Elaine Shults

Elaine Shults will be speaking about her life after graduation (deciding to get her Master's in biotechnology), as well as giving a short description of her current company and role, as well as the drug development process with a focus on regulatory affairs and accelerated approvals. Then she'll go into some of her general observations about different biotech career options, and end with some post-grad life advice.

Elaine Shults graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder in Spring 2016 with a Biochemistry major and 3 minors: Dance, Chemistry, and Leadership. Elaine just graduated with her Master's in Biotechnology (w/ a track emphasis in BioBusiness) from Georgetown. She has gained experience in oncology clinical trial operations at AstraZeneca, and technology transfer at a DOE National lab. She will be starting at Genentech on September 11 doing regulatory intelligence in San Francisco until November. Then Elaine will move back to DC after the initial 3 months to continue working in Genentech's regulatory/policy office there, which is one block away from the White House.

Her position essentially consists of assessing the landscape of various pipelines for novel therapeutics, in terms of the types of trials being conducting and what the FDA will want to see for approving these new types of therapies (such as cell therapy, gene therapy, CRISPR-Cas9, etc.).

In her talk hosted by BMES, Elaine will provide a broad overview of what kinds of jobs may exist in biotech/pharma outside of working in the lab. Elaine says that she "know[s] that upon graduating from CU, [she] had no idea about the types of roles there were for scientists who maybe didn't want to continue with research, but wanted to stay close to the innovation."

Elaine Shults will be coming to speak to us on Wednesday, November 1, from 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. The presentation will be held in Duane Physics, Room G125.