Dr. Heather Benz, PhD in Biomedical Engineering | Associate Director, Clinical Research at Johnson & Johnson

In this episode, we discuss Heather’s passion for mentorship and the ways her involvement with the Thread program has uplifted her and contributed to her success, how her dedication to patient impact led her to pursue roles working with robotics in the healthcare industry rather than in academia, and her take on the necessity of taking risks to reach your full potential.

Hosted by Michael Wilkinson

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

Transcript

Michael Wilkinson 

Hello! Everyone! I'm co-host, Michael. Wilkinson, 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 Heather Benz. She received her PhD in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins in 2014, and is currently an associate director of Clinical Research at Johnson and Johnson. Heather, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you here.

Heather Benz 

Thank you. So exciting to be chatting with you.

Michael Wilkinson 

So, I'm a member of the robotics program here at Hopkins. I'm surrounded by folks in medical robotics. My PI Noah Cowan actually used to, or knows your former PI Nitish Thakor. So, there's a lot of shared interests. Your previous research to my understanding was more focused on like prosthetics and like relational upper limb motor control things along that lines. How much of what you currently work on relates to things that you used to research? And where are the what overlaps kind of interest and excite you about what you're doing now, and what lack of overlap also, I guess excites you?

Heather Benz 

It has been such a cool journey, I have to say, from PhD to FDA to where I am now at Johnson and Johnson. Everything applies and nothing applies. Because yes, I was, I was doing decoding, you know, machine learning for control of a robotic back when I was a robotic arm back when I was at Hopkins. I took that to FDA and wanted to make a smoother path to market for devices that help patients, right? We were doing all kinds of really exciting upstream research in the clinic and I wanted to make sure that it would have an eventual impact. So that's what I did well at FDA. Today, even though I am leading the clinical research on a robotics program and AI is baked into a lot of what industry is developing today, I'm much more focused on the patient outcomes. I have really driven to patient impact and I leverage all the tools. And when it takes a team of 1,000 to get a really innovative project to market, it's important to be able to speak everyone's lingo and bring that background knowledge. But today I'm really focused on clinical impact. 

Michael Wilkinson 

So, that’s really interesting. You mentioned like the focus now being more on patient outcomes because I think this measured in a variety of ways like whether it's like the ergonomics of the device or, you know, report and satisfaction. So, what does patient outcomes look like for you, and what you're doing and like, what are the kinds of things that you're looking at when you're looking at like patient outcomes? 

Heather Benz 

I know there's so many, there's so many different technologies, right? When I was at FDA working closely on on upper limb robotics which actually looked at patient preferences. And what do patients want from their prostheses? The big one, when everyone's driving towards dexterity, everyone said, comfort, please, and help me with my pain, please, which actually it was really cool, because at the time Darbo was funding sensory feedback which can help with amputee pain. So, it that was, that was one part of the world. Now, when I work more in surgical robotics, and I work, for example, with the medical device innovation consortium, this public-private partnership on augmented and virtual reality devices across the continuum from surgery to everything else they can be used on. We think about critical ones, patient safety, patients are are able to return to their activities, are, have successful procedures, and we think about things like efficiency and costs, and a health care system that works for everyone, a healthcare system where surgeons across the country can train so that everyone comes up to a baseline standard of care. The picture is very broad, and it is something where the patient has to remain at the center. But we can build out layers of value around the patient.

Michael Wilkinson 

So as someone who is maybe more on the cutting edge of your field in terms of like the kind of research that your company does where do you see your field going in the next handful of years? And what are some of the major challenges that maybe slow progress down in a way?

Heather Benz 

So, I love that we actually, we bring in speakers from Academia too to see in the world of surgery robotics what's being published in, you know Nature and Science. Obviously, AI is super exciting, but so is just the fact that robots are proliferating, right? We now have 10 different takes on what is real value for hospital systems and ultimately for patients. Is it something that can be adapted to many different procedures? Is it something where you're bringing a deep sense of quality and cost savings? And being deeply integrated into the hospital system? There's so many different angles you can look at it. What I love is that everyone's brainstorming. You see surgeons’ eyes light up when they talk about putting on an augmented reality headset. You see there you see the engineers’ eyes light up when you talk about getting the robot to suture all by itself. And then, you see patients’ eyes light up actually, when they think about having a procedure that that has way fewer complications than in the past. We've seen those complication rates driving down over the decades, and it's not just our robots that are doing it. It's MDs and surgeons and nurses and everyone paying attention to patient care and saying that if we if we put in best practices, if we work with technology, if the technology helps us implement known best practices, then we are doing better and better by our patients and getting more standardized.

