Q&A with Jennifer Tsai: Biotech, Building Nucleate Dojo, & more 🧬

Hey, I’m Jennifer and I go by she/her pronouns. I’m currently a third year undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo in the Biomedical Engineering & Co-op program. Currently, I’m fascinated by using computational biology, data science, and transcriptomics as quantitative tools to study the brain! The field of neuroscience stuck out to me growing up as I saw my dad experience impaired mobility and paralysis due to post-polio syndrome, which affects his ability to participate in daily activities such as running or climbing up long flights of stairs. In the winter time, he had a heightened risk of slipping and falling from ice. So when I took my first science class in high school, I started asking myself questions at the nexus of neuroscience and regenerative medicine: can neurons and nerves regenerate/repair themselves to enable the recovery of complex motor and cognitive functions?

Chasing this question, I joined the research team at a physiotherapy clinic over my grade 11 summer that was trying to disrupt the current approaches to neurorehabilitation. Traditional physiotherapy for recovering motor movement is slow and often ineffective for more severe cases of mobility disorders. At the clinic, I started a project that was investigating and helping clinically validate a treatment technology called translingual neurostimulation (TLNS). This is administered through the PoNS (Portable Neuromodulation Stimulator), which leverages the paradaigm of neuroplasticity to amplify your brain’s ability to rewire itself. We’ve seen that pairing this device with physiotherapy has been able to help people improve their gait and balance over time! By 2022, this device was approved by Health Canada and the FDA to be treated for multiple sclerosis and traumatic brain injury.

From this experience, I entered a university wanting to have a focus on the technological side of biomedical research. I realized there's a lot of versatility with having a technical skill set, and is in huge demand in the biomedical and health industries. So ultimately, I chose an engineering program over a traditional life science program - I was absolutely fascinated by how technology can disrupt the current ways we approach biomedical problems! I’ve done a wide variety of things since my first research experience, but my aspirations are still rooted in discovering mechanisms underlying and engineering therapies for brain dysfunction, neurodegeneration, and paralysis.

Outside of school and research, I like to long distance run, hike, read, and write!

I’m currently one of the managing directors of Nucleate Dojo, which is a non-profit organization under Nucleate that enables undergraduates to get exposed to and succeed in the biotech and life sciences field. We do this through three main mechanisms: open-access education, community, and capital/funding. 

I joined the team around March of last year and was brought on as a program manager of a new initiative that we’re currently trying to launch, initially coined DojoGrants. DojoGrants is an institutional-agnostic scholarship program to financially enable undergraduate students to pursue research in the life sciences. We’re particularly committed to supporting students from underprivileged and underrepresented backgrounds, such has those who identify as BIPOC, first generation, low income, and LGBTQ+.

We started this initiative as we saw undergraduate research as something inaccessible to financially underprivileged students, as most of these opportunities are unpaid or underpaid. Many undergraduate students have to decide whether they should work a paid part-time job at a Starbucks or a McDonald’s, or work in a volunteer research position that will help advance their career in the long run. We conducted a survey of around 70 undergraduate students around the world which entirely confirmed these speculations. We were trying to understand the barriers undergraduates were facing in life science/biotech career, and an overwhelming amount said the lack of capital and funding for research opportunities. So the goal of DojoGrants is to fill this huge unmet need for undergraduate research funding.  

All of this work with Nucleate Dojo is volunteer-based, but it's something that I’m very passionate about and has the potential to have an exponential impact on undergrads. With the grants, we’re effectively giving access to career-advancing opportunities to students who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to pursue. We’re fostering agency in students to become the future of biotech and life science. 

Can you talk about what biotech is and what are some examples of it?

Biotech is a field that uses cutting-edge tools and technologies to advance human biology and to accelerate life science discovery. That’s a bit abstract so let me give a few examples. Synthetic biology is a booming area in biotech right now - it’s essentially applying experimental tools to manipulate genetic structures like DNA and RNA to do a specific task that we want. Previously, I worked at a biotech startup called Strand Therapeutics that does just this: creating mRNA therapeutics using synthetic biology. We’ve seen mRNA being successfully used in vaccines, but there’s a lot more potential to it. The company has found ways to modify mRNA to treat cancer by making the mRNA identify and fight cancer tumors in the body. 

