this summer and I was like, well, this seems great, like it seems like a nice place, and that was pretty much how it went.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 12:02

As a high school student, you're getting to us what are some of the big problems in the world and how can I use synthetic biology or biotech to solve that and, like BioBuilder, is providing you with some sort of platform to start to figure out how you actually answer these questions.

Tara Peterson : 12:17

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was amazing. I would have never thought I could do something like that as a high schooler.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 12:24

You're felt so confident in just your abilities because you said you didn't do too much lab work, but so much of science is the background that you do, right, the papers you read and like is biotech the right tool to solve this? And there's like more than half the work is the background work. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I do want to ask you a bit more about the poster itself. I know this was a few years ago so I'm going into too much details, but what were some of the like you have to figure out your chassis, your plasmid, like presumably E coli, the type of plasmid, and like? Were these some of the questions? You were as a group, laskin?

Tara Peterson : 13:01

Yes, I remember being in the classroom one day and we'd come up with the concept already and we thought like, oh, we'll get some kind of. We'll have three filter layers. One of them is like a basic physical layer. The next is going to be a biological layer, so that's the genetically engineered bacteria, and then the third will be a chemical kind of filter that gets the last bit of it. And so we spend most of the time working on the biology, the biological level, with the genetically engineered bacteria.

Tara Peterson : 13:33

And I remember then, or yeah, I think we had a lot of TAs in the area so they were helping us with that part, and at some point I think we just thought like, oh, there's some bacteria that can do this right, so we'll just say like it's going to be a bacteria.

Tara Peterson : 13:46

And Natalie was like, no, you need to do your research more and tell me what bacteria specifically there's a lot of kinds of bacteria find one that could potentially do this. And I remember sitting there and be like, oh man, okay, this is a challenge. Like I can't just say bacteria and then call it a day. I really have to, really have to do this work. So that was a super important challenge to face, that young, yeah. So that was what we did. We had to go find a bacteria I can't remember the name of it, but we did find one that naturally occurs in nature that filters waste, and we said we were going to genetically engineer it to glow green with GFP once it had, I think, either stopped or finished filtering I can't remember which stage, but as like a signal that the filter had been successful.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 14:33

Wow, that's definitely a challenging project to take on in your senior year, but so cool at the same time, right?

Tara Peterson : 14:40

Yeah, yeah it really was Nice.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 14:43

You're now summer in 2016,. You're working as in lab central and sort of in operations role. How is that Like? What did you learn Like being there's so much that goes on at lab. It can be very chaotic, but it also needs to be very structured at organize at the same time. But yeah, we'd love to hear your experience of that summer.

Tara Peterson : 15:02

Yeah, absolutely so. I primarily focused on lab operations, like you said, and there was a lot of small projects that would come up, like we're moving equipment. We need to communicate that to the scientists, let them know, find a way to communicate that. Or we need someone to help move furniture. Even we're setting up for this event like a lot of like being pulled into different things. That was always going on in the background, even like manning the front desk sometimes.

Tara Peterson : 15:29

But the main project that I did was help implement their chemical, their hazardous chemical inventory system. So I did two summers at lab central actually, and two winters. They really liked me, which is great. They have to let me come back multiple times. This is just fun.

Tara Peterson : 15:46

So in the first summer, I helped implement a msdf online which is a tracker for these hazardous chemical inventories, with the model of lab central having all these small companies. Everyone has their like independent systems for tracking hazardous chemicals, but lab central needs to be able to have that information organized and easily accessible in case of an emergency or just for general knowledge of what. What is on the process. Right, there's a lot of different kinds of hazardous chemical scientists could be using and it's really important, even just for the fire department. If they ever show up, they need to know that information really quickly.

Tara Peterson : 16:20

So this was a system we were implementing that summer. So it involved a lot of me coordinating with scientists like when is a good time for me to come and check out your lab space? And then they would also have to send me the list of the chemicals they did have and I would have to input that to the system. If there was an SDS missing in the system, which is a safety data sheet that gives you the information about what kind of hazard it is, I'd have to go find that. So I did a lot of research like where can I find that hazardous chemical inventory information? So that was my primary project for my first summer. And my next summer I actually got to build sort of built my own chemical inventory system in an app Not an app, but like a website they had. I got to like structure it a little bit more independently for a smaller scale operation that they had.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 17:06

Yeah, so basically, if you need to run your own lab tomorrow, you're good.

