The Future of Work in Biology—Post-Pandemic

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Monica Ranes-Goldberg: The pandemic truly put a bright spotlight on the importance of medical laboratories and pharmaceutical companies. I felt like all of a sudden, the whole world was looking in on us. Like, we've been here all along. But it's pretty wild to think that diagnostic PCR tests and antigen tests have become household words.

Jill Finlayson: Welcome to the Future of Work podcast with Berkeley Extension and the EDGE in Tech Initiative at the University of California, focused on expanding diversity and gender equity in tech. EDGE in Tech is part of CITRIS, the Center for IT Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute. The way we work and the skills we need to succeed in our respective fields is shifting quickly. There is an increased reliance on data to inform business decisions, growing automation of job tasks, and more calls to incorporate sustainability into every business and government process.

From the use of technology, including AI and automation, to the adoption of remote work and distributed teams, the way we work today looks drastically different from just a few years ago. What trends, skills, and equity issues will we face in the years to come? Each episode, we talk with industry experts in their fields to discuss the changing evolution of the workforce and the skills needed to stay competitive.

In this episode, we look at the future of work in biology post-pandemic. If anything positive can come out of COVID-19 pandemic, it's the importance of health care professionals are now seen as paramount, especially those who are furiously developing a vaccine. From understanding how the virus worked and ways to mitigate its transmission, to how to protect our global population against it, the biologists and the labs became the lesser-known celebrities of 2021.

We discovered scientific pioneers like Katalin Karikó, whose work over 40 years led to the messenger RNA vaccine. This behind-the-scenes work quickly became front-page headline news. And with that influx of attention and sizeable demand came a surge in open positions in the biological sector, jobs in specific occupations, such as epidemiologists, medical scientists, biochemists, biophysicist, and biological technicians. All of these roles are expected to see continuing strong growth.

What is the future of work in this sector? And what will it take to fill the jobs gap? Today we're going to hear from a pioneer in her own right, Monica Ranes-Goldberg, who taught one of the first online classes for Berkeley in biology, long before COVID made it the norm, and with AOL as the platform, no less. A Berkeley graduate with a degree in Molecular Biology, Monica went on to get her PhD at Harvard University in Cellular and Developmental Biology.

She did her postdoc in Paris and was involved in AIDS vaccine development in the late '80s. When debating whether to go into the research lab or onto a career in pharma, Monica discovered while on maternity leave that she had a passion for teaching. She started at Berkeley Extension and stayed, combining her passion for biology with her talent for teaching.

Monica has refined her own pedagogy and designed new courses from introductory biology to current topics and biosciences like immunology and hematology. And she is currently teaching five different courses. Welcome, Monica. Thank you so much for joining us and please tell us how and why biology is your passion.

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Oh, Jill, thank you so much for your introduction. First of all, it's a pleasure to join you today in this conversation. Why biology? Honestly, I can't remember a time when biology was not a passion for me. Since my early childhood, I was drawn to the live sciences by just a deep curiosity to understand how life works.

My grandmother was a tremendous inspiration to me. She earned advanced degrees in chemistry and biochemistry during an era when women rarely went to college. She had actually aspired to be a medical doctor. But in the 1920s in Eastern Europe, that was unheard of for a woman.

So instead she pursued what turned out to be a very successful career as a medical laboratory professional. She worked side by side with physicians in medical clinics and hospitals running diagnostic tests on patient blood and biopsy samples. And some of my fondest childhood memories are of hours that I would spend playing with her microscope, examining various types of cells and microorganisms.
And as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I just continued following these interests. My family had assumed that I would ultimately pursue a medical degree and go on to become a physician. However, my undergraduate years at Berkeley coincided with the birth of recombinant DNA technology and the biotechnology industry. So what a time that was. And I chose to major in molecular biology and then pursue a PhD because I was just swept up in the excitement of doing laboratory research and being a part of the biotechnology revolution.

