5 Unique Molecular Biology Jobs You May Not Have Heard Of

When imagining molecular biology jobs, do you find yourself stuck in a single lane? The cultural idea of a “scientist” is often limited to the traditional academic researcher or professor. But there’s a whole world of alternative molecular biology careers out there for those who are passionate about the field. 

The “Speaking of Mol Bio” podcast aims to bring those possibilities to light, with scientist guests of all backgrounds coming together to share their current non-traditional molecular biology jobs and the career journeys that led them there.

In this blog, we introduce 5 molecular biology experts pursuing their diverse passions in government, industry, and beyond. From beer brewing to science writing, each episode’s guest is making their mark on the field.

Molecular biology jobs in the spotlight: 5 experts share their experiences

1. Beer brewing and fermentation science

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Kelly Tretter, Senior Quality Integration Manager, New Belgium Brewing

John Leech, Bioprocessing and Fermentation Technologist, Teagasc Agriculture and Food Development Authority, Republic of Ireland

Industrial bioproduction — which uses living cells to produce key molecular products at scale — is in itself a whole universe of molecular biology jobs. The same basic science can lead you to a key therapeutic that will change someone’s life or to a crisp, balanced glass of beer or wine. The career possibilities are endless.

SOMB guest Kelly Tretter is a trailblazing microbiologist with 30+ years of experience in the male-dominated beer brewing industry. Her day-to-day duties as a quality specialist include monitoring products and materials for safety, quality, and taste, drawing on scientific data to understand which contaminating bacteria might affect a beer’s flavor profile. She uses core molecular biology techniques like PCR, chromatography, and more in her work.   

Yeast is the fermenting organism behind the taste of your favorite beer, but of course there’s a whole, vast world of other microorganisms out there.  

Guest scientist John Leech bridged into fermentation science from evolutionary biology, where he had become interested in the strange longevity of bats (fun fact: they live much longer than their body size suggests they should!) and the role of the microbiome in human health and aging.  

Many consumers try to boost their microbiome diversity through commercial probiotics containing 1-12 strains of bacterial species, says Leech, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to how many species may coexist within natural, healthy microbiomes. Leech is interested in using naturally probiotic-rich, fermented foods to enhance health and is examining which ones can demonstrate reproducible benefits.  

Beyond the food and beverage space, fermentation science also extends into career possibilities in biofuel production, pharmaceutical manufacturing, skincare and cosmetic design, and more.  

Listen to the podcast episodes:

Cheers to molecular Biology – Speaking of Mol Bio

While the end product is quite different, brewing beer is not all that different than many other bioproduction processes used in the lab and industry. Both require skills, experience, and the right QC/QA methods to control and monitor the starting materials and the entire process, all the way to that bottle of suds you might be thirsty for. Steve and Gabriel talk with Kelly Tretter, a microbiologist with more than 30 years of experience in the brewing industry, to discuss brewing at the molecular level. The passion of all three for beer is evident in the conversation, which spans from the basics of the brewing process all the way into the use of molecular methods (e.g., PCR, sequencing, HPLC, GC/MS, ICP, etc.) used to test and monitor starting materials and in-process samples. You’ll leave with an elevated appreciation of what brewers do, and you’ll likely be ready for another pint too! Subscribe to get future episodes as they drop and if you like what you’re hearing we hope you’ll share a review or recommend the series to a colleague.  Visit the Invitrogen School of Molecular Biology to access helpful molecular biology resources and educational content, and please share this resource with anyone you know working in molecular biology.  For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

