From Chemical Engineering to Biotech Innovation: Turning Science Into Impact

In this episode, we sit down with Kendall McWilliams, ’20 Chemical Engineering, M.P.S. Biotechnology Student, to talk about what it really takes to build a meaningful career in biotech.

Kendall shares his journey from chemical engineering into the biotech industry, and why pursuing graduate education was the logical next step. He explains how understanding quality systems, GMP regulations, clinical trials, and business operations transformed how he approaches his work—especially in bringing promising therapies from research to patients.

The conversation also dives into how AI and data modeling are being used responsibly in bioprocessing, why human judgment still matters, and how constant learning is simply part of the profession. Kendall offers honest insight into balancing full-time work with graduate school, navigating different roles within biotech, and staying grounded in the industry’s ultimate purpose: protecting and improving lives.

This episode is especially valuable for working professionals considering graduate study, career-changers exploring biotech, or anyone curious about how science, regulation, and ethics come together in real-world biotech work.

Learn more about UMBC’s M.P.S. in Biotechnology: https://professionalprograms.umbc.edu/biotechnology/

Transcript

Dennise Cardona  00:00:00  
Hey, thanks for tuning in to this episode of UMBC Mic'd Up podcast. My name is Dennise Cardona from the Office of Professional Programs, and I am here today with Kendall McWilliams. He is a current student soon to graduate with the an MPS in biotech from UMBC. He also graduated in 2020 with a chemical engineering degree, Bachelor of Science degree. Welcome, Kendall. It's so great to have you here with us. So let's start at the beginning. Shall we what first drew you to the UMBC biotech graduate program, and what were you hoping to gain when you enrolled in the program?

Kendall McWilliams  00:00:39  
So what actually drew me to it was one of my one of my good friends, he was doing a degree in Individualized Studies, which had a lot of this particular program inside of that in his bachelor's degree. And he told me how great it was for biotech, how it teaches you all about the quality, all about everything you need to know to really navigate the BIO biotech landscape. And I decided to go into that considering, for chemical engineers, you have emphasis, so you can emphasize on a particular type of production. And one production I was fairly well, very well suited for was bio processing. So during my undergraduate degree, we did a lot of different types of simulations and problems with bioprocessing during our coursework. So I thought it would make a logical next step would be to try to understand the industry that I'm trying to work in. So I decided to take, I think I took about six months off of school and worked. I got a job at the company I'm at right now, next year, and then after about six months of that, I decided it's probably a good idea to get more familiar with biotech landscape, considering, I guess I'm going to be here for a while. So that's how it started.

Dennise Cardona  00:01:59  
Oh, that's awesome. What do you love most about the biotech industry being in it right now? What do you love most about it?

Kendall McWilliams  00:02:06  
The biggest and most exciting thing to me is taking something from effectively, taking it from a college or university's tech transfer office or your internal research team, taking a promise of something that's actually good for a particular patient population, and getting it to the clinic with the highest level of quality possible, and when you're able to see the difference and even the data set like your different statistical parameters that you use to determine if something is good or not, something is effective or not, From a scaling perspective. So getting the drug to the market is really important, that that's really exciting when you have a drug or a disease candidate or a drug candidate, I should say that is promising in the pre clinical data. It looks great. It looks it looks it is exciting, and it is fulfilling to be able to give potential research subjects a either a new drug or model. In our case, it's a monoclonal antibody, a new treatment opportunity, or a new or better alternative to what's on the market. So it's exciting.

Dennise Cardona  00:03:22  
That sounds really purposeful. One question I have given the whole state of AI right now, how does, I don't know. How does the biotech industry look with AI? Are you using it, or is it something that is insulated from that whole I guess some people consider it a problem when it comes to career choices and things like that. What's your take on that?