Jill Finlayson: So you're really following in your grandmother's footsteps almost. it's amazing. So today, you talk about it was very exciting when you were in college. What makes this an exciting field to study today?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Well, biotechnology is exciting not only because it has dramatically advanced our deeper understanding of living organisms. But it has had a tremendous impact on the human condition. It's affected so many sectors of life not only through development of new life-saving medications, but in furthering our ability to understand, diagnose, and prevent diseases.

Biotechnology also extends into agricultural fields, for which there's a changing climate that's presenting huge challenges that threaten our ability to feed future generations. So agricultural biotechnology is also a huge and growing sector. Now, my expertise is more in the clinical field. But, again, we all have this awareness of how important agriculture biotechnology will also be for our future.
Yeah, I agree. People often forget that the soil biome, the chemical makeup of plants and understanding how to engineer more nutritious plants or plants that can be resilient in the face of climate change, is really a key issue. So I'm glad you brought that in as well. I think for many people what brought this to the fore was the pandemic.

So it made us more aware of how important labs are for testing and the critical nature of pharmaceutical research to find vaccines.

Jill Finlayson: Maybe you can share a little bit about what jobs were already kind of important in that. And what has changed since the COVID epidemic?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Oh, my, yes, the pandemic truly put a bright spotlight on the importance of medical laboratories and pharmaceutical companies. I felt like all of a sudden, the whole world was looking in on us. Like, we've been here all along. But it's pretty wild to think that diagnostic PCR tests and antigen tests have become household words.

And prior to the pandemic, I would venture to say that most folks wouldn't have known what those were. All eyes of the world were suddenly focused, as well, on vaccine and therapeutic drug development. The whole world was anxiously awaiting results from phases of clinical trials, which these kinds of efforts have been going on for decades. But now all of a sudden, everybody was watching.

So the pandemic has impacted job growth opportunities on many fronts. Job growth includes all sectors of health care-- physicians, nurses, pharmacologists, the public health sector, including epidemiology. We've heard countless stories of nursing shortages and the great demands the pandemic placed on hospitals and clinics.

There's tremendous job growth opportunities that also include clinical laboratory specialists, those people who are running and analyzing those diagnostic tests. We have a need for public health leaders who would typically work in government and public institutions such as the CDC, that we hear from regularly now, or local health departments. Each county, each state has their own public health departments. And these individuals serve the important function of communicating with both research scientists and government officials to help in guiding policies to protect the public.

We've witnessed really an unprecedented rate of advancement of new tests, vaccines, and therapies. And this has happened within a relatively short period of time. We witnessed development of novel vaccines that changed the course of the pandemic.

And despite what seem to be overnight successes, it's important to appreciate that these advances were the result of decades of biotechnology advances that had been brewing all along. Further growth is continuing in biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries because the research scientists need to continue developing new drugs and vaccines and diagnostic tests because we don't know what new SARS-CoV-2 variants have yet to emerge. So we have to be anticipating the emergence of these new variants.

And we also don't know what other novel pathogens may yet appear. And the world is now keenly aware of just how vulnerable we are and why it's important to be on the ready for innovation. We can also anticipate, as a side consequence, a happy consequence, is that these innovations are going to be applied to other diseases that we have not cured, AIDS and cancer included. So we have a long way to go. The journey is just getting started in many ways.

Jill Finlayson: I really appreciate what you're saying about both kind of the hidden world that is now open to everyone to see, the speed of change, that when we have a crisis like this, things that were, as you said, being worked on for decades now were having to be done even quicker, more openly, more transparently as well, and the fact that people are aware now of how vulnerable they are and how much this plays a role. Because we've had pandemics before. Ironically, at Berkeley, in 1918, there was a similar pandemic. And you could see a lot of parallels.

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: I mean, what's different is that in 19-- the influenza pandemic, we didn't even know the structure of DNA. We didn't know what was causing the pandemic. We didn't know it was a virus. So we've come-- if you think about how far we've come in those 100 years, it's pretty remarkable. And yeah, so you could say that, in a way, we were lucky that if the next pandemic were to hit, that it happened at a time when we had this capacity to make this quick, coordinated, global effort to try to smack it down, which it's frightening to think on the other hand, how ill equipped we would have been if we didn't have these biotech advances.