Michael Wilkinson 

So as as a director that oversees, you know, these teams, I wonder, you know the engineers maybe have things that excite them. The clinicians have things that excite them. So how do you kind of manage everyone’s expectations and desires around the things that from their own background to their maybe they're emphasizing they're prioritizing to kind of get this nice unified pathway out?

Heather Benz 

Yeah stepwise, right? It's that's what I think I learned when doing our early development at Hopkins, and it continues today. You iterate and you get better. You need to have this short-term win. I think PhD students will recognize that years without wins can be a problem.

Michael Wilkinson 

Yup!

Heather Benz 

So, you've got to have a portfolio that includes short term wins. But also, long range vision. Business world is full of jargon and cliches, and future back is all the rage now. So, we look at where do we think the world can be in 10 years, and I love that when you do that exercise you can get input from everyone visionaries, patients, you know everyone along the way, and then what do we want the world to look like in 10 years? And how can we have a cadence where we're reaching it step by step? We're never gonna be perfect the first time. So, we plan to improve and improve and improve. 

Michael Wilkinson 

So, it's interesting. You mentioned these like short term wins, and you alluded to this idea, which is true in science a lot that sometimes the science doesn't work out, right. And sometimes, you know, especially as a PhD student if you're starting something from scratch, it might not work out at the end of your 2 years, right? So, how are the ways that in a way, even if the science doesn't necessarily work out in this one specific pathway that you're still kind of getting those wins along the ways and getting these constants? As I imagine, industry kind of demands a little bit more because there's an expectation of productivity and continuing to produce good products for folks.

Heather Benz 

100% 100%. I think we've seen in the recent economic, you know, turn that products need to make money, right. Like you need to be meeting a need such that your customers see they they want it, and they're gonna pay you for it. Which means, and I think this is a process I had to learn over many years, including over the course of my PhD, your wins should be closer to where you are right now than you think, right? Why can you do really well today? You should be implementing that immediately to the best of your abilities. What do you think is a stretch? Okay, now cut it in half. Now deliver that really well tomorrow. And then, and then importantly, take risk. Risk taking is so important. Be able to fail forward, right? When you fail, you are learning. If you're not failing, you're not taking enough risk. You got your safe bets. Okay, fine. But but why wouldn't you want to grow and reach as far as you can reach? You're only gonna do that if you're stretching yourself, but also stretching your teams, stretching what are the capabilities today? And I, I think just engineering and our projects have gotten so complex that even if we do fail, we end up with some things on the shelf that we can take down as needed that are pretty useful designs, right, or pretty cool science that's going to be part of the future even if it's not part of this one thing today. 

Michael Wilkinson 

And you learn a lot of skills along the way as you're failing too, which I think every every PhD student is familiar with it. It never works the first time you do anything. But you learn a lot of skills as you kind of iterate through your failures, and continue to push forward so it's really cool to see how that's developing in industry and developing in your experience at J & J. So, you've had a lot of experiences postgraduation. You talked about, you know the FDA. You were also a part-time lecturer at Hopkins for a few years during your time at the FDA. And now you're J & J obviously. So, I like to kind of maybe walk through that timeline a bit little bit. So, from PhD to the FDA like what was that transition like? And what led you working to the FDA?

Heather Benz 

Yeah. No, I did come out of this crazy, exciting PhD, where we were, you know, like whenever I talk to people at parties, and they say, what do you do? Like decoding people's brain signals, right? I mean, it doesn't get cooler than that. They're controlling robots. And like I said I wanted to get closer to patient impact. I love the science, and now I wanted to drive it into clinical use and and helping people. And FDA best kept secret has a research office, has multiple actually cause FDA, right, is divided into drugs and devices and everything else. But I'm a device person today. So, their device office at a research lab with postdoc openings that was collaborating with Darpa on the same programs that had funded my PhD. I said, this is crazy.

Michael Wilkinson 

Oh, wow!

