Dr. Jacob Fiksel, PhD in Biostatistics | Senior Research Statistician at Vertex Pharmaceuticals

In this episode, we discuss the impact of mentorship on Jacob’s decision to pursue a PhD in biostatistics and on his job search, his advice for finding a career that satisfies your interests, values, and needs, and the different skills that he applies to his current work in the pharmaceutical industry.

Hosted by Lois Dankwa

To connect with Jacob and to learn more about his story, visit his page on the PHutures #100AlumniVoices Project website.

Transcript

Lois Dankwa

Hi! I'm co-host Lois Dankwa, and this is the 100 alumni voices podcast, stories that inspire, where we explore the personal and professional journeys of a diverse group of 100 doctoral alumni from Johns Hopkins University. Today, we're joined by Jacob Fiksel, PhD in Biostatistics and current Senior Research statistician at Vertex pharmaceuticals. Hi, Jacob. How are you today?

Jacob Fiksel

Hey, Lois, I'm good. Enjoying a nice snowy day up in Boston, so.

Lois Dankwa

I love it well, I'm glad you're able to enjoy some snow. It's in DC it's not sunny. It's not snowy. It's gray, but it's a good day though. I'm glad to have you here and to learn a little bit about you today. I wanna dive in and start by just understanding and hearing from you why you wanted to pursue a PhD in Biostatistics, and just hear more about your graduate experience at Hopkins in general.

Jacob Fiksel

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So, I think for biostatistics. So, biostatistics, it's a really interesting mix of applying quantitative skills like math, but applying it to public health and social issues. And I think part of that stems from—so, my mom's a social worker, and my dad's a physicist. So, it's kind of the natural marriage of the that super quantitative but also desire to go out and help people and interact with people in that sense. And also, when, so I went to Pomona College for my undergraduate degree. And there I got a degree in math, and in one of the classes the one of the last lectures, the Professor, she would go on for about 30 min giving her opinions on all the different things you could do with the math degree, and the she always said biostatistics was like kind of the number one thing where you could have a solid, you know, career, but also do a lot of good for the world. So, I think, between that and also my advisor, Joe Hardin, who is a Biostatistician and taught at Pomona College, he really encouraged me to keep going with statistics classes at Pomona, and to apply for a PhD in biostatistics. So, I think it was kind of that combination of all those factors, and being able to use my math degree and apply it to really important applied public health problems.

Lois Dankwa

I love that, and I love how you mentioned really the role of being inspired, I guess you could say, by your parents’ professions. But then, also having some mentors that help you, remember, remember that the skills that you had, or ones that you could continue into your future.

Jacob Fiksel

For sure. Yeah, I think a lot of this is really like, because of my mentors and like exposing me to different opportunities and encouraging me with my skillsets that they that they help give me.

Lois Dankwa

So, I wanna dive in then to your experience at Hopkins. How like, what was it like? And then how were you even thinking about your career when you first entered? And how did it—how are you thinking about it when you were closer to the end of your PhD program?

Jacob Fiksel

Yeah, that's a good question. So, I think the transition. So I went to college near Los Angeles, and then moved straight out to went straight from an undergraduate degree to the PhD Degree. I think moving from Los Angeles to Baltimore was quite a big it's quite a big like culture shock, like big sprawling LA warm all the time to Baltimore, where everything's like way more compact. And then I think also just kind of this transition from college life to real life was harsh while you're doing this very stressful, very difficult PhD program. So, I think the first semester for me was really challenging. Just the social aspect, and also just the educational aspect of it. The classes that have pushed me harder than I was ever pushed as an undergrad and I think during the PhD in grad school in general, I think it's a lot more up to you than an undergraduate. I think I found a lot more support from like teachers who will like kind of give you the really, all the material you'll need. Where in in graduate school, not that professors won't support you, but it's really more up to you to—it's a lot more open-ended in terms of like the education that you give yourself. So, I think that first semester was really hard for me, and honestly, actually, after the first semester, I had a meeting with my the chair or the head of the program I was like, I don't know if I could do this anymore. I was thinking, maybe I can leave and take some science classes and maybe try out Med school or something. But both he and also my parents really just encouraged me to stick it out for the year and things improved after. The classes started going better. But and so during the PhD, I did lots of different work. I worked in cancer, genomics. I worked in international health. So, my feature was actually in international health and a collaboration with the Gates Foundation with the Government of Mozambique. But actually, I really and I, maybe this is a regret, I don't think I really started thinking seriously about my career until really the end of the PhD when I had to start, when I realized it was kind of ending, and I think maybe I just assumed that I would apply for academic jobs, because that's just what you do with a PhD. But I think I was mainly thinking about just getting the PhD and didn't put enough time into thinking what I wanted to do for a career afterwards.

