Dr. Amy Weil, PhD in Chemical Biology | Global Medical Information Scientist at Merck

In this episode, we discuss what led Amy to pursue a PhD in chemical biology at Johns Hopkins, how she combined her love of both science and writing to carve out a career in medical communication and education, and her advice for trusting yourself and following your own path.

Hosted by Lois Dankwa

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

Transcript

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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 Amy Weil, PhD in chemical biology and current global medical information scientist at Merck. Hi, Amy.

Amy Weil

Hi, Lois. Thank you for having me. 

Lois Dankwa

Yeah. How are you today?

Amy Weil

I'm doing great, a little bit chilly but.

Lois Dankwa

Ah well. It's a little chilly. Yeah, well, I am excited to chat with you. Hopefully you're wearing something warm and we can dive in. So, I want to start by hearing a little bit about what made you want to pursue a PhD in general, but then also just more about your graduate work.

Amy Weil

Yeah, great. So, I was always really interested in science. So, it was kind of clear that I would end up doing something in the sciences. So, I went to Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia and had a really strong pre-Med program. And I had some really good mentors in both Chemistry and biology. In high school I had an amazing teacher in biology, so I went to Ursinus thinking I was biology, biology, biology. But then I had these really great mentors in chemistry and started thinking about, you know, maybe I do want to start pursuing that. And so, when I started applying for Graduate School, because I knew that I definitely wanted to seek higher education just because of the type of ambitions I had, and I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew it involved a higher degree. I started looking into kind of different programs. So, I knew biology was my strong suit by far, but I started kind of flirting with chemistry and this is right about the time that chemical biology had really started to come to the forefront for graduate programs. And that's most definitely what brought me to Hopkins. So, I went to a couple of different schools for interviews; they’re more on the biochemistry end. Hopkins was the only program that had, like a true chemical biology program. And for those who aren't really familiar with chemical biology, it takes several different disciplines, and it really studies the chemistry of biological molecules, whether they are the natural chemistry or using chemistry to modify biological molecules in order to improve their stability or visibility in biochemical studies. But I found that so interesting. And so, once I actually went through the interview process, it became very clear that I was going to end up at Hopkins because that was really the type of program that I wanted to pursue.

Lois Dankwa

That's really interesting. I'm glad that you described a little bit more kind of how chemical biology is different than biochemistry and as someone who in the past was pre-Med, who, while I wasn't amazing at it, really loved biochemistry, I I am curious then what you mentioned how chemical biology, it was kind of beginning like people were thinking about it more specifically when you were beginning your doctoral studies. I'm curious, what was it like being in like, entering into a space that a lot of people were entering into in a new way.

Amy Weil

So, I think it was really exciting because you're you, I was only the 3rd class of the training grant that that Hopkins has and really the first two classes were kind of invited specifically who had who had they'd applied to other programs and had been picked to you know, oh, are you interested in maybe doing this program? But my class was like the first who had actually applied, I believe to the chemical biology interface program. And I think it was kind of there was just this moment in, you know, the field where we were starting to use chemistry more and more to look at what can we do with biological molecules. I always say like for people who aren't familiar with chemical biology, it's those like non-natural amino acids, right? Like where someone went in and introduced this very novel chemistry into a protein and now, we can use that protein to do something different and that just was so cool to me. Really I just thought it was interesting and it it melded my two different interests together.

Lois Dankwa

Yeah, I understand that. I am someone that certainly loves to kind of mold and meld all of my different interests, and exist as an interdisciplinary person. So, I love how you you kind of ended up doing a similar thing. And I also love that you mentioned how it really sparked from kind of the role of mentors in your life where they helped you show helped you kind of notice your passions for different topics, and I'm curious how, how that kind of guided you throughout your doctoral program in terms of what you saw yourself doing afterwards?