The value of community – your microbiome – Speaking of Mol Bio

The history of fermented foods like beer, bread, and other foods can be traced back thousands of years to ancient civilizations in China and Egypt. This ancient technology was originally used to preserve foods when refrigeration was not an option. While less common in modern industrialized civilizations, we’re now realizing that fermented foods play a major role in gut microbiome diversity, which is a biomarker for overall health. Join our conversation with Dr. John Leech, Technologist at Teagasc in County Cork, Ireland to learn all about the history and how cutting-edge technologies are being applied to research in food fermentation. John shares his story of how he found this field of research and how he’s now headlong into striving to understand and harness the power of fermented foods. We learn about the complex microbial communities that define and deliver the health benefits of these foods, but we also hear about how this biological complexity makes them inherently irreproducible. Foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, tepache, milk kefir, and water kefir are produced from fermentation, facilitated by complex communities of microbes. Consumption of fermented foods can alter our gut microbiome, which has been shown to affect obesity, inflammation, longevity, and efficacy of drug treatments. John and his team are using qPCR, NGS, and other methods to characterize the microbial consortia used to produce these foods. They’re now working to figure out how to simplify the consortium while still delivering health benefits, all while making the process reproducible and scalable Subscribe to get future episodes as they drop and if you like what you’re hearing we hope you’ll share a review or recommend the series to a colleague.  Visit the Invitrogen School of Molecular Biology to access helpful molecular biology resources and educational content, and please share this resource with anyone you know working in molecular biology.  For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

2. Science writing and marketing  

Jason Amsbaugh, CEO, Samba Scientific

In today’s world, we are fortunate to have more – and more advanced – tools and data than ever before to fuel our collective scientific exploration, innovation, and creation. The downside? We have more tools and data than ever before. It’s a lot to keep track of. 

Science writers, marketers, and communicators help connect knowledge to power, linking the right tools and data to the right audiences who could benefit from them.  

Life science marketers like guest Jason Amsbaugh work with industry-leading companies to increase awareness of solutions like instruments, reagents, and services among customers who are facing a problem that these new approaches might address.  

This work – which can span the gamut of skills from writing, strategizing, analyzing, designing, and more – often requires technical expertise, so that marketers can fully understand workflow pain points and possible solutions. To effectively communicate to their audience via whitepapers, brochures, blogs, explanatory videos, and more, marketers benefit from scientific training that helps them engage with customers in peer-to-peer conversations.   

Beyond marketing agencies, science communicators and writers can also work in government, academia, PR, journalism, and industry.  

Listen to the podcast episode:

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Scientific marketing in the century of the biotech revolution – Speaking of Mol Bio

Most scientists start their education and careers with a vision of working in the lab to discover great things and drive innovation. However, we don’t all end up loving the actual lab work portion of science. What non-lab career options exist to utilize molecular biology knowledge and skills? Well, according to our guest, Jason Amsbaugh, Founder and CEO of Samba Scientific, the career options are far more plentiful than you may think. Scientific marketing, according to Jason, is one such role that is all about understanding the science, first and foremost, but it’s also about effective communication. Essentially, he and his team have to balance technical knowledge with creativity to understand a wide variety of client products and services, uncover the core benefits of those products and services, and then develop marketing content that holds water when put in front of scientists who are, according to Jason, “skeptical” by nature. Our conversation covers Jason’s own career path, current trending technologies, the use of AI in both science and marketing, ethics in scientific marketing, and more. If you’ve ever wondered about what roles exist outside of the lab and how to move your career in that direction, this episode is for you. If you’re happy in your lab-based career but want to have a bit more faith in those selling you the products you use, this episode is also for you! Visit our virtual lab: www.thermofisher.com//molbiovirtuallab Subscribe to get future episodes as they drop and if you like what you’re hearing we hope you’ll share a review or recommend the series to a colleague.  Visit the Invitrogen School of Molecular Biology to access helpful molecular biology resources and educational content, and please share this resource with anyone you know working in molecular biology.  For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

3. Food safety and biosecurity

Beverly Wood, Molecular Diagnostics Lab Supervisor, North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services

Food safety and biosecurity is another large field that addresses the more insidious members of the global microbiome – disease-causing agents and toxins.  

On the human health side, molecular biologists can serve as infectious disease experts monitoring disease risk and spread via molecular diagnostics. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, molecular biologists have been key in developing tests and treatments and in surveilling wastewater for SARS-CoV-2 virus levels.  

Some molecular biologists become biosafety experts helping to deliver safe facilities, trainings, and best practices for handling dangerous pathogens, while others pursue national security policymaking with their deep scientific understanding.  

On the side of food safety and security, scientists like guest and public servant Beverly Wood work to protect our food, economic, and health systems by monitoring livestock and food supplies for contamination, illness and potentially zoonotic diseases like avian and swine flus, chronic wasting disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, foodborne illnesses, and more.  