Another big focus in biotech now is longevity, which is trying to treat age-related diseases and reverse the effects of aging. There’s also neuroprosthetics and neurotechnology, which applies technology to enhance or treat the brain. For example, there have been a lot of developments surrounding brain-computer interfaces, which are devices that allow you to communicate with the world or control things solely with your brain signals. 

There’s a lot more to biotech than what I’m describing here, and I assure you that there is something in the field for everyone! You don’t need a PhD in biology to get started, and whether you’re into coding, business, investing, or the science itself, there is a role that requires expertise from each of those disciplines in biotech. I wrote a handbook here on how to get started in biotech!

I honestly applied to Nucleate Dojo on a whim after coming across the opportunity on LinkedIn and Twitter. I had been following them for a while after a friend told me about it in first year, but I didn’t think much of it then because I was in an engineering program and I thought I was too far removed from the pure life sciences/biology realm.

I applied by filling out an online application form and got interviewed by two of the co-founders. The interview was pretty chill, they just asked some questions to get to know me and what I’m excited about in biotech. The team felt authentic, and I felt right at home once I joined the team. It was a relief to finally meet people who had similar ambitions and aspirations as I did. 

The Dojo team itself is probably one of the main reasons why I’m still in biotech. I was pretty lost when I entered university because I thought I wanted to pursue biomedical/neuroscience research, but there was no one I knew around me doing that at my school. Coming from a tech-focussed institution, most people were motivated by working at large tech corporations and software startups, but that wasn’t really my thing. When I met the community at Dojo, I felt completely supported in my goals to work on cool science, and met friends who were going through similar journeys as I.

Aside from that, the work itself is incredibly exciting. We’re effectively changing and influencing the way biotech is taught, how it’s funded, and how new connections in the community are made on a global scale. On a daily basis, it’s the little wins like getting that one sponsorship to fund a program you’ve been working on for months, or seeing a student succeed in their future biotech endeavours after being a part of one of our programs.

As I mentioned before, Nucleate Dojo is one of the big reasons why I’m still pursuing my lifelong research aspirations now. I’ve had a hard time in the past finding and surrounding myself with people I felt inspired by, but that changed when I joined the Nucleate community. You begin to see people walking unconventional paths to get to where you eventually want to be. You see people doing things you didn’t even know was possible at your stage. I noticed myself starting to chase after bigger ambitions and take more risks in my career. For example, last fall, I moved to Boston (and lived alone in the States for the first time) to join Strand Therapeutics for an internship. And I’ve recently just moved to Switzerland for the summer to work at one of the coolest (in my opinion) neuroscience labs in the world. These were all opportunities I created for myself, and I don’t think I would’ve had the guts to do so without the support of the community at Nucleate and from all the friends I’ve made here.

If you’re a beginner in biotech and want to learn how you can break into the field, I made a resource guide here: bit.ly/biotech-quick-start. To see Nucleate Dojo’s initiative launches and upcoming events, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, or join our Discord community. I’m also on Twitter and LinkedIn if you’d like to reach out to me with more personalized questions!

My biggest piece of advice to any undergrad is to not be afraid to veer off path and do something that’s different that what everyone else is doing. University can often feel like swimming in a stream, where the system, culture, and your immediate peer groups are set up to nudge and influence everyone toward a similar destination. In science, this may be medical school. In business, this may be consulting internships. There’s a comfort in knowing that as long as you outcompete everyone else, work hard enough, and follow a specific formula, you’ll end up with those highly sought-after outcomes. This feels safe, but without the true intention to pursue these goals, people often lose themselves in the process. They forget why they even started in the first place: am I doing this for myself, or because everyone else is doing it?

Burnout is so prevalent amongst college students because people subject themselves to unnecessary amounts of competition. I think not a lot of students realize that you don’t have to be part of the competition if you don’t want to! You can define your own path and your own niche so that at the end of the day, the only person you’re competing with is yourself - how can you compare yourself with anyone if you’re the only engineering student who’s also a varsity athlete, biomedical researcher, top-notch chef, and startup founder? Once you liberate yourself from a pre-defined path or label, you realize there is so much more you can do that is genuinely exciting for you.

Following this philosophy can be isolating at first, because you’re not going to be able to easily find people who are exactly like you, with your exact combination of interests. But if you have the courage for it, to explore outside what is narrated in your immediate environment, it can be really rewarding and fulfilling!