Fred Hutch Cancer Center grows new scientists at every age from elementary school students who extract DNA from smooshed strawberries to high school and college interns who learn basic lab skills to postdoctoral researchers who run their own research projects.
At every level of education, Fred Hutch encourages participants from historically marginalized and underrepresented groups to make the leap to the next level.
The leap from college to graduate school has become a chasm in recent years, however, as PhD programs have become increasingly competitive, favoring applicants who already have extensive lab experience and even authorship on published scientific studies as undergraduates.
That kind of experience often is out of reach for students from underrepresented groups for many reasons including the size, location and resources of the colleges where they earned degrees.
But this summer, recent college graduates reported to their labs at Fred Hutch to begin training in the first full year of a new program that will increase their chances of admission to graduate school and a career in biomedical science.
The Fred Hutch Postbaccalaureate Scholar Program provides recent college graduates $50,000 a year and benefits as full-time Fred Hutch employees. The salaries are funded by the principal investigators who want postbacs in their labs. The job is like the role of a research technician, but with an expanded emphasis on career guidance and preparation for further studies.
One of those new postbacs, Angie Aguirre-Tobar, is looking for a greater sense of purpose at Fred Hutch than she felt after graduating from Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
“I didn’t have that passion in me,” she said. “This postbac program really presented an opportunity to find it and also integrate values that I have outside of basic life sciences, which include diversity, equity and inclusion.”
She is one of four postbacs working with Nasa Sinnott-Armstrong, PhD, in their lab within the Herbold Computational Biology Program of the Public Health Sciences Division, which uses both computational and experimental methods to better understand gene-environment interactions.
“As a scientist, I want to be able to create a change that isn’t just a new discovery on this microorganism in a cell. I want it to be: how do we make science more inclusive and relevant to the communities that I am a part of?" Aguirre-Tobar said. "This postbac program and being in Dr. Nasa’s lab has given me that opportunity.”
Scholars in the program receive a salary for the 40 hours a week they spend in a lab, and they are paid another $5,000 a year for additional training and mentorship, currently funded through generous philanthropic support. Some of the participants helped launch the program last year, some have been referred by Fred Hutch faculty, and 20 of the scholars who started in July were selected from 200 applicants in the program’s first national search.
About 40 scholars are working in labs this year, but going forward, Fred Hutch will recruit new classes of about 30 each year.
The program defines diversity broadly, said program manager Kyle Shea.
“It’s not only historically excluded populations in terms of race and ethnicity, it’s also social class and economic status,” Shea said. “Because we have more flexibility in who we can hire, we can look for people who maybe came from small liberal arts colleges who only have a summer or two of research experience.”
The director of Fred Hutch’s postbac program, James Alvarez, PhD, saw the value of a postbac experience when he was a professor at Duke University involved in the graduate admissions process. He noticed that applicants who went through the postbac program at nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill stood out.
“We would get these really fantastic applicants who had gone to UNC’s postbac program and oftentimes these were folks from underrepresented backgrounds,” said Alvarez, who is a cancer cell biologist. “They went to colleges where they didn’t have an opportunity to do research in undergraduate for whatever reason.”
Alvarez arrived at Fred Hutch in 2021, and the following year he participated in a faculty leadership academy where he proposed a postbac program for Fred Hutch. His timing couldn’t have been better.
He was paired with a mentor, Sue Biggins, PhD, who directs the Basic Sciences Division.
Biggins had already been laying the groundwork for a postbac program for a year with Susan Parkhurst, PhD, who holds the Mark Groudine Endowed Chair for Outstanding Achievements in Science and Service, and Nina Salama, PhD, senior vice president, education, who holds the Dr. Penny E. Petersen Memorial Chair for Lymphoma Research.
They saw that the pipeline bringing more people from underrepresented populations into scientific research was leakiest between college and graduate school.
Together with Alvarez, they brought the postbac program to fruition and hired Shea, who was the graduate program advisor for the University of Washington neuroscience program, to manage it.
Shea had observed how much more competitive graduate admissions have become in the five years he reviewed applications at UW.