Kendall McWilliams  00:03:44  
My first exposure to AI was actually using an evolutionary AI algorithm in, I believe, 2016 for one of my engineering projects at Howard Community. It was an AI built to effectively solve Sudoku against gave you Sudoku puzzles are progressively harder. I love those, yes. And then I eventually evolved that program from Sudoku to a learning program for calculus because I got tired of using this study guide programs from the school. I was like, this isn't effective. Let me try something else. So I decided to do that there back in 2017 so I'm fairly familiar with early AI. And then there's a type of modeling that is similar to AI, and how it works is called neural networks. I was using neural net my first projects that I took over at this company back in 2021 the first program that I was doing the development work for in upstream, upstream is you make have cells and make your product, and then you harvest your cells so your cells are in a bioreactor. And our goal was to optimize the bioreactor conditions so cells make more product or don't die because. Cells make other things that you can't give people that's upstream. In a nutshell, in the way we the way I used it, used AI, in particular neural networks, is I actually use a platform called Jump JMP, and in this statistical software actually allows you to use neural networks to model different bioreactor parameters or responses, is what they call them, sometimes, is, which is basically you have your factors, which are your bioreactor performance, parameter like your temperature, your pH, your gassing, your feed, how much you're giving the cells to eat and grow and produce. And then your responses are like viable, viable cell density, different things like that, actual reacts that you measure on offline equipment or equipment that's attached to your bioreactor. And the neural network can take all of that data, all of it it can take as much data as you can give it, and as much RAM as your computer has. And it will help generate a model to tell you, Okay, this parameter is ideal here. You should try to maintain it here for this amount of time, or you should try to maintain it here for the entire run. So that's actually my first implementation of it, and it actually was able to increase production from one of our products from by about 50% is about 50% it was the highest something we call titer, which is protein concentration in the bioreactor. It produced the highest titer that we saw at this company. Far and away. It was over double the next candidate for a different, obviously different drug, a different program, but it was over double of what we've seen previously. So it works very well, but it is limited. You have to be careful of what you're putting in. If you put in bad data or data that's missing points, data that is measured poorly, you get bad, bad results out of the model that aren't necessarily accurate.

Dennise Cardona  00:07:04  
Yeah, so we still need humans working with AI, which is fabulous.

Kendall McWilliams  00:07:10  
Think of it like an assistant. Your AI is quite literally a very smart, silly robot. It will do exactly what you ask it to do, and that is sometimes a problem

Dennise Cardona  00:07:24  
That's hilarious. Yes, I can see that. Now, graduate school can be very demanding. How did the program, or how has the program, I should say, prepare you for the realities of working in the biotech field, as you are.

Kendall McWilliams  00:07:40  
So I would say that it's not necessarily the program as much as the professors. They really understand how this industry is and how it works, especially guest lecturers as well. While the program is great, the people in the program really matter too. When you get to talk to some of our some of our staff and some of our professors, adjunct or otherwise, they really give you a good idea of what should expect and go in. And they also don't even assume something in industry you don't like. They can give you guidance on how you can approach it. If your company is doing something you don't necessarily agree with or but it's perfectly legal. Of course, you can have those more ethical conversations with your mentors here, your your staff here, and get an understanding of how you can navigate that while not necessarily causing problems.

Dennise Cardona  00:08:34  
Yeah, that's great. Having those mentors, those people, the resources at your hands can be so helpful in helping to, like, just think things through and inform thinking. That's one of the greatest assets, I think, of having great faculty, which we do here at UMBC, industry practitioners. To me, that's like, the biggest golden nugget of studying here at UMBC is having those professors who are out there doing the work too, and they know it's like real time, real world shifting. It's really powerful. So tell us about what you are doing now. So how did, how is the time in the program been able to help you get where you are today? I know you graduated with chemical engineering, and then you ended up in a role after that. And was that? What was that? What motivated you to really start this master's program is seeing, hey, with this type of a degree, I could probably be able to give a lot more value here.