Biologists in this space can also explore high-level food system resilience to pandemics, climate change, invasive pests, and more. These efforts often begin at the molecular level, such as using genetic engineering to develop more resistant plants, engineer remediating symbionts, or interrupt a pest population’s reproductive cycle.  

Listen to the podcast episode:

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Unsung heroes of food health and safety – Speaking of Mol Bio

When you buy chicken or turkey from the grocery store, you might not give it much thought, but there is an entire network of people working to ensure the health of the animals in our food supply chain and your health. In this episode, we talk with an unsung hero, Beverly Wood, supervisor of the molecular diagnostics lab at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, who works tirelessly to ensure the health and safety of poultry and livestock animals in our food supply chain. Our conversation delves into the types of samples and volume of testing that Beverly and her team do on a routine basis uncovers how their work changes as they move between surveillance and outbreak modes of operation, and gets into the molecular testing workflows they use. Given that her lab analyzes more than 30,000 samples a year, the discussion also touches on advancements in sample preparation and PCR that help enable this level of throughput, while delivering the rigor and reliability their lab requires. Join us to learn about the unsung heroes, both people and molecular methods, that deliver food health and safety. Subscribe to get future episodes as they drop and if you like what you’re hearing we hope you’ll share a review or recommend the series to a colleague.  Visit the Invitrogen School of Molecular Biology to access helpful molecular biology resources and educational content, and please share this resource with anyone you know working in molecular biology.  For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

4. Sustainable energy and materials production

Elizabeth “Izzy” Bell, Postdoctoral Researcher, Bioengineering, National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Ramesh Jha, Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory

A lot of clean energy innovation happens in the physics and chemistry realms, but biology has a lot to contribute as well.  

Guest Ramesh Jha won a prestigious R&D 100 award for his team’s work on a project called Smart Microbial Cell Technology, an ultra-high-throughput screening platform for engineering custom biocatalysts. The system can screen a million genetic variants in just hours.  

Biocatalysts are enzymes that enhance the rate of chemical reactions; it’s a 10 billion dollar industry spanning nearly every sector, but this field is especially critical to advancing clean energy and sustainability science. As we continue to produce huge amounts of waste like plastics and greenhouse gases with long staying power, we are in dire need of faster chemical processes to break them down and mitigate damage.  

Guest Izzy Bell is working to optimize enzymes for biocatalytic recycling of nylons and polyurethanes.  

Other applications of molecular biology within sustainability science: hacking photosynthesis for carbon dioxide conversion into fuels, engineering plants or other organisms to sequester carbon or bioremediate soil, and monitoring biomarkers for signs of climate change impact and early warning of “tipping points” in ecosystem health.  

As a field that sits at the intersection of computational modeling, molecular biology, AI, clean energy, next-generation sequencing, and more, sustainable materials production is a very future-proof and exciting career path option.  

Listen to the podcast episode:

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Directed evolution – A PETase project – Speaking of Mol Bio

Plastics are a modern miracle of science that have helped deliver both convenience and life-saving solutions. However, we must now grapple with the challenge of immense amounts of plastics in our waste streams and environment. How do we best deconstruct plastics to reusable or more bio-friendly molecules? This is the exact challenge being addressed by the work of Dr. Elizabeth (Izzy) Bell and her team at the National Renewable Energy Lab. Our conversation with Izzy showcases her ability to summarize complex topics very concisely and understandably, which she says is a skill that is critically important in her field because it’s so interdisciplinary. Izzy summarizes the challenges they’re working to address and then walks us through the stepwise processes she and her team use to conduct directed evolution studies. These studies aim to create and characterize enzymes capable of deconstructing common plastics, first at a laboratory scale, but eventually at an industrial scale. If you’ve ever wondered about how directed evolution studies are done, and the role that molecular biology plays with them, this conversation will be sure to clarify. In addition to the great science of this episode, Izzy also helps outline what it takes to get into and be successful in her field – a great resource for anyone aspiring to get into this area of research. We hear about how interdisciplinary the field is, but how that means it’s also ripe with opportunity for those passionate about learning and making a difference. Join us for what is sure to be an informative and inspiring episode! Subscribe to get future episodes as they drop and if you like what you’re hearing we hope you’ll share a review or recommend the series to a colleague.  Visit the Invitrogen School of Molecular Biology to access helpful molecular biology resources and educational content, and please share this resource with anyone you know working in molecular biology.  For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