And on that note of innovation, in terms of future job growth, there's a demand for bioengineers. That's another sector. Because we have this tremendous need for next-generation platforms, for more efficient large-scale testing and production capacities in making these huge quantities of vaccines and therapies, that we need to have precise machinery to manufacture these. So there's a lot of job growth in that sector as well.

And then one final word in terms of opportunities in the context of drug and diagnostic development is that we have to acknowledge the importance of the regulatory aspect and that as we're all now acutely aware of how important it is for the FDA to put their thumb on approving these vaccines and tests and therapies. And so there's great job growth opportunity in the area of clinical trial design and regulatory affairs. And these professionals work inside pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and they have to assure that the company's products and protocols and documents are in accordance with the FDA requirements. So that's just a whole other sphere of job opportunity.

Jill Finlayson: People often forget about the policy and the safety and the regulation aspects of these new innovations. But that's how we develop not only the vaccines that work, but do so safely. They work for everyone, tested on different populations. So I'm glad you brought that up. It also ties in with the fact that we have so much more data these days, right? There's so much more data to inform the vaccine development. And so there are some jobs at the intersection of data and biology.

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Absolutely, so the sector of bioinformatics, which is really the marriage of data and biology, continues to be an area of tremendous importance and growth for navigating and making sense of these large volumes of biological data. As technologies for gathering these large volumes continue to advance, so does the need for computer scientists to develop algorithms for analysis and mining of these data and make sense of it and then use that as guidance for how to proceed. In fact, this field is important not only for fundamental research, which is how it really was initiated with the Human Genome Project and understanding the human genome, but now this type of research is being implemented by biotech and pharmaceutical companies in their quest to identify what we call disease markers.

And then we can use these markers to try to design novel drug therapies that are targeted and more effective. So it continues to be a huge sector. So certainly there's a need for bringing in more computer scientists into the realm of biological science and vice versa, training biologists to be computer programmers and to marry those two sectors.

Jill Finlayson: Well, it speaks to the fact abount personalized medicine, right? How do we develop things that work differently on different people? We certain people can process drugs at different rates, and so understanding humans better in order to make the more personalized cocktail of solutions that they might need to overcome the disease or illness that they're facing. We certainly saw people were differently impacted by the pandemic, depending on different risk factors and things that were involved. So I think that's super interesting to see what's going on. You mentioned next gen, right? All these next-gen startups were here in Silicon Valley.

When you think about startups and the people who are trying to solve these issues, who are dealing with the regulatory issues of getting something out of the research lab and into society, where it can have its positive impacts, that requires a lot of time. That requires a lot of money. So there are venture capitalists who want to invest in this space. How are they deciding what to invest in and what not to invest in, if they themselves are not fluent in biology and immunology and the like?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Great question. And in fact, that is a huge challenge for any investment entity. As it is, it happens in the Bay Area, where we have really a huge concentration of investors. Those who are the most successful in investing in biotechnology do have in-house experts.

And so I actually have some insight into that, as having done some consulting. And as a sidebar, my husband is actually in the venture field. And he worked for a while at a venture firm that did half health care and half technology. He has an engineering background.
And many of the partners who were handling the biotech investments had advanced degrees in biology. And so they were making those decisions based on their own expertise. And when they fell short, then-- and I know that this is true for most of the successful biotech investors is that-- they then seek expert advice. If they're doing diligence on any new entrepreneurial venture, they will seek advice and do that diligence and make sure that the science makes sense. And then they also look at it from the point of view of return on the investment in the future.

Jill Finlayson: Have you actually done that yourself? Have you been consulted? And were you surprised or alarmed by the companies that you reviewed?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: That's a great question. I actually had-- it was mixed.

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So there were several times that I was-- that my opinion was sought out just from the point of view of does this make sense? Does this make scientific sense? And there were a couple of times I said, not really.