Heather Benz 

These are people who think day in and day out about what does this take to get this to market? And the researchers at FDA they're job is not to lower the bar. They say we're not lowering the bar for safe and effective. We're raising the floor, right. We’re we're putting into place everything that you need to be able to get to safe and effective devices for patients. It just sounded like a really cool opportunity to have a big impact, and you do. You have a really big impact there. It's a small but mighty team in the device center, like, you know, compared with the size of drugs. And they are so innovative, and they are described as the Wild West sometimes, right. They’re I mentioned getting patient input. They are. They do this whole software, all these software pilots to try to get AI software everything to patients faster. And that was just really cool. At the same time, I did see it as my degree after my PhD. I really went there and planned to train and to learn all I could, so that it would then be possible to go to the products and bring them to market. Along the way you mentioned that Hopkins lecture. I love to teach, and our collaboration during my PhD with the Hopkins applied physics lab I did some connections with that just fantastic research team there in prosthetics. So, when they were doing a BCI course, I jumped in to provide, you know, a little bit of my expertise and keep my keep my programming sharp. That after ended when I saw this role at J & J, where J & J is one of those gigantic companies that has global impact right on millions and millions of people. And I saw that they are now working to bring more robots to surgical applications, and said, this is a field that's going to explode. We are at the point today where a lot of publications have gone from robotic surgery is non-inferior to minimally invasive you know manual surgery. Now shifting to where are their improvements? And and right now it's in the most complex surgeries, right? Or the surgeries where they're nerves that you are trying really hard to spare. And so, your patient quality of life outcomes might be a bit better. We're now shifting to when you layer on digital teaching, learning capabilities, can can you improve, you know, standard of care? That is the place where I wanted to be, and that has been a wild ride. It is charting new territory.

Michael Wilkinson 

Yeah, it sounds like a very wild ride. I A) was unaware that the FDA did that kind of research. That's super super cool to know. But I also wonder the kind of job-hunting piece of it. I'm sure a lot of people like who listen in are like, oh, man, it's crazy like you worked for the FDA, and then you went to Johnson and Johnson, which are these two really big organizations, even though that team might have been like the small little Wild West team, right. So, maybe also talk through a little bit of you know, what was it like, as far as the job-hunting piece of it when you first transition into the FDA? And then also importantly you had been at this the with the FDA for quite some time, and now this option of Johnson and Johnson comes up, and how the job hunting for that went a little bit, or the job transition for that went?

Heather Benz 

Sure, with FDA, I honestly, you will maybe get in some of your lectures the occasion regulatory, like, here's the 5, 10 K pathway, here's it. Anyway, it seemed really boring whenever I came across it in grad school, but honestly, one of the master’s students in my labs had gone to FDA, and so I sent him a note, and I was like, is it as boring as it sounds? Is, I mean, I love the impact of public health potential impact there, but like, do you fall asleep at your desk every day? And when he said no, and then said, let me tell you about the research arm. It just went from there. You know I was considering other options in consulting in defense in healthcare. But the other thing I've kinda tried to do is go where there's a real need. And this felt like the area where there was a real need. But I will say like I scattered my resume everywhere, and just saw what came in, and this was this was very interesting. It was just very different. Then the transition in J & J was hard. I loved my FDA Home base, like, you know, when you spend 5 years somewhere 4 or 5 years somewhere, you it becomes home. You got your buddies. But I knew that it was time to grow and do something new. So, what did the job hunt look like? I honestly, and this is, if I say, give to every single human in the world, in the workforce, my bosses at the FDA, who had come from industry, said interview every year, like, no matter what just keep yourself in the habit and see what's out there and understand what the world is like at least once a year. So, I had been. I'd been I checked in with a contract research organization. They run clinical trials. They didn't strike me as the particular group that support teams, or that have both the human part and the work part worked out. You know I'd considered some companies that would use more of my machine learning background. And they were exciting and disruptive sometimes, but also didn't, same thing, I didn't see the human impact. You can see the business impact real quick. But I did wanna drive towards that human impact. So when this popped up, it just seemed like the perfect fit, a job where I could. I guess the other advice I got from someone I was even considering consumer products and like dental products at one point, because of a connection in my network. And when I was talking with them that guy I really liked his recommendation, you know don't just do your best. You know, put yourself in a position to get the job, right, with your skills background, resume, network, whatever. Put yourself in a position to be really good at the job. I read this job description, and I looked at what I've been doing at the FDA and my background from Hopkins, I said, yeah, I think I would know what it takes to to knock this out of the park, and it worked out. It was just the right team. I actually, so I'm in Cincinnati now, working on the robot and I didn't want to leave FDA, right. So, I came to interview here in person, right before Covid, when all in-person interviews stopped. I came to interview here in person. I was like I don't want this job. I don't want this job. I don't want this job. And then I talked to everybody, and it was the best team with the best people, doing the coolest things, and I was like, shoot. I got to take this job.