Amy Weil

Yeah. So, it's interesting I when I was in school, so just for context for people I was at Hopkins between 2007 and 2013 and for anyone who was in a PhD program at that time, it was still pretty typical that, you know, you get your PhD, you do a postdoc, and you apply to a faculty position. That was kind of what your advisor had done, what their advisor had done and there wasn't a lot of talk at the time about kind of alternative career paths, and probably about my third-year in. So, we took classes year one, primarily rotated through labs. Year two, we joined the lab and did a mix of class work and lab work. And then year three is when you really buckle down and focus just on your research. So, during that third year, when I was at the bench and only at the bench, it became a little clear to me that I probably didn't want to be at the bench for the rest of my life. I loved science, but what I really liked was giving those presentations and talking about my science. I didn't love sitting at the bench and pipetting and actually, going through the motions of executing the research, but more just thinking about the problems and talking to people about the science. And also, my background you know I naturally was good at math, but where my strength really was was more in language and communication, which is a little bit backwards for someone in the sciences, and I had always had a really strong background in writing. I was a writing fellow in my college. I didn't even take a single writing class, but I ended up working in the writing center just because of professors who had acknowledged my strength there and and wanted me to help mentor other students in that area. So, I kind of thought, well, what if I could marry kind of as you were saying interests, my love of like communicating and writing science with communicating and writing with science itself, because you know, there are a lot of scientists who are brilliant who not aren't necessarily the greatest communicators. Maybe I could fill that gap. So that's when I started to like investigate what were the different types of careers that someone could do, who had these interests. And I wasn't really sure at first because I didn't have the right contacts, so the few people I did know who were kind of in the right area pointed me a little bit in the right way. And so, I learned about like science journalism, and that didn't quite feel right for me. And ultimately, I learned about medical writing. And this really didn't happen until my postdoc that I learned about this. I'd started picking up a little bit of medical editing as kind of like a side hustle if you will during my postdoc and then I learned about medical writing. So, there's so many different ways you can you can use writing in a scientific or medical sense, but medical writing, medical education, the the little bit of realm that I ended up in was medical education, medical communication. So, I ended up in an agency where we are basically training the sales force at pharmaceutical companies. So, we were writing pieces that would provide disease state training, so making sure the sales reps who don't necessarily have a scientific background become educated on the disease state where the products that they're trying to sell work, and then we'd also do treatment training as well, like product training, but primarily we were heavily focused on disease training and so that was such a good fit for me because I fully understood the science, but I wanted to talk about the science and I also have always really liked the mentorship role and even though I never would never meet these people that I'm training, you know, we would just ship the product off and then they would employ it with their sales force, I still had that feeling of like I was teaching them and I was breaking down these scientific principles into something that anyone could understand, and that was really satisfying to me.

Lois Dankwa

It's funny because it can be a little bit, even though it's feels rewarding to notice kind of how your strengths exist in the interest that you have, it adds a layer of complexity where it's like great. Now I have to find what type of job, what works, you know.

Amy Weil

Yeah. And I'm not the type of person to necessarily be super into like ohh I have to go network and meet all these people. It it happened very naturally. It it was a little bit ironic too. I was doing laser training during my postdoc at Penn and ran into someone from Hopkins and after that meeting I was like, oh, hi. And we we, you know, hooked up on LinkedIn and then a few years down the road she had started working at this medical agency and I was like ohh, maybe I would want to do that. So, it's it's funny how these little things that seem just like one-offs and random could potentially influence you down the road, but that little kind of chance encounter led to a five-year medical writing career in an agency. So yeah, it it was a great opportunity and I guess kind of moral of my story is that it is it, maybe it still is kind of the standard model where a lot of people are still their advisors are still kind of really just thinking about the academic path, but there's so many more opportunities out there for PhD students that have nothing to do with being at the bench. And even my position now, it's just it's kind of the flip side of what I was doing at the agency. I was writing training materials. Now I'm on the on the pharma side and I'm reviewing the training materials to make sure that they're compliant and and so forth and medically accurate. And what's funny is that a lot of the people in my role are pharmacists, so even still, I'm kind of this odd duckling out in a kind of in a good way of bringing new perspective to it, but there aren't as many PHD's. But what that also tells me is that this is an underappreciated area where PHD's who do have these interests could potentially end up.

Lois Dankwa

Yeah, and that's the thing it's great to be able to kind of notice how people that are maybe using the degree that you have in perhaps unorthodox ways. And I love that you mentioned the kind of exploration process you took to figure out what would be a good fit for you knowing that you didn't have the the right exposure when you were looking. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about kind of, yes, you mentioned kind of the chance encounter that occurred, but kind of I'd love to hear more about what that was like, how you prepared yourself to have conversations you didn't really know that you would end up having cause you just been with scientists doing bench stuff the whole time.

Amy Weil

Yeah, it's funny. So, I I guess I would seek out those conversations. So, the first thing was when I when I hit that third-year realization of, you know, maybe I don't want to be at the bench all the time. I had reached out to a professor from my undergrad and said hey, do you know anybody who does anything with writing in science cause he was he was still scientist. Well, he was teaching at Cornell at the time, and I said, you know, do you have any prior students who, who went into medical writing or science writing? And he had given me some names and I talked to someone, but it was still way too premature for me to be, like, actually doing anything about it, but it at least gave me like this knowledge. All right, I'm taking a step forward. I might not be taking a leap forward, and I still don't know what I'm doing. But I'm thinking about it in the back of my mind. So, then that gave me a little bit of confidence when I went to, you know, my thesis committee for your like annual review, and bringing it up to them and I I know when I first mentioned it to them, there was a very mixed reaction cause some were a little disappointed that I wouldn't want to go the academic route and then others were very supportive. Like Ohh I know so and so who's an editor at this journal. Maybe you can talk to them. So, it was finding kind of those opportunities where it was natural to be talking about career development or like the next steps and to have the confidence, I guess to just know like this is what I want to do. So why not ask for it? Which doesn't come naturally to me, but you know it is really important. You're the only one who's going to be able to know what you want. So, I thought that was a good step forward so, but the irony is that I still did then go do a postdoc because I wasn't ready really to make that leap yet. I didn't fully figure out what I had wanted and so I did do the standard postdoc route and during the postdoc that's when I started reaching out to there was this editorial service, a free service that postdocs could do. So primarily, they were helping English as a second language postdocs help revise their manuscripts or various pieces for free and it would just give you, you know, an an additional mentorship opportunity, work on your own editing skills and things like that. But, joining that group then led me to getting that side hustle as a medical editor because a girl who had been in that group emailed the group, hey, is anyone interested in a paid position and it's just kind of those little baby steps moving towards the direction I wanted to go. And while I'm not an editor today, it exposed me more to medical writing. That was more of a journal writing and and and editing but still it it pushed me more into the right direction. And so, once I could put that on my resume, it definitely helped once I wanted to go out and actually apply for, for medical writing jobs, like ohh, you've been a medical editor. That's fantastic. It made such a difference in my interviews, even though it wasn't really experience in the job I would be doing it still was close enough that it it gave them confidence that I'm a good writer, that I have a strong command of the English language, and obviously that I knew science well enough, not even my own research, but other people's research where I could just get a manuscript and understand it to the point where I could edit it. So, all of those small little steps I feel like walked me towards the right place, even if they weren't necessarily straight steps, they still pushed me in the right direction.

