How to Get Started Building in Biology: Interview with Michael Trinh

Welcome to Invite Health! This week, I invited one of my friends, Michael Trinh, to share his story as an aspiring immunologist & bioengineer. Today’s highlights include:

• How Michael landed a research position in MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department

• Advice for students who want to get their first lab position, even if they don’t have experience

• Co-founding Nucleate Dojo, with the goal to increase access to opportunities for students wanting to pursue life sciences (fun fact: Subaita, our last interview guest, was a co-founder of Nucleate Dojo!)

How to Get Started Building in Biology: Interview with Michael Trinh

First off, tell us about your journey so far. Where do you study, what inspired you to pursue this, and what’s next? What else do you like to do outside of studying?

Hi everyone! I’m Michael (he/him), a final-year undergrad double majoring in Immunology and Fundamental Genetics at UofT.  My goal is to become a world-class immunologist and bioengineer who also runs a record label. 

I have always been someone passionate about building and tinkering. I love the idea that I can continuously build something up by starting simple and slowly creating a more complex system. After losing several people in my life to cancer, I pledged to channel this passion for building to usher in the next generation of cancer therapies. Now as a scientist, I want to engineer our immune system to fight diseases that are currently hard to overcome or are outright incurable. In pursuit of this goal, I’m going to enroll in graduate studies to study the intersection of immunology and bioengineering come the Fall of 2024.

I value being creative, both in the lab and outside. As scientists, we often strike a balance between following protocols and thinking out of the box to answer new questions. When designing an experiment to answer these unanswered questions, in a logical and meaningful way, you can find yourself needing to flex your creative muscles.

The creativity doesn’t end there though! In my free time, I produce music and videos, supporting artists through both producing their music videos and co-producing instrumentals for their beats. I hope to continue this throughout my PhD, building upon my discography as an artist and supporting other artists’ tracks and music videos.

How did you land your first lab position, and what was the position? What advice do you have for readers who want to start lab work but don’t have experience?  

My first lab experience in a lab was a volunteer position in the lab of Professor Maryam Faiz. I had been cold emailing both professors and graduate students to get their perspectives on research and answer questions I had about their work. In reaching out to these people in the interest of genuinely learning about their projects and their research, I was able to build a genuine connection with people who became interested in my growth as a scientist. Doing this eventually put me in a position, as a curious sophomore with little experience, to start asking my mentors directly for volunteer opportunities. 

Even though my degree was in immunology and genetics, I had the opportunity to join the lab which focuses on the neurobiology of astrocytes and glia. This was the best place I could have started because it was nothing familiar to me and joining a professional neuroscience research environment pushed me out of my comfort zone. The one thing I am glad I did was to come into the experience with an open mind. I wanted to be a sponge to learn as much as I could about how research is done and to split apart my perceptions of research from the day-to-day reality. 

Looking back at the time I was trying to get my first experience, the number one thing I’m glad I didn’t do was give up after the initial rejections. I did wish, however, that someone stressed to me how important it is to get feedback on your messages and re-assess your approach to reaching out and following up. Sometimes your outreach falls on a busy inbox or a lab not looking for students, but sometimes the outreach approach itself needs work. This is something that your peers can help you adjust after you draft your first email, cover letter, or CV. Make sure you’re being intentional and thoughtful with your outreach, and don’t give up after the initial rejections or no replies.

As a couple of tips:

• Sample a few papers from the lab that are fairly recent to get a sense of what research area of the lab you are interested in getting involved in.

• If you are emailing a big lab, it helps to find a grad student or postdoc in the lab who has already published a paper in the research area that you want to get involved with.

• You want your email to be fairly straightforward, do not drag the message on more than it needs to be. Professors will appreciate you keeping the message concise and brief.

• Make your subject line clear with your intention (ex. “Inquiry about summer 2024 volunteer position”)

• I like to follow the following structure

  • Intro paragraph with formalities, your interest in the lab, and any papers you specifically read. It also helps to have a question or two here about the research from their lab that you have read.