Lois Dankwa

That's I'm glad that you shared that that while one that you were honest about how that you struggled a bit in the first year because that's certainly something a lot of us experience in our first year of our PhD or any doctoral studies, where it's like, Whoa, this is just a lot of work, whether it's the course work. And you're trying to figure things out. And I think that it's it also means that sometimes people don't even think about what they want for their career. And they assume they'll go into academia. But I'm curious then, when you started to think about your career, how did you then narrow down what you wanted to do? Were there influencers, or like, yeah, how do you keep up that since you hadn't really thought about that?

Jacob Fiksel

That's a good question. Also, I also want to touch on the point about maybe people not like talking about as much. They're like, well, there's troubles during the first year. So, I think so, I thought maybe part of it was, I thought I was the only one like struggling during the first year, and actually it turns out that, like almost half of my cohort at some point had a very similar talk with the head of the department. So, I you know I I'm I really encourage people to be open with their struggles, and I think it's easier to face struggles like that with other people going through the same thing. I think, in terms of my career so quite to be quite honest, there's a great mentor that I had, Jason. He actually, he's not an official Hopkins faculty member, but he taught a summer course, and he's been a great mentor to me over the years, and he so I was thinking maybe about applying to Postdocs. But he also, he works in clinical trials, and he connected me with several people who are at several companies that work in clinical trials, and so I interviewed with several of them and ended up taking a job with Jansen. I think this position I just felt like comfortable with the people and the company, but I honestly didn't like, really think through as much as I did during my this most recent job search I had about really what I was looking for in a career. I think it was more I needed a job, and also this was March of 2020. So, Covid was happening and I was finishing my PhD. And it was the whole whole whirlwind of things going on. It was quite hard to really just take some time from myself and think about what do I want in a career? So, I think so, the people at Jansen were great, but at least the job wasn't exactly what I was looking for, and so I ended up taking some time recently before I took this job at Vertex pharmaceuticals to think about, you know, what are like the aspects that I'm really looking for in a job. So, I think I would like high—you know, my, my, what I'm looking for is going to be different than what other people are looking for. But you know you have to consider well, well, the one thing I'd for sure say is, don't worry about what you think other people want for you. Like, for example, don't, don't worry if you think that maybe you're not interested in becoming a professor, but you think your advisor like thinks you'd be great at it. You know I think a lot of and my advisor, for sure I may be worried about disappointing him, but because he's a great advisor, he just wanted what would be good for me. So, you if you think that you know someone wants something for you, if they're a good, you know, mentor, or whatever supporter of you they'll want what makes you happy, I think, and it's always good to keep stock of that. And then also think about you know what so it's so it's just a balance of you know what are you good at? What are the skills that other companies are looking for? You know what kind of work-life balance are you looking for? Do you want, you know, a remote job, in person, job? Do you want to be highly collaborative? Do you want to kind of be doing your own thing? You want applied work? Do you want a lot more freedom and doing basic research work? So it's it's really a dance of different factors, you know. I still like, go back and forth in what I'm looking for, and I think a lot of people much further on in their careers go back and forth as well, so just I think it's always good even just in your third or fourth year or your PhD, if you can find an internship, even if it's totally like, or mostly unrelated to what you think you want, it's always I've gotten my most valuable experiences out of doing things that I didn't end up liking because it's always good to know what you what you don't want to do. So, really, I highly encourage just like start thinking, just starting early and really thinking about, you know not necessarily the exact job, but just like, what are you looking for in different positions?

Lois Dankwa

Yeah, that's such a good point about even if you try something, it doesn't mean that you are not going to look if you try something and don't like it. You still will learn something from it, and that's super valuable and important.

Jacob Fiksel

Yeah, for sure. 

Lois Dankwa

I think that I think that that's a lesson that I've learned a lot in the past, and I think that it's something that it could be so easy for people pursuing doctorates to also be people that are slightly perfectionist.

Jacob Fiksel

That's an understatement. Yeah.

Lois Dankwa

Right. So how can we, how can we balance that right?

Jacob Fiksel

Yeah. For sure. Yeah, I think also, it's interesting, because especially, I think in people who go into academic jobs, each like stage of the career is so different than before. So it's really hard to know, you know, being a PhD student is very different from being a tenure track faculty member, so it's not only good to know, you know, what do you like in your current job? It's also good to be aware you know what are the responsibilities in your future job like? For if you like, there are some people who just love the process of research, and sitting down and thinking, and having that that time to do research, and then they become professors, and then they spend none of their time doing research and all their time meeting with students, writing emails, doing admin work, whereas like you know, maybe if they had looked into a job at in an industry where they, the companies, are just like, go ahead, do research, like you don't have to do anything else, that might have been a better fit for them.