Tara Peterson : 17:13

Just with the chemicals. Yeah, I know what I felt a lot about those chemicals.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 17:18

When you're an undergrad at Temple University, those three, four years, how did your experience at being exposed to all these really cool biotechs and therobiology experiences at BioBuilders or in high school, and I presume that lab operations was during the first year of college as well right?

Tara Peterson : 17:37

Yeah, so it was the summer before my freshman year and the summer after my freshman year of college.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 17:43

That's what I wanted being yeah, you feel, yeah, yeah, and did that BioBuilder experience help you get lab internships? Because you were already like, you already had like a bunch of internships while you were like pretty much before getting into college. How do you think having BioBuilders are not on your resume but also would have given you a bit of confidence to go out and do like real, like go on and do research at university? How big a w did BioBuilder play in that?

Tara Peterson : 18:13

Yeah, I mean, I think it was huge. To be honest, like the confidence was the biggest thing for me. It's something I would not have been able to understand until recently, but any experience in the field is valuable. Lab operations is not what I did in college and so you would think like, how helpful was that really for her? But it was very helpful because it gave me an understanding of, like what a lab looks like and I felt comfortable walking into that space because I had been in labs all summer, like in two summers.

Tara Peterson : 18:43

So when I joined the lab at Temple University when I was interviewing for that position, I was a sophomore, so that was after two summers and one winter in lab central. So I was feeling really good about my confidence of just being in this space, being really comfortable there, even though it was completely different kind of lab. I would be doing completely different work than I had done before. It was like, hey, I see all those chemicals on the shelves, I recognize those, like it just feels good and it gives you that confidence that you can project then when you're in an interview, which is really key. So, yeah, it was enormously helpful. I could not have done it without that confidence, I think I would have been way to nervous.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 19:19

Yeah, yeah, no, of course, and I presume that you know confidence and that experience translated to once, we're, you know, your final year of university looking for those grad positions Because it's, yeah, as soon as you finish undergrad. It's so hard to get those, you know, research associate positions, like working industry, if you don't go down the masters of PhD. Around working in industry, like I've seen a lot of positions that are looking for research associates, like oh, you must have a PhD, or for his experience, how is the so okay, you're in, like final year at at Temple, you're finishing up. How is the process of finding that first job at Everabyer and then the subsequent job at Novartis? And let's say, the audience for this question is people who are just recently just graduated and they're looking for research. They don't want to go into PhDs just yet. What you know, tips and advice can be given to them as well as what do you think helped you sort of get those positions that you're yeah, that you're in?

Tara Peterson : 20:19

Yeah, I would say one thing that people I mean people stress this to college students but I don't think the message always gets through the right way is that networking is huge. And I don't mean like going to a social where you're eating like little bits of charcuterie and chatting up complete strangers. I don't necessarily mean that kind of networking, because that's very scary. But like the work that you do as an undergrad or as a high schooler even builds connections that you can then use later to leverage and get more jobs, more positions, like that's how I got my first job is I had made connections and these people were either my references for this job or they helped me. Like contact a person, like it just kind of starts to grow in ways that you can't even imagine, like I had already when I was coming and knew I was moving back home after college. So I was like I'll come back to Boston, I'll work in biotech in Cambridge. I was at lab central for two summers. Like I know what that environment is like and I have connections there. I'm sure somebody knows of someone who needs a research associate and I can just like hopefully apply and get that job. So that's not necessarily how I found AvroBio specifically, but that was my plan of attack and that's what I would advise other people to do is leverage connections you already have and lab central. The people that I worked with there were my references for AvroBio, along with the PI I had at Temple University who could attest to my lab specific experience.