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And then it would be sort of a pass. But then there were some. But no, this makes sense. I mean, I wasn't passing judgment on whether or not it would be a good business, but in terms of sort of giving a nod that the science held up and I would do a little research on papers that were referenced. And yeah, so, again, those that are successful in investing in biotech do the diligence either they have both combined with their in-house knowledge and then seeking diligence from professionals on the outside.

Jill Finlayson: What about the bigger companies? Like I think about Bayer that does actually work in ag tech, as well as working in aspirin, right? They run the full gamut. How do these bigger companies, who have such large staffs, deal with keeping their staff up to date?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: That's so important. And this really depends on the company. The larger-- depends on their funding and how well-funded they are. But those that really see the value in keeping their employees educated on the front line, they will encourage their employees to attend conferences, take continuing education courses for which students then can be reimbursed if they pass the course with a specific grade.

I know that UC Berkeley Extension has a steady flow of students who are sent over by their companies. Their local companies say, hey, we should really learn more about cancer. You should really learn more about immunology. So we recommend this course for you to take. And if you pass with a certain grade, then we'll reimburse. So that happens on a regular basis.

And then some companies may sponsor in-house training workshops. I have some experience in providing such workshops, two-day crash courses in immunology or cancer biology or infectious diseases. So again, those companies that are seeing the value in educating their employees will encourage them to take on these educational opportunities.

Jill Finlayson: Yeah, I always think that's where innovation comes from, right? If somebody's introduced to this crash course, they might see connections that other people might not because they're working on a different area. So it's really interesting to think that in two days, you can actually get people founded, grounded in these topics.

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Yes. And it also increases their-- I think their passion for their job. And they have a better understanding of the significance of what their companies are producing. So, yeah, good for retention.

Jill Finlayson: That's a good point. And turnover is so high post-pandemic. We've seen the Great Resignation, or the Great Migration, as people are trying to move on to jobs that are more fulfilling, jobs that are growth opportunities. So it is exciting to hear that there are companies that are embracing that model of making sure their employees are offered these opportunities.

In a lot of ways, the pandemic really stress tested our health system. It was demand for trained medical staff going up. It was shortfalls in the talent pipeline. It was suddenly having to do telehealth. How do you see our medical sector changing and embracing kind of technology to improve outcomes?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: So as far as telehealth, in particular, I do predict that we'll continue to see the implementation of telehealth because it's proved to be a convenient and effective. But there are certainly limitations. And as we move to a post-COVID world, certainly there will be a gradual shift back to in-person interactions.

And I predict there will be some kind of a hybrid dynamic that we end up with, perhaps preliminary consultations by phone or video and then follow up with in-person examinations and testing. But really this depends on the specific condition, and it depends on the community, and it depends on the individual. So there's a lot of variables in play here.

And how comfortable is the individual in navigating the technology? And what is the availability of a suitable platform, computer, internet connectivity? So there are so many things at play.

It's certainly going to be a dynamic circumstance. And we'll just have to see how it plays out. But I don't think it's going away.

Jill Finlayson: Yeah, I think we saw at UC Davis, they had a large community effort around telehealth. They saw exponential growth in use of that. And they partnered a lot with organizations in the community to make sure that they were reaching the most vulnerable populations.

I think the pandemic, at large, shone a light on disparities in treatments and an outcomes. What do we need to learn about-- in the biotech space, what do we need to understand about building trust, understanding different communities, the value of really reaching out and understanding and having representation in your researchers, in your caregivers? What is your experience with that?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: So it's such an important point. And we've seen this and how important that is during this pandemic. And what we really, really, really need are effective communicators, people who can translate the language of science and health challenges to the public. Certainly public health professionals need community partners that are trusted and respected by the citizens.

And what I think we've all observed was how difficult it was during the pandemic for the CDC to be able to communicate on almost a daily basis what was happening with the pandemic. And its so changing day by day. And we're learning new material day by day and to keep the trust of the public during those times and this across the board. And certainly different populations have different trusted leaders. And so what's really important, again, is to find trusted leaders within each community who can be the spokesperson and who can also understand the science so that they can communicate it in a way that's most meaningful for that population.