  • Into paragraph to yourself, your education, your prior experience (if applicable, feel free to put your educational background if you do not have prior experience)

  • Your ask- this is where you discuss the opportunity that you are interested in. Keep it short and sweet, specifically mentioning what area of research in the lab you are interested in joining, as well as the timeline you are looking to get involved for.

• Follow up politely every 5-7 business days if you are waiting for a response. 

• If you aren’t hearing back, don’t get discouraged, and keep emailing other labs in the meantime. Sometimes the experience you end up going with deviates far from your plan A.

You have an interest in bioengineering, as demonstrated by your vast research lab experiences. Can you explain in layman's terms what bioengineering is, and what the future of bioengineering looks like?

Bioengineering is the practice of applying the core principles of engineering to address complex problems in biology. These principles include problem identification, iterative design, and feedback-driven experimentation. The end goal is to leverage the insights that we as scientists learn from basic biology, to then build new tools, systems, and approaches that can address unmet problems. Bioengineering as a practice can be applied to anything from disease, and problems in the environment, to consumer products.

As a field, bioengineering has countless applications to advance modern medicine. From traditional biomedical engineering approaches that aim to develop new medical hardware such as diagnostics and prosthetics, to molecular engineering and synthetic biology that hold promise to build the next generation of therapeutics and diagnostics. I find myself in the latter part of bioengineering, asking how the basic DNA, RNA, and protein building blocks of biology can be built into therapeutic structures that we can leverage against disease. 

Every day in this field, it gets more exciting. Each new headline just reinforces the idea that the future of medicine is shaping up to be highly data-driven, studied at scale, and largely focused on programmable biologics such as antibody, cell, and gene therapies.

You got to work at MIT as a Canadian undergrad! Can you tell us about your experience and how you secured this position as an undergrad student?

Between my junior and senior years (3rd and 4th years) as an undergrad at UofT, I was a visiting student at MIT Brain & Cognitive Sciences from October 2022 to June 2023. This opportunity abroad was unpaid, however, my supervisor helped me acquire full funding for the opportunity through two fellowships, Emergent Ventures, and New Science. I was lucky to set up this opportunity by cold-emailing potential faculty supervisors whose research I was interested in, who then assessed my application and interviewed me for the visiting student position. After passing the interviews and being offered a position, I needed to fulfill a funding requirement set by MIT for visiting students. This ensures that visiting students have sufficient funding for their living costs while in the United States. In order to fulfill the funding requirement, students need to source at least 51% of the funding from external fellowships or scholarships. After funding my stay thanks to the support of both fellowships, I was able to qualify for the MIT J-1 visa requirements. This allowed my supervising faculty, Drs. Omar Abudayyeh, Jonathan Gootenberg, and Professor Ann Graybiel to sponsor my visit to the United States under a J-1 visa status visiting student. 

Arriving at MIT was incredible- seeing the rate of progress and concentration of world-class talent was genuinely inspiring. I distinctly remember stepping up from Kendal/MIT station for the first time and walking down Main Street in Cambridge. Nowhere would I expect to see Google, Microsoft Research, MIT, Broad Institute, Moderna, Koch Institute, Novartis, and Whitehead Institute, all in the same 1-mile stretch. My research experience at MIT was incredibly stimulating and fast-paced, demonstrated by an introductory meeting with the Graybiel lab in my second week of being in MIT, thus leading to a project being started off the ground with a new molecular detection method, only two weeks into my visit. As a student I never felt more empowered to put forward my ideas and thoughts, to contribute new ideas to the research, and to pave the way for my project by designing experiments and ordering parts. This experience overall was an incredible growth catalyst for me as a scientist and I am forever grateful to my supervisors for enabling me to set this up.

Having student status was a huge enabler for me to make friends on campus, opening me up to be able to join student clubs. One of the best decisions I made during my year abroad was to join the MIT Sport Taekwondo Team, a student-led athletic team that trained on campus but also toured up and down the East Coast during the tournament season. Through the team, I was able to meet a bunch of incredible friends who would end up being my busmates and sparring partners for the year.