Lois Dankwa

Right, that's such a good point about. Well, you mentioned how some of the stuff that got you to even that, that transition moment that got you to now it forced you to kind of exercise outside of how you typically would do things. And I'm curious then what is like or what are some lessons that you learned from learned about yourself from kind of stepping outside of your comfort zone?

Amy Weil

I think one of the big things is and especially for students who went straight from high school to undergrad to Graduate School, a lot of people in the, you know, in Graduate School are, you know, highly intelligent, achievement motivated, maybe got A's their entire life, and you might feel this feeling that you know, if I don't go for that academic route, I'm somehow failing, right. Like that's the prize position that we should all be, you know, striving for. And it's just not true. You can do you can excel in whatever job you you're happy with, and even if that's stay at home being a mom, you know that's if you're impassioned by that, that's what you should do. Your PhD will never go to waste. Never. So, I think it's part of it was just kind of coming to terms with that too, like just because I don't go the academic route doesn't mean I, you know, doesn't mean I couldn't hack it or something. And I think that's something that a lot of PhD students probably struggle with if they're thinking about these alternative careers, especially if they they've always been the person to, you know, get straight A's or, you know, be top of the class type of thing. You're not letting anyone down by being yourself.

Lois Dankwa

Yeah, and that's certainly a challenge, being in perhaps high achieving spaces or just around a lot of people that are doing a lot of things. It seems like reminding yourself not to compete or compare yourself to them when it feels like that was the criteria to be in this space.

Amy Weil

Yes, it's it's so true, a like an oxymoron.

Lois Dankwa

So, I am curious if in addition to lessons that you learned, is there any advice that has stuck out that kind of continues to like that has helped you through getting to this moment?

Amy Weil

You know, I think anyone who's been through a PhD program probably has been through, you know, the the times, the long stretches and when the data is not coming out or, you know, maybe your writing is hitting a wall or something and kind of just thinking back to those moments when you were successful, you know, everyone who who's made it this far, you you have achieved something. You don't necessarily have to graduate first or be the first to publish. Everyone's path in a PhD program is so singular and and the circumstances around it are so different that I think it like kind of like you said, you know, just don't try to compare your journey to someone else’s and ultimately, you're the one who's going to have to live with the choices. So, you know do the things that make you happy and and realize that any skills that you have are going to be useful no matter what path you take. As I said, I’m a PhD in a PharmD dominated department, but my experiences have enriched our department because I just come at things from a different angle and my, you know, my background as having been in an agency and having done medical editing, I can bring those things to the table in my daily job and it, you know, people around me sometimes like, wow, that's really, I never would have thought of that. That's great insight. And it's just because of the experiences that I've had. And again, it's my singular path that that's made me what I am in my position.

Lois Dankwa

And it's what you're saying is reminding me that so much of kind of doctoral work and just research in general is identifying the gap in the literature and filling that gap with your research. But it can be easy to forget that also then when thinking about whatever professional direction you want to go in what gap are you feeling right. And it's not just about your project.

Amy Weil

Yeah, that's a great point.

Lois Dankwa

I'm curious then as my last question, what inspires you right now?

Amy Weil

Oh well, I have a really great family. I have two super adorable kids that put a smile on my face every day and a great husband. I actually met my husband at Hopkins. I came a summer early and did an early rotation and we got set up. So, he was finishing up his PhD program and I was just starting so that was that was the beginning of our little family. But yeah, my kids are five and four now and yeah, they just I guess they just make me want to be a better person which is which is a great thing.

Lois Dankwa

I love that. I love everything from how you met your husband, to your cute little family. 

Amy Weil

Thank you. 

Lois Dankwa

Amy, it's been so wonderful chatting today and hearing a little bit about kind of your perspective, your experiences and all the things that got you to this moment today. Thanks so much.

Amy Weil

Oh, thank you for having me Lois and it was great meeting you too.