It used to be that a summer internship in a lab was good enough to qualify.
“Now it’s a full year of lab experience and three letters of recommendation from investigators who personally observed that lab work,” Shea said. “It’s hard to get three letters if you didn’t start research your first or second year in college.”
Like many scientific institutions, Fred Hutch hires research technicians right out of college to assist with basic lab tasks, but those techs don't have the same kind of peer community that graduate students and postdocs rely on to help each reach their professional goals.
“This is the one career stage that Fred Hutch was missing,” Shea said. “Most people would just get research tech roles and work there for two or three years.”
The postbaccalaureate scholar program began last year with a “soft launch” aimed at giving research techs already at Fred Hutch who wanted to advance their careers the experience they would need to be more competitive.
Virology expert Daniel Blanco-Melo, PhD, had the perfect candidate in mind: Mónica Padilla-Gálvez.
He had recruited Padilla-Gálvez to Fred Hutch after she impressed him during a Zoom class about the COVID-19 virus that he taught at his alma mater, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which has been developing a world-class program in genomics.
“We pretty much did the same undergraduate program back in Mexico,” Blanco-Melo said.
But the University of Washington’s Molecular and Cellular Biology Graduate Program requires a year of experience in a U.S.-based laboratory, a common hurdle for international students.
“Knowing these things, for me it was very important to provide a source of opportunities that do not really occur organically,” Blanco-Melo said.
That’s one of the reasons he spearheaded a reciprocal exchange program between students from Mexico and the U.S., including Padilla-Gálvez, who started as a research tech in his lab last year.
“I really, really wanted her to be part of a community,” Blanco-Melo said. “So, when the whole conversation started around the postbacs, I definitely was one of the first to say `yes, please, I do have the perfect applicant.’ I was very pleased when Monica was accepted.”
She started in August 2023 as part of the inaugural class.
“It has really pushed my personal growth in academia,” Padilla-Gálvez said. “It’s basically 101 in how to be an academic.”
About half of last year’s inaugural postbac class went on to graduate school at top-tier research institutions including the University of Washington and Vanderbilt University. Others stayed for a second year, including Padilla-Gálvez.
“In Seattle, I learned that the expectation for graduate programs is to have a research paper publication,” she said.
She is likely to be a named author on three publications before she leaves, Blanco-Melo said.
In February, faculty from all scientific divisions at Fred Hutch interested in hiring postbacs for their labs were invited to provide brief descriptions of available research projects designed to develop a trainee’s capacity to perform independent research.
That was the same month that Yasuhiro Arimura, PhD, started at Fred Hutch in the Basic Sciences division and recognized the opportunity to staff his new lab with candidates selected in a national search.
“He came to our info session," Shea said. "He was asking questions, and he was always on top of the timeline. That’s exactly who we want: people who care about mentorship, people who want scientists who are going to show extreme growth.”
Postbacs choose the labs that interest them, and faculty choose the postbacs they want to mentor.
“We can recruit the people from all over the U.S.,” Arimura said. “We can recruit people who are super motivated.”
Many candidates wanted to work with Arimura, who focuses on understanding the molecular structure of chromatin, the mixture of DNA and DNA-packaging proteins, using cutting-edge techniques.
Most faculty relied on videoconference interviews to choose their postbacs, but Arimura also wanted to meet finalists in person to be sure they would be the right fit.
He paid for finalists to fly to Seattle for a long day of interviews before choosing Priya Digumarti, an Arizona State University graduate, and Jacob Martin, who graduated from the University of Maryland-College Park.
Digumarti, who was born and raised in India, appreciated the opportunity to work with Arimura, a Japanese principal investigator.
“I was seeing so much innovation being done by a PI [principal investigator] who is also international,” Digumarti said. “He’s also not from here, so that was something I was instantly drawn to. From the very initial stages of conversing with him and seeing his lab, it was incredibly evident that he is all about inclusivity and mentoring new people in the field.”
Martin said it’s evident that Fred Hutch has created a community for people at the research tech level of their careers that also welcomes people from historically underrepresented groups.