Michael Wilkinson 

So, the winters didn't scare you away? I'm from Cleveland, so like the winters didn’t scare you away?

Heather Benz 

I did my undergrad in Cleveland. It was the worst. I love Cleveland and the people and the place. 

Michael Wilkinson 

Just not the temperature?

Heather Benz 

I hated the 10 feet of snow, but I'm 4 hours south of there, so it's a little better.

Michael Wilkinson 

Oh, yeah. So, this kind of it's a really interesting strategy this like continual interviewing, and for you was it that these opportunities would just pop up? Would you kind of leverage your network to like find and seek out these opportunities? Like, I think you kind of colloquial, said like, oh, the Johnson and Johnson, one just popped up? Did it? I imagine it didn’t just like literally pop up.

Heather Benz 

It popped up on LinkedIn. Speaking of AI changing the world right, LinkedIn knows when you're looking at certain types of jobs and it like scoops them along towards you. So yeah, no, it was one of those ones where I had hunted around in clinical research. I hunted around in robotics and digital and LinkedIn knew me and passed me this one. 

Michael Wilkinson 

That's so funny. 

Heather Benz 

Yes, take advantage.

Michael Wilkinson 

Yeah, cause I think that I think that's something that you know, folks kind of also struggle with in this idea of like, okay, I know, I want to be on the job market. I know I want to search but like how do I even begin searching? And how do I even begin leveraging my connections in a way? 

Heather Benz 

Yes, and putting it out there, right? I'd love to learn more about what you do. I’d love to learn more about where you were. You know, can we talk? Just these super effective job seekers. I was more casual about it over time, but I've seen some super effective ones in my time who, you know, go to that informational interview and then connect with you on LinkedIn. And then, while they're chatting with you, ask for a couple of more connections, and soon enough they’ve wended their way right through an entire multimillion-dollar corporation, and they know all the departments and all the people and who’s hiring. I can't highlight enough work on cool projects, even if it's, for me, even if it's not just the super focus main goal. I do tend to have a couple like other things going on. I mentioned MDIC. I like to help people, and I find that when you help people they also like to help you. It's not an intentional outcome for me, but but I really have benefited from being curious and open to trying new things.

Michael Wilkinson 

That's wonderful and it's a wonderful piece of advice for folks who want to figure out their own network. I'll pivot a little bit, which is, I had seen that you have been with Thread for like 13 years, and for folks who are listening and I don't know Thread is basically an organization that links mentors from various like fields and levels to local high schoolers. At least, I know, in Baltimore's local high schoolers. I’m not sure in different cities they do different things, but I'm very passionate about advocacy and mentorship myself. So, I really admire that quite a bit. Can you kind of talk through some of the work that you're doing with Thread, and where you hope to see Thread go over the next couple of years?

Heather Benz 

Thread is my favorite thing. This part of this podcast and project has me sending in a couple of pictures which I need to do this week, and the first thing I did when I knew I needed a picture was I went to my Thread inbox. I actually have a whole email devoted to Thread with thousands of emails across the decade plus. And I and I searched through it for pictures because that I knew that had to be a core piece of what I what I talked about. And Thread is my favorite thing coming out of Baltimore because it's about learning from everybody. It's about never giving up that failing forward thing that I learned came from Thread. It's about being all in. Like every way in which I'm doing well today is because I learned this from a bunch of Baltimore high schoolers who who work with Hopkins students and overcome any challenges they're facing in high school and beyond. So, I started in Thread, I came to Hopkins really excited to start with Thread. They had actually come to my visiting class, and let us know what they were. And I was like oh, oh, well, obviously, I gotta go to Hopkins now. So when they started recruiting my during the course of my first year, though I mentioned, you know, wanting to help and going where there's need. And it seemed like they were getting, they were getting a ton of people to volunteer like hands on going to tutoring sessions with high school students and things like that. I said, where do you guys need help? Like, where are your gaps? And they actually said like, can you write grants for us? And can you also talk to the teachers at the school and help them help our students? You know, so I'd like buddy up with students and go to their teachers and say, like, hey, what's the homework this week and stuff like that? And then I also started talking to the millionaires of Baltimore about why this was such an awesome program, and at the time the first reason we saw it was an awesome program was because the high school graduation rate in Baltimore city is hit hard by just like all the challenges that that high school students are facing there. And meanwhile our program’s high school graduation rate like blows it out the water. And we work with some of the students facing the biggest challenges. So that's a really big success. But then, as it grew, we realized that we are building a network of relationships across Baltimore that's helping a lot of people. When Covid hit and we started reaching out, and everything was shutting down, and we wanted to understand what was affecting our families and Thread, it was like it was actually food like, and we partnered with organizations to bring food to a lot of people which was an under understood need at the time. So, anyway, because I got into grant writing because I was doing all the like background stuff I joined the board of directors, where I have been for a long time, long, long time. I still sit on the board. I'm among along with the 2 founders who still run it, I'm like the token, you know, she's been here forever. She's not given up on us. Let's not give up on her. I have seen Thread grow so much. When I talked to my husband, I talk about our budget, which is multiple. But the kids we’re helping. We are bringing in our biggest class. We're helping. We're, you know, getting into helping hundreds of students every year, partnering with hundreds of volunteers across Baltimore every year, and have people in other cities clamoring for how are we gonna help their cities? So, it is a great place to be where we have to figure out now, how do we go deep in Baltimore? Make Baltimore, you know, the place we want it, we all, students and Hopkins, and everyone wants it to be? And how do we make widespread impact as well? You know, can we have curricula? Can we have training? Can we have lots and lots of options?