You also co-founded Nucleate Dojo, which houses many programs such as DojoHouse, DojoGrants, and DojoExplore. What is Dojo up to this year if readers are interested in getting involved? 

Dojo is a nonprofit dedicated to supporting undergraduate students to access unique experiential learning opportunities in the life sciences. We do this through an equity-focused lens, aiming to level the playing field for marginalized students who demonstrate financial need to access opportunities that are often costly to pursue. This year, Dojo has been growing the scope of its three programs to new locations, new students, and new communities across North America:

• DojoExplore, our introductory course on how biotech startups get spun out of academia, scaled from running at Harvard in Fall 2023 to running out of McGill and UC Berkeley this Winter 2024 semester.

• Dojo House, our subsidized undergraduate intern co-living space in Cambridge, MA, will be returning for a third year with added support for our students. More to come from the Dojo team on that note, stay tuned!

• DojoGrants is our year-long fellowship for undergraduate researchers who are looking to get impact research experiences that cannot offer funding. These students demonstrate both financial need, as well as their aptitude and interest in research. 

For anyone who is interested in getting involved, please visit our homepage here and get in touch with the team!

Where can students go if they want to learn more about these experiences?

I’m fairly active on Twitter and am happy to reply to any pressing questions over Twitter DM’s! (@MichaelTrinh18)

Is there anything else that you would like to add for Invite Health readers?

I wish someone told me this before embarking on the journey so I’ll leave it here: follow your passions, but more importantly, follow the potential impact you can make. 

It helps to choose opportunities that are going to either provide the best impact to something you care about or the people in your life, but note that you can also choose things that maximize their impact on your learning and growth as a person!

Trust yourself and do future you as many favors as possible 🙂

Next Week on Invite Health 💌 

I interview Rowan Ives, one of my closest friends from undergrad! He’s one of the smartest people I know, and maybe one of the only people I know who enjoys organic chemistry…

We dive into his journey from health sciences in undergrad to becoming a fully-funded Oxford DPhil/PhD student, studying Chemistry in Cells: New Technologies to Probe Complex Biology and Medicine. Fun fact - he’s the only international student in his cohort of 7 people!

Rowan’s interview will be available next week on Invite Health.

In the Community 👩🏻‍💻

• Follow Invite Health’s new Instagram page! @readinvitehealth

• High School Student Summer Research Opportunities (paid)

• Intern, Research Analyst (2024) at Innovative Research Group (paid)

• UHN Summer Student Role with Dr. Sita Bhella (paid)

• Scientist I - Analytical Operations - Co-op at ThermoFisher (paid)

• Summer Positions at Visions of Science (paid)

• Summer Youth Positions – Health Information Clerk; Community Service Worker; Community Worker at South Riverdale Community Health Centre (paid)

• SickKids Awards for Indigenous Nursing Students and Black Nursing Students ($5000 bursary)

• Program Manager at Michael Smith Health Research BC (paid)

• Student Assistant - Social Media / Communications, Research at Women’s College Hospital (paid)

• Diabetes Action Canada Research to Action Fellowship (paid)

• The Pre-Amp Fellowship (paid)

• Jack Layton Fellow (Summer Student) - Policy and Public Affairs (paid)

• Read last week’s interview with Subaita Rahman:

About Invite Health 💌 

Invite Health is a newsletter for students trying to figure out what to do with a life sci / health sci degree. I highlight students pursuing careers in healthcare, and the paid experiential learning opportunities they've had. From biomedical engineering to medical anthropology to climate policy, my goal with this newsletter is to introduce you to the various pathways that students can pursue in healthcare (and get paid along the way!).

Whether you’re reading this on a commute, during your study break, or from the comfort of your own home, I hope you enjoyed reading today’s newsletter.

- Sachi

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Invite Health is an invitation to build a network, learn a new skill, or find your next opportunity. Here’s how you can get the most out of Invite Health:

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