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May 16, 2023
In a quickly growing start-up environment, project management tools are essential for success and need to be developed early. Within a year, the R&D team at Variant Bio tripled from five employees to fifteen. When Alyson Barnes joined Variant Bio as R&D employee number five, she was given full creative liberty to establish tracking systems to organize GWAS-backed associations, triage new genetic targets, and note cross-functional team communication. These tools currently are used across teams, by leadership, and contribute to a competitive R&D pipeline. After the development of these tracking systems and tools, the data needs to be maintained and managed on a weekly, if not daily basis. Expanding beyond data organization and tracking, a fast-paced drug discovery role requires project management skills to facilitate internal and external collaborations, lead projects in the lab, generate data by ambitious timelines, manage CROs and external data generation, and communicate scientific results to leadership. The early establishment of these project management tools have contributed to the success of individuals, teams, and the company over the past year.
About our speaker
Alyson Barnes is a Functional Genomics Scientist at Variant Bio, a human genetics biotech start-up in Seattle, WA, with over ten years of biomedical science research spanning industry, academic, and government settings. Her research experience includes determining the mechanism of action of small molecule anti-Ebola therapeutics, analyzing the antibody repertoire of participants in an anti-Ebola vaccine trial, characterizing the molecular mechanism of a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) associated with Chlamydia-induced cytokines, early discovery therapeutics research, and genome-wide CRISPR screening. In her current position at Variant Bio, Alyson uses project management as the project lead on two pre-clinical targets, to organize GWAS-backed associations, contribute to a competitive R&D pipeline, and to facilitate internal and external communications and collaborations. In her day-to-day work life, she uses a variety of project management tools such as Jira, Confluence, and SmartSheets. Alyson received her PhD in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology from Duke University and bachelor’s degrees in biology and philosophy from the University of Virginia. During her time at Duke, she also interned under Kris Herring as Associate Programming Director for the PMCOP with Abraham Nguyen.
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