Kendall McWilliams  00:09:33  
The way I would describe it would be this, I felt like with the chemical engineering degree and my research and individual, individual path through university, I felt like I had a fairly strong understanding of the science I in the mathematics. I felt like I didn't necessarily need more of that, but I did notice gaps in my ability to navigate both the management. Side of things and the the GMP side of things, because while in the chemical engineering program, I took courses that helped us understand the EPA, the EPA and the FDA are not the same thing. Everyone could tell by the names. So when you're so I started here as effectively I think I was, I was I was called a process engineer. So I started here as Process Engineer one, and in biotech, they use the word engineer loosely. They can you can be a biologist and have Process Engineer title. So I didn't necessarily need more science, but I definitely needed to understand the impact of what I was doing, and understand how to navigate both the regulatory and the ensuring the quality of what we're doing. Because while I understand the science behind it, there are there are levels to the science, so to speak, while your data may look fine from a numbers perspective, the execution is not quality, because those are different things. For example, 21 CFR compliance is really important in in the biosec industry, that's our code regulations. It's really important, and you should know it very well. By the time you're done with this program, you're gonna know it extremely well. So I basically looked at our I looked at what the program provided. So different courses, management courses, business courses, because as a chemical engineer, you finish your capstone project, basically trying to build a chemical plant with your team, make some regulate or follow some certain regulations, etc, etc. So I understood capital costs, equipment costs, I already knew that stuff, but I didn't understand the personnel impact nearly as much. So courses like project management really important from this program. Other courses are also very important, like introduction to business practices. And then another course that was really important was actually introduction to clinical trials. So those three courses, I would say, stood out to me, to the point where I believe the semester they offers, offered clinical trial, Introduction to clinical trials. I just signed up for that class. Immediately, I was like, I need to know, I need to know what's actually going on in this black box called a clinical trial. How does it work? Where does it come from? So that's what drew me to the program, was in addition to, of course, the testimony, effectively from my good friend. But the actual content of the program, it's unique. You're not really going to get a program that helps effectively build you towards that understanding daily operations, how your building is supposed to look like. I took facilities, for example, facility design, and we had to design a facility for various different products, for various different types of facilities, different biosafety levels. And so that helps really open my eyes to how in depth this program really is, because I felt like, after taking with my industry experience combined with my research experience and education, it doesn't matter what biotech products I'm working on nearly as much anymore. I'm not worried about crossing over from, for example, I work on mostly monoclonal antibodies. But if I were to swap over something like an adenovirus or another particular type of adenovirus vector, AVS or even cellular gene therapy, I'm not worried about crossing over there, because this program has prepared you so well to understand both the science and the regulatory associated with those things. Yeah.

Dennise Cardona  00:13:44  
Now many prospective students are working professionals like yourself. How did how are you balancing graduate school with your other responsibilities, and what has helped you to stay on track?

Kendall McWilliams  00:13:57  
I actually work in the upstream side of things, long days and late nights, early mornings. I should say it is something where you really have to understand that what you're doing at work is for the patients at the end of the day. You want patients while they're they're subjects, while they're in your clinical trial. Your goal is getting patients, because that means your drug does something, and that means it's safe, it's efficacious, and it changes lives. And you really have to understand that, because you're even though you're going to work every day and you're making salt water, sometimes, literally, salt water. You don't want to make salt water. No one wants to make salt water. You have to do these things to make sure that your company, and particularly your drug, can move forward to help people. It's for a purpose that is supposed to be meaningful. You're that's the goal is you're helping people, and you have to really you. Balance, if that's something that you really want to do, because it's hard, because sometimes it doesn't work out for you in that particular role. But you may understand through this program, maybe quality control is more your role, or maybe QA quality assurance is more your speed. Maybe you're not, maybe you're right for biotech, but you're in the wrong department. You could be right for biotech, but you're at the wrong company, and you can help in those are conversations you can have with your faculty here, who have plenty of years of experience. CF, classmates. Most people work at the same time, like you're saying, so they could have different work experiences than you. So you can really have that conversation a lot better in a program like this, because of the concentration of students who work while going to school, like for example, most of the people, because I went part time for most program, so a lot of the people that I worked with actually work at another company. By checking the area, it's really funny, because sometimes they would suggest certain things and projects, and I'm just like, that wouldn't fly. So you get to also understand how other people experience biotech, and that not everyone's experience is the same. So you could, you will come to that understanding.

Dennise Cardona  00:16:18  
Absolutely and given that, keeping that in mind, do you feel like once you are done with the program, that things will ease up, or is this always the nature of being a biotech professional?