Tara Peterson : 21:48

So networking is important. Experience is important, even if it's, like I said before, not the exact same experience that is required of this new position. When I looked at the job description for AvroBio, I was thinking, okay, I've only done like one or two of these bullet points, like I've run a few Western bots. They weren't great, but I did it. So, all right, tick that box off, like you know. So it doesn't feel great initially, thinking I don't have a ton of this experience, but you have some kind of experience and at such an early level in your career too, they know that they're going to need to teach you a lot, and if they're good people and they're smart people, they will be prepared to teach you a lot. And so that was what I found at AvroBio.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 22:32

Yep, yeah, awesome. And final two questions, I promise. How is your day to day like at Novartis, where you're currently working as a research scientist?

Tara Peterson : 22:45

Yeah, absolutely. Novartis is a really large company. It's a really great company, I have to say, like they have a lot of stuff going on, so there's a lot you can learn there and a smaller company. There was a lot going on as well. It was a smaller bubble and so I knew everyone what they were doing and I could talk to them. But here I've just found that there's a lot of ways to use your resources and connect with more people and I found that to be really valuable learning experience.

Tara Peterson : 23:09

So my day to day is it varies a lot. I've been asked this question before. When I'm top to college students they're like what's the day like? It depends what day. So some days I spend a lot of time doing the background research. We talked about reading journals, preparing methods for experiments. I spent a lot of time writing protocols, making sure all of my controls are where they should be. That I've thought. I've really thought it through.

Tara Peterson : 23:35

So when I execute the experiment, I'm doing it as efficiently as possible and not wasting time, not wasting resources. I know that I should be able to get the answer to my questions as long as everything goes okay, and that I have an idea of what maybe my next step will be afterwards. So those are a lot of what I do is think about those things and prep for those things. And then, of course, there's the actual time at the bench. So spend a lot of time pipetting and preparing samples and collecting data and analyzing data. And then also communication is huge. I spend a lot of time working on presentations. Spend a lot of time in PowerPoint prepping graphs, sharing those with people, presenting in meetings. So those are all my activities. Basically Takes up a day or two days or Obviously amazing.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 24:19

Final question I want to go back to imagine 2016 year old no, 2016 year old, 2016, taha and imagine other students who are in that position. They're either in their grade 10, 11, 12. They're looking into maybe applying for a prep, maybe starting a BioBuilder to explore, but looking into the apprenticeship program. What advice do you have for them? Because high school is a scary time. There's so many different things going on and I've seen BioBuilder that really helps students start their career path journey. So what advice would you give to those students who are in that position right now?

Tara Peterson : 24:57

Yeah, I would say absolutely. Do it. Get involved with BioBuilder. I think any education you can get in STEM if you're interested is valuable and it will keep being valuable for a lot longer than you anticipate.

Tara Peterson : 25:10

I still think about what I learned at that time in high school with BioBuilder. They're in the apprenticeship challenge. As I'm doing the work I do today. I just think how valuable it was to get that early exposure, because these are complicated concepts that they're teaching in BioBuilder and it takes a long time and a lot of repetition to really feel like you have a grasp on it. I still don't know if I completely get how all of these things work with this technology, with this biotechnology, but I feel like I had a really great foundation and it gave me a lot of confidence. Confidence is really important in any industry, but especially in science, and it's been a tool that I've used to get all of the positions that I have now, and I gained that confidence in BioBuilder for sure. That was super crucial in giving me that confidence that I needed to march through all these next steps Then did yeah.

Zeeshan Siddiqui: 25:58

Thanks once again to Tara for joining me today. What I found really insightful today was her comment about how any experience in a field is valuable. She talked about how her lab operations role made her more comfortable in that environment and she was able to translate that confidence and experience into all her future endeavors. She emphasized that it's not just about the role but having the curiosity drive, an initiative to crush her goals. So for all the students listening take chances, say yes to opportunities, even if you feel underqualified. You never know where that first step can take you. I feel this episode will be useful to anyone interested in learning more about the apprenticeship program, as well as gaining a deeper dive into the life of a BioBuilder student from high school, through undergrad and now working in industry. If you would like to learn more about anything Tara and I discussed today, please refer to the show notes. Join me for the next BioBuilder podcast. We'll welcome another wonderful guest whose career has been influenced by BioBuilder's life-changing science. See you next time.