Lois Dankwa

Yeah, exactly. That's such a good point. So, I'm curious about either your first role after graduation and also this role, how are you seeing kind of skills and things that you've learned in your PhD, whether they were like direct or indirect things, how are they showing up in what you do like now?

Jacob Fiksel

Yeah, it's a good—that's a good question. So, the skills that are, you know, not showing up right now, or like going like my—so my jobs, I don't do like big, deep dives into single subjects. And you know, really creating, I'm not creating a lot of—like so in my PhD, in statistics, a big portion of it is creating new methodologies and going like pretty deep into very complex statistics and I'm sure it's the same in PhDs and all, all different subjects, but the skills that I think really serve me well are like our communication for sure. So, like being able to really distill down, you know, what are the main points of what you did. So, you might, you might have if someone gives me a data set now, I might have taken, you know, several days and explored all different aspects of it, and maybe run a comp like a lot of complicated models. But you have to really be able to think and explain one in terms they understand and to like to get to the point like, why, why does that matter? And I think that's a skill that I honed in my in my PhD by doing a lot of collaborative work with non-statisticians. I think also I honed that skill doing a lot of I was like a teaching assistant, but I was like leading like labs as a statistics teaching assistant. And so also being able to explain, you know, complicated topics to people who have never seen those things before that also is, was very helpful to me in both of my roles that I've had, and all my roles that I've had since the PhD.

Lois Dankwa

That's cool. It's cool to see how things that you learned that aren't even directly part of what you did in your dissertation are the things that you're using the most, and I I'd love to kind of hear more then about what you do and common myths that people would like kind of have about your field of work and stuff like that.

Jacob Fiksel

Yeah. It's a good. So, what I—so I'll just talk about what I do now. So right now, so in clinical or in pharmaceutical industry in general, so it's generally you can split it up into what's called clinical work. So, that's basically any all clinical trials. And that's where I'd say the vast majority of statisticians in the pharmaceutical industry work, supporting clinical trials. Everything from defined helping to define what is the patient population like exclusion criteria to designing the studies, to making, to signing on an analysis plan, taking care of making sure all the data is properly analyzed and stored, so that's where a lot of the work that statisticians do in the pharmaceutical industry is but actually so, I'm in the pre-clinical space. So, you can think of that more as a drug discovery. So in in the clinical space, a lot of statisticians will support, you know, maybe only treatments in oncology, or in a very specific disease area, whereas I work with researchers who are developing drugs in all sorts of different disease areas and all sorts of different stages. So, anywhere from doing just like assays with like cells that they collected to experiments on mice that that will inform whether or not the FDA will allow you to give a drug start testing a drug on patient populations. So, it's a lot of the same skills. It's study design, helping to think about analysis interpretation. But one of the big differences is that in the clinical space clinical trial space especially, the FDA requires that you have statisticians, whereas in the pre-clinical space it's not required to have statisticians. So, it's just not as not as highly regulated. So, you can have a little bit more, a little bit more freedom. But you still have to do things that in a way that people will understand it, and that it's generally accepted. So, myths, I honestly don't know if I don't know I didn't. I don't know what myths people have about working as a statistician. Maybe, I don't know. I and I guess some like I think there's maybe a common myth in general that working outside Academia you don't have like any freedom or anything like that, and where academia is like total freedom to do whatever you want. I think I think more and more, I mean, there's been tons of article, or I don't know, maybe this is just targeted to me, since I work in industry now. I feel like there's been lots of articles recently, and in Nature talking about like the realities of what working outside of academia. And I think I actually wrote, I've like written about this a little bit on Twitter, about how I don't really like this like divide between, you know, academia and industry. I think they're like kind of what I was talking about before. You have to really decide what you're looking for. So, in Academia, there's freedom to work on whatever you want as long as you have the grant money for it. So, if the government is interested also interested in paying for what you know, for you to work on what you're interested in, then you have that freedom. But you know you can't just, unless you have the grant money for it, you really can't just like work on whatever you want. You do have responsibilities, and you do have like people that you have to. You have deliverables and in industry you can even have sometimes they're, you know, they're research groups, and especially in big companies like Google or Facebook, that really just get to sit back and do you know, just do really whatever they want, and I'm sure in pharmaceutical companies I'm sure they have basic science groups that are where they just give them total freedom because they have the money and they have the profits to be able to kind of let just pay smart people to do what they're doing. So, I think you can totally fine lots of freedom, if not even more freedom outside academia, if you, you know, find the right company and position.