Kendall McWilliams  00:16:31  
It's one of those things where once I'm done with this program, all it does is free me to fill my time with other pursuits because, because right now I am doing daily operations for the entire development team, so I'll do scheduling, etc, etc, as well as experiments, as well as statistical design, etc, etc. So I'm very busy, but it doesn't change the fact that I still need to give off industry. I still need to read the reports, I need to read the papers, I need to understand the science, I need to understand the business. So even when I'm done with program, I'm still going to be doing the same thing, which is reading the industry, understanding where we're going, understanding where other people are going, understanding where the technology is moving under and then also keeping an eye on, okay, what can I implement at my current company that isn't there yet? You know, it's not quite there. Are we using all of our technology to the fullest? What is the fullest capability technology today? So there's constant learning and constant pursuit. So while you may be done with the program, you're not done learning, especially if you want to continue to push the envelope. Yeah.

Dennise Cardona  00:17:48  
So it takes that drive. It really takes a lot of drive, but understanding what the whole underlying purpose is, I think, is what it sounds like. That's what your drive is.

Kendall McWilliams  00:17:57  
Yeah, because at the end of the day, I had a mentor my engineering program at Howard Scott forester, then he's always big on the engineering code of ethics, and the number one for any engineer doesn't matter. Number one thing is protecting the public. What is better than protecting the public from cancer by giving them medicine that actually takes care of that problem for them? And it's a big it's an ethical thing. It's, and it's, it's extremely important. That's your goal as an engineer, if, and he was super big on basically, if you weren't doing it for the public, why are you here? You really drilled that into you, and he was hardcore, like from the very beginning, that was my first exposure to engineering, and I feel like with that in short engineering course that he had us take it stuck with me for over 10 years now, because I think I took it in 2015 or something like that. So stuck through my entire engineering career, absolutely.

Dennise Cardona  00:19:00  
So finally, what would you say to somebody who is considering UMBC biotech graduate program but is not quite sure that's really the right next step? What would you say to somebody?

Kendall McWilliams  00:19:11  
I would say that the reason why UMBC biotech program is so unique is it prepares you for various things. For example, it prepares you for the business aspect of things. So if you're a scientist in the lab, you're in the wet lab all the time, and you want to take a step back. Maybe you want to go into go from the science side, and maybe you want to go to business. It does that. It provides you enough information for you to do that. Let's say you're in the science side of things, but you want to go over the quality assurance. You don't really know about quality assurance. You don't know anything about it at all. No idea. All you do is sign your batch record and you think you're good. You measure the thing. You told the management, I measured it, and you're fine. But maybe. Wanted to go on quality assurance. This helps, program helps to build that understanding, understanding of the regulation and understanding of what the current trends are. Let's say you're stuck in the quality assurance office, and you're like, I don't want to sit in the office anymore. I want to get my hands wet. I'm going to get into purification maybe, maybe that's where you want to try out. This program helps also build you so that you'll be able to understand how to purify something, so that if you wanted to pursue that, you also have years of experience in quality assurance and understand that theoretical understanding you need to process a particular protein or drug for somebody to use in development or in the clinic, in the clinic, and that's just the bio the biopharmaceutical side of things, also teaches you about medical devices, too. So if you want to get into medical devices, let's hear about pharmaceuticals like me and you want to go over to medical devices, it prepares you to understand what that field, what that industry, looks like. So you're not just pigeonholed into making monoclonal antibodies rest of your life. This program helps really broaden your scope and give you a deep understanding of what you're actually doing.

Dennise Cardona  00:21:13  
Wow, that's very powerful. What you just said. Beautiful summary. Thank you for sharing that and thank you so much for sharing all of your thoughts with us today on UMBC program, where you are in the world, and it sounds like you're doing an amazing, amazing things out there in the world. Very purposeful, and that's very inspiring. Thank you so much for sharing that. Kendall. 

Kendall McWilliams  00:21:35  
Thank you.

Dennise Cardona  00:21:37  
And thank you to everybody who tuned into this episode of UMBC Mic'd Up podcast. If you'd like to learn more about our offerings, click the links in the show notes. Thank you so much.