Michael Wilkinson 

So, you speak very passionately of your love of mentorship and teaching, so I have to ask the question which is at any point did you consider going the academic route kinda during your PhD? I know you did a little bit of guest lecturing to kind of maybe satiate that. But what led, you know, what was your kind of initial career plans when you started your PhD? Was academia in mind? And what led you to sticking with the industry? Considering how much like I could tell you really love like teaching and mentorship and things like that.

Heather Benz 

For sure I contemplated Academia, and I talked to folks I know, and who had graduated, you know, slightly ahead of me, and were in academic positions. There were a few reasons that I did not go that route. I wouldn't say the primary one, but a substantial one is I am a mom, and I knew I wanted to be a mom of at least a few. So, I've got 3 and I knew that even when I was in grad school, and I knew stats around, you know, neonatal health and age. And I said, you know what I'm gonna start having kids in my late twenties. So, I so I did. I had a baby before I graduated, because it was great time to do it. Luckily Nitish was super supportive. I still remember his big smile when I talked to him about it. So that means that I was bonding with babies around the same time when frankly, tenure track puts a lot of upfront pressure on you at a time when it's not always convenient for women, right. There were other considerations, too, though. I do love science and research and cutting edge. I saw my ability to have the most impact in industry. I guess it is. It's a balance of how do I reach patients with what we know today? 

Michael Wilkinson 

Right and the scalability piece of it too to a degree in the industry. 

Heather Benz 

Right, academia is obviously critical. That's where all the innovation starts. But then there's a whole path that innovation has to take to land with people who need it. And that's just where I saw myself.

Michael Wilkinson 

Wonderful it's been an absolute pleasure talking with you just because I'm watching time, and we're getting a little bit short on time I'll wrap it up, but I'm happy to follow up afterwards with my own slew of personal questions for you offline. But yeah, so I'll end it with this. You've talked through your kind of journey and the things that you're really passionate about, what inspires you now in the things that you're doing, whether that's in your work life or your personal life, or whatever that is, what's your source of inspiration?

Heather Benz 

I gotta say I've been really lucky to be able to partner with patients a lot, even during grad school I was actually doing human studies, so we'd wheel our little cart into the neurology clinic. And still my favorite memory there was we were able to bring our Wii. We had a Nintendo Wii in order to develop some of our like signal processing stuff, and there was a little guy in the clinic who was really bored during his one week of monitoring in the clinic and we were able to bring that to him to play with, and he loved it. And obviously the patients inspired me to go work at the FDA, where I had the best time on a project working with Parkinson's patients to to get their input on clinical trial design, right. Like, what do you want really? They were so excited. I still have dinner with them sometimes. We called ourselves Team Awesome, and the energy they brought amidst their own struggle with a, you know, lethal disease was amazing. And then today, we have impact lung cancer where I've sat in the FDA and have heard patients come to advisory panel meetings and talk about the impacts of lung cancer on their life. And like, you gotta keep driving towards a better world man with with what they're facing today. But then a variety of other diseases that are not yet on label, that when you see people's eyes light up and they see what's coming, and they are ready to dive in and help, even though they're the ones in pain it like keeps you going, keeps you getting out of bed every day.

Michael Wilkinson 

That's wonderful. I think that's a very wonderful source of inspiration, and I think we all need to do make the world a little bit better is a great point to end on. So thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, and I look forward to speaking with you in future.

Heather Benz 

Thank you. Thank you very much.