“They certainly made an effort on both parts,” Martin said. “It’s more diverse than you’re used to seeing in your average undergraduate program.”
Martin had the opportunity to mentor other students at the University of Maryland and he’d like one day to do that again, perhaps in his own lab.
He may get that chance sooner than he thinks. Though they are the newbies this year, Arimura expects Digumarti and Martin will soon be showing others the ropes as his lab expands.
“They will teach the newcomers,” Arimura said.
At full strength, Fred Hutch will train about 60 postbacs a year with 30 starting out and 30 finishing.
“It’s going to be a really vibrant, robust program,” Alvarez said.
Though mostly focused on “wet labs” where students manipulate chemicals, liquids and biological samples, Alvarez hopes eventually to provide more experience in “dry labs” where students work with data, coding and computer models.
The four postbacs working in Sinnott-Armstrong’s lab already are getting a feel for both wet and dry lab work.
“Applying to graduate schools is hard,” said Prasanna Padmanabham, a recent UCLA graduate. “A lot of times they want to see that you are being creative, thinking critically, you’re able to read papers and design experiments and have a wide variety of technical skills. What I really appreciate about this program is that our mentor/PI Dr. Sinnott-Armstrong has been very supportive talking with us and trying to figure out what our interests and goals are and specifically working backwards from there.”
Padmanabham chose Sinnott-Armstrong’s lab because she gets the chance to improve generative artificial intelligence programs in clinical settings, which can reflect racist stereotypes and assumptions baked into the large language datasets used to train the program.
“This lab specializes in skills that I haven’t had an opportunity to apply, Padmanabham said. “This lab is asking a different set of questions that I really haven’t had a chance to explore.”
Ashley Herrera-Agustiniano, who recently graduated from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, is creating an at-home questionnaire for people who have reported tick bites but don’t have symptoms of Lyme disease.
The study will help the lab identify biomarkers that can help with diagnosis in the earliest stages of the tick-borne bacterial infection that causes Lyme disease.
She didn’t get into the graduate school she applied for right out of college, but she hopes she’ll be better prepared when she tries again.
“The work I’m doing here is really important to me, and it will help me down the line,” Herrera- Agustiniano said. “It was the perfect opportunity for me to bridge the gap. I’m planning to do it for two years, so I’ll be applying to grad school or master’s programs next year.”
For his first two years at UC Berkeley, Ranga Bharadwaj studied evolution. After an internship in India with a public health department, he became more interested in epidemiology in his junior year, but he didn’t have enough time left as an undergraduate to make the transition.
“This program helps me make that switch very quickly,” Bharadwaj said.
He hopes to become a physician-scientist, so after putting in a full day in the lab, he also is studying for his Medical College Admission Test.
Sinnott-Armstrong interviewed many postbac candidates and chose four to mentor.
“In the end, I felt like it would be better to have multiple people starting at the same time so that that way they were able to work with each other,” Sinnott-Armstrong said. “I wanted to hire people through the postbac program because I felt like it was an opportunity for them to have a broader community than just my lab.”
Meanwhile, the Brandeis graduate, Aguirre-Tobar has rediscovered her passion for science.
She knows that their work on Lyme disease extends beyond understanding the proteins they study under a microscope.
“Our main focus is trying to make health care and access to health care more equitable for different communities: trans communities, communities of color, low-income communities,” Aguirre-Tobar said. “Being part of this lab is really inspirational.”
The Postbaccalaureate Scholar Program is supported in part by generous donors including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Rich and Karmann Kaplan, the Marco J. Heidner Charitable Trust, and Kathy Surace-Smith and Brad Smith.
John Higgins, a staff writer at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, was an education reporter at The Seattle Times and the Akron Beacon Journal. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, where he studied the emerging science of teaching. Reach him at jhiggin2@fredhutch.org.
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Are you interested in reprinting or republishing this story? Be our guest! We want to help connect people with the information they need. We just ask that you link back to the original article, preserve the author’s byline and refrain from making edits that alter the original context. Questions? Email us at communications@fredhutch.org
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