Jill Finlayson: Yeah. I think it's one of those areas that's sometimes overlooked. Do you think you can just put the information out there? But you have to think about how you put the information out there as well.

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Absolutely. Absolutely. And we saw how difficult that was, and continues to be because most of the professionals who are-- take for example Dr. Fauci, who I've known about-- I never met him in person. But I've been following Dr. Fauci's career and his contributions since the late '80s because I was working on AIDS. And he was one of the forefront researchers in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

And he's kind of forced into the forefront. And he's been a leader in the field. But I think just so interesting watching him to be forced into this situation of being the face and the spokesperson for this very challenging pandemic. And we see this with the CDC leaders and how difficult it is to be communicating in a way that's clear and trying to be consistent and trying to be accurate when you're in the middle-- and I sometimes I describe it as being in the middle of a hurricane.

And the storm is whirling all around. And the people on the ground are constantly saying, well, how much damage is being done? And you're like, I don't know because the storm is still raging. So we don't know. And it keeps changing. The wind conditions are changing, and the direction of the wind is changing. So we're trying our best to give the best advice in the moment with the information that we have.

Jill Finlayson: That's important because people assume that we know everything. But we're really learning it as we go. And I will say Fauci was so popular here in Berkeley that when we had falcons that come and have nesting every year, one of the falcons was named Fauci.

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: [LAUGHS]
That's great.

Jill Finlayson: So, yes, we have a good following here. Well, coming back to Berkeley, you've taught the first online class at Berkeley on biology. You were an early adopter of kind of that flip script, where students were supposed to watch the lectures and then actually come and engage in conversation for the class time. How do you teach these very difficult subjects when you're in an online format? Don't you need a lab?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: [LAUGHS]
That's a really great question. And in fact, that was one of the biggest challenges we faced when we first started teaching online classes. And the very first biology class I developed, we set up a curriculum of home labs, where I had the students developing-- doing lab activities in their kitchen. And then we had virtual labs.

There's now a much richer opportunity for doing the virtual labs because the internet has advanced so much since then. And then the kitchen labs are really sort of fundamental biology activities that you can do with everyday products. However, for some courses, particularly lower-division chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, just general biology courses, a lab component is often required for medical schools. And

In fact, the UC Berkeley Extension does have a wonderful post-baccalaureate pre-med program that does include such courses that have a lab component, where students are able to go to a laboratory facility and do lab activities. So we've really advanced in that offering as well. But for the upper-division courses, which are more theoretical and problem-solving in nature, they don't require laboratory component.

For example, in a typical-- and this is true on a university campus as well, immunology-- upper-division classes like immunology. And most campuses don't even offer hematology. But those courses do not have lab components required.

So we're able to meet that need without any big issues. And any laboratory skill development that a student might need will happen when the students are in a graduate school program or maybe in a job, where they get on-site training to use particular equipment and such. So that has not been an impediment for advancing their education.

Jill Finlayson: In terms of recent graduates who come and take courses to build their knowledge and experiences, what do you see as kind of their biggest job skills gap? And how do you help fill that?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Oh, my goodness, well, certainly this has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my teaching experience is that the students are using these courses to gain acceptance into a variety of graduate programs, and for job promotion as well. Our students are using their UCB Extension coursework to satisfy requirements for all sorts of advanced credentials, including medical school, veterinary school, dentistry, optometry programs, PhD programs. The UC Extension also offers a highly respected certificate program in clinical lab sciences.

And there's an advanced bioscience certificate program. There's a regulatory affair certificate program. So they are really using these courses to advance their careers.

And just last week, alone, for example, I heard from three of my former students with exciting news. Two were just accepted to medical school. Another one was accepted to a clinical lab science master's program. And this is happening regularly, where the students are leveraging their new coursework, their newfound knowledge, and their credentials and really pushing themselves to the next level in their career.