5. Pharmaceuticals and Contract Research Organizations (CROs) 

Joey Azofeifa, CEO & Founder, Arpeggio Biosciences

Saboor Hekmaty, Director of Laboratory Operations, Avrok Biosciences

In this golden age of life science innovation, R&D specialists are pushing the limits of therapeutics as novel tools and techniques like next-generation sequencing (NGS) continue to emerge. Many are also taking a more holistic view to problem-solving with multiomics approaches that braid together ideas from genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and more.  

Molecular biologists work at the heart of the pharmaceutical design space by developing everything from oligo therapeutics to mRNA vaccines to novel drug classes. And today’s researchers are tackling unique challenges like antibiotic resistance, a need for more personalized medicines, and more.  

Guest Joey Azofeifa is CEO and Founder of Arpeggio Biosciences, a company developing new medicine to target homeostasis in cancer and chronic kidney disease using advances in AI and RNA-sequencing.  

Drug developers – from small startups to Fortune 500 companies – often lean on the help of Contract Research Organizations (CROs) for the crucial testing portion of R&D. CROs provide specialized, outsourced support in designing, managing, monitoring, and analyzing results of clinical trials. Guest Saboor Hekmaty is Director of Laboratory Operations at Avrok Biosciences, a 10,000 square-foot CRO facility in California providing clinical and translational research support including sample intake, processing, testing, array development, and sample storage.   

Listen to the podcast episodes:

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High-throughput transcriptomics and AI for drug discovery – Speaking of Mol Bio

Doing something complex and meaningful in a new way requires thinking and acting a bit differently. This is the case with how Dr. Joey Azofeifa, from Arpeggio Bio, is using systems biology to discover new drug candidates. Join us in this Season 2 kickoff episode where we dive headlong into transcriptomics, systems biology, machine learning, and learn how they’re being used to innovate drug discovery. We learn about 3’-end mRNA barcoding and in-cell reverse transcription methods that allow the pooling of up to 1,536 samples so that only a single library preparation is required while still allowing the deconvolution of RNAseq results. This reduces their RNAseq costs by up to 400-fold, which enables them to generate enormous transcriptomic data sets. We also learn about how they’re using generative adversarial AI networks to use this transcriptomics data to design potential drug candidates. We even hear how one of their drug candidates, which targets iron homeostasis pathways, has progress to successful testing in mice. To access the transcript for download, please visit – https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/brands/invitrogen/molecular-biology-technologies/speaking-of-mol-bio-podcast.html Subscribe to get future episodes as they drop and if you like what you’re hearing we hope you’ll share a review or recommend the series to a colleague.  Visit the Invitrogen School of Molecular Biology to access helpful molecular biology resources and educational content, and please share this resource with anyone you know working in molecular biology.  For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

Molecular Biology for hire – the CRO experience – Speaking of Mol Bio

Contract Research Organizations (CROs) are a resource that most scientists know about but relatively few have first-hand, internal experience with. In this episode our hosts speak with Saboor Hekmaty, Director of Laboratory Operations at Avrok Biosciences, who pulls back the curtain to illuminate what CROs do, and the skills required for them to be successful in supporting diverse projects for their customers. We hear about the work Saboor and their team do in biospecimen processing, biobanking, clinical studies, and lots of sample analysis, all tailored to meet the unique needs of the challenges they face each day.Join us for a casual, insightful, and educational conversation that will leave you with a deeper understanding of CROs and what it’s like to work for one customer. Saboor highlights the importance and ubiquity of molecular biology in their projects and the personal traits required for him and his staff to be successful and enjoy the diverse work Subscribe to get future episodes as they drop and if you like what you’re hearing we hope you’ll share a review or recommend the series to a colleague.  Visit the Invitrogen School of Molecular Biology to access helpful molecular biology resources and educational content, and please share this resource with anyone you know working in molecular biology.  For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

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