Lois Dankwa

That's a really good point to highlight. While I know that you said that for pre-clinical there's less restrictions than regulations, but overall for Academia versus working in industry there are different things that are restricting the type of work you're able to do. And I think that's a really good point to bring up in general

Jacob Fiksel

Yeah, for sure. I mean you have to—someone, someone you usually someone's paying for you to do something, and you have to—and they have some outcome in mind. So, whether it's, you know, the government or the company like they want you to do something specific. So, you have to. You know, if you're like if you're like passion is, for example, I I'm like I love like baking like bread in my free time like, but you know the government's not giving out grants to people to bake bread. So, you know, that's maybe an extreme example. But it's you can't always just do whatever you want if you have an academic position.

Lois Dankwa

Yeah, that's a good point. So then, I'm curious what advice you would give to someone that's interested in working in your field?

Jacob Fiksel

So, I think. And I think, maybe, like speaking specifically to like statisticians, or I, it really in general, I think kind of was going right going back to what I said earlier is, I would really recommend starting to think early about this. And just like trying to talk to as many people as you can who are working. Like have, like your advisor connect you to people, or even connect to people on LinkedIn or message them on Twitter. And you know almost everyone that I know would be like more than willing to just talk about their experiences and give advice to people, and just tell them what they do. So, I think this type of informational interviews, or even like emails, can be like super helpful to like, get a sense of like the of like the day to day I think that's like also important, just like, you know, you can think about there's like a difference of what you're kind of producing at the end. So, for example, producing, like a ground-breaking like research paper is like really really cool. But then you also have to think about like what's the day-to-day realities of like getting to that end. So, like what is the day-to-day reality of like any type of work, and like, really make sure that it's that is like the type of work that that you would love to do. So, like, even if you love like the aspect of like scientific discovery, a lot of like science work is writing. So, you like, make sure you actually enjoy like sitting down and that creative process of of writing as well. So, if I think just importantly thinking about like the day-to-day type of work, and also like trying to talk to as many people and you can. And and also like all sorts of fields, even if you think it might be like totally adjacent to what you think you might be doing. For example, I've seen actually quite a lot of people who got their degree in like a lab-based field, and they become like medical writers for these pharmaceutical companies, and they like really love that. Like they really love the writing aspect of research. And they just like, that's their job now. And I don't think like that's like an example of a position that a lot of people in their PhD would have no clue existed. But it's a it's a position where you need a PhD. You get a you get exposed to like tons of different science. You get to write a lot if you like that, and it's paid really well. So, I think, like really trying to broaden your horizons about possibilities is really important.

Lois Dankwa

Yeah, that's a really good point. It's about not just knowing, oh, this is the job title I would want, but recognizing and understanding what that really means for your day-to-day.

Jacob Fiksel

For sure, and I think also, another thing is like I am—so I went to Jansen after my PhD and actually did a short postdoc after that, and then I went to Vertex Pharmaceuticals. So, I think, like always keep in the back of your mind like, and especially if you're if you're listening to this, podcast you like probably graduated from Johns Hopkins, like lots of companies would love to hire a Johns Hopkins, PhD. Like there will always be all sorts of opportunities for you. So, I think like never—I think it's always important and it's always great to, you know, keep building and like staying in a certain path. But if you like, listen to your gut, and it doesn't sound right like always know that you can, you can make changes, and that all sorts of different places will want you for sure.

Lois Dankwa

Yeah, that's a helpful note. So, I have one more question for you, and I am curious, what inspires you right now?

Jacob Fiksel

Oh, that's that's a great question. Hmm! Let me let me think about that. So, I I don't. Maybe this is a weird answer, but honestly, I've I've honestly been like really into like making bread and pizzas, and it's not maybe, yeah, it's not as inspirational as something, you know, like seeing the effort to create like a covid vaccine in the matter of you know, of a year, but I always, I don't know. I just like love seeing the process of just flower, water, and salt turning into this like awesome product that that you can eat. And also, there's just like pretty crazy large supportive, like online, like support for baking bread and food and all sorts of stuff. So just a small thing in like daily daily life that's been fun and inspiring to see.

Lois Dankwa

I, well as someone that loves bread and pizza, I see how that's inspiring, but it's also it's cool to put something together. I get that. And also, just building community around something that excites you and you enjoy. I see how that's inspiring.

Jacob Fiksel

Okay, yeah, yeah, especially, in in public health, there's, you know, it's saving lives millions at a time. And there's also there's also something to, you know, making a loaf of bread and seeing like your friend or your partner, just like biting into and being happy. So, there's always it's always nice to see that as well.

Lois Dankwa

This is true. Oh, well, Jacob, it's been so wonderful to chat with you today, and I'm so grateful that I've learned a little bit about your story today.