Jill Finlayson: So what are you most excited about? What's the most recent class you've developed? What's on the horizon? What do we need new courses on?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Oh, my goodness. Well, during the pandemic, on top of juggling my regular course load, I took on a huge project to overhaul and update our hematology course, which is a heavy clinical course that is a required component of the clinical lab science program. Many medical students take this course because it has such a heavy clinical focus. I honestly don't think I've worked as hard on any project since I wrote my PhD thesis.

It was a very intensive process. But I feel so fortunate that I was able to work alongside a very talented team of development staff at UC Berkeley Extension. They were just outstanding. And it truly was a partnership.

I was the so-called expert in the subject matter. And I created the PowerPoints. And I created the lectures and the quizzes and the assessments and such. But working with this team, we've really developed a course that I am so proud of.

And the course launches next week. So I'm very, very excited to see how it's received by the students. And I think they'll have a much improved learning experience through that course.

Jill Finlayson: For the layperson, what is hematology? What does this feed into in terms of jobs?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Oh, great question. Hematology is everything you ever wanted to know or didn't realize you needed to know about the blood.
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So we learn in this course, we learn not only about the structure and functions of all of these components, but then we also learn about what can go wrong in a wide range of diseases. And then we learn about how those diseases are diagnosed in a clinical laboratory. So we get very technical in terms of understanding how these diseases are detected in a clinical lab, how they are measured, what the significance of those measurements are, and then how clinical scientists take that information and work hand in hand with physicians to help them guide treatments for their patients.

And the exciting thing is, as I was developing the course-- this is during the pandemic. And we came to understand that many COVID patients, in their most serious phases of disease, were suffering from abnormal blood clotting. And this was happening-- we were learning about this right at the time when I was starting to write the lecture on clotting disorders.

So it's really timely. And the students who take this course, again, I would say about half and half would be those who are interested in medical-related fields, either as first-line physicians or those who are seriously considering working in clinical laboratories. So when the blood tests and urine tests and biopsies are gathered by the laboratory, they go into those back rooms of the hospital or the clinic. And they need to be put into the trusted hands of these clinical laboratory scientists to conduct the tests and to provide data that is reliable.
And that information is then sent to the physicians. And that guides the physicians on how to treat their patients. So it's a really important field in that right.

Jill Finlayson: Well, hopefully your passion for the biological sciences is contagious and it's infected other people who are thinking about this space. Do you have any final words or advice for how to get behind the scenes in a lab? Like, how do you design your biotech career path?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Oh, that's a great question. So first of all, professionals who work in labs and pursue a career in biotech or a clinical career path, they are expected to have proficiency in fundamental and advanced bioscience subjects. So there really are no shortcuts. And it isn't easy.

But with that said, if a student is willing to put in the work and avail themselves to these opportunities, they'll find it to be incredibly exciting and rewarding and to know that they are working on the front lines in advancing the human condition. And it's all worth it. Put in the work, find the-- advance your education, avail yourself to these opportunities, and you're setting yourself up to a lifetime of very rewarding work.

Jill Finlayson: And I have to go back to your grandmother. Did she give you advice that you have kept with you all these years?

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Oh, my goodness. I don't know if it's so much as a verbal advice or as an example. She didn't retire until she was in her mid 70s. And when she retired, she was working at a hospital, in a hospital lab in Los Angeles. And when she finally put in her notice for retirement, they begged with her not to leave because she was so dedicated to her craft.

And she just put her whole heart into her work. And I just found that to be-- she didn't have to say anything. She just did it. And that was my inspiration.

Jill Finlayson: Well, thank you, Monica, for putting your whole heart into your work. We really appreciate you joining us today.

Monica Ranes-Goldberg: Thank you, Jill. It's been a pleasure.

Jill Finlayson: I hope everybody enjoyed this latest in the long series of podcasts that we'll be sending your way every month. Please share with friends and colleagues who may be interested in taking this Future of Work journey with us. And make sure to check out extension.berkeley.edu to find courses, including those Monica's teaching, and certificates to help you in your biotech career.
And to see what's coming up at EDGE in Tech, go ahead and visit edge.berkeley.edu. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll be back next month to talk about intentional learning and expanding your future career growth. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.

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