To the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,
I am interested in the Project Manager career opportunity with the Open Science and Science in Society programs at CZI.
I have a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology and a decade of experience managing open science projects. I enjoy making discoveries and teaching science, but I believe my greatest contributions to science and society are my ability to empower others to make and share discoveries that advance our understanding of biological processes.
As an undergraduate, I pursued a degree in Biochemistry because I was fascinated by the beauty of chemical processes and the complex biological systems they regulated. I enjoyed drawing chemical structures and solving chemical equations. After graduation, I worked as a full-time Teaching Specialist in the Organic Chemistry Department where I gained experience teaching hands-on laboratory experiments. I dreamed of discovering new chemical compounds in the rainforest and coral reefs. After graduation, I pursued a post-baccalaureate internship in Costa Rica where I used both my SCUBA diving skills and molecular laboratory training to contribute to a multi-disciplinary research effort to discover biomedical relevant fungi in the ocean.
From 2008 to 2017 I worked as a lab technician and then a graduate student in Hans Hofmann’s lab at The University of Texas. As a technical, I combined laboratory and teaching expertise to work on several collaborative projects and train other scientists. During this time, I presented our research at numerous conferences around the world, developed and taught numerous workshops, co-authored 20 scientific publications, and wrote numerous blog posts. My research broadly focused on understanding the neural and molecular processes that regulate animal behavior. I embraced open-science during this time and used R for reproducible data analysis. All of my thesis research is available on GitHub, and my thesis chapters can be easily read online at https://www.raynamharris.com/Thesis/.
During graduate school, I also served as the Training and Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Genomic sequencing was on the rise, but training in bioinformatics was lagging. To fill this gap, I organized a series of workshops and four annual symposia to bring together scientists, engineers, and medical doctors who were using similar tools to solve diverse problems. By building relationships across academic disciplines and into industry, government, medicine, I was able to foster new collaborations and promote the transfer of knowledge. I started conducting post-workshop assessments and writing blog posts to communicate my interpretation, but I needed guidance on best practices. A colleague introduced me to the non-profit organization Software Carpentry (which later merged with Data Carpentry for form The Carpentries) and I became an avid volunteer. I instructed workshops, mentored and trained new instructors, served on the Board of Directors, and collaboratively developed new lessons. Through these experiences, I became skilled at managing online communities and serving as a liaison between sub-communities.
After completing my Ph.D., I joined Dr. Titus Brown's lab as a technical liaison for the Data Commons Pilot Phase Consortium (DCPPC), focusing on communication and community engagement. The DCPPC consisted of about 500 scientists, engineers, developers, and funders from over a dozen institutions whose common goal was to build cloud-based infrastructure that would make biomedical data more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). I co-authored onboarding documentation, co-organized in-person meetings, facilitated webinars, conducted online retrospectives, and beta-tested software. The long-term benefits of our community-building efforts are evidenced by numerous collaborative projects that have continued years after the initial funding period ended. Dr. Rebecca Calisi-Rodríguez and I were brought together to make science videos about the DCPPC. Then she hired me to work on a science communication project funded by National Geographic and an NIH-funded project investigating the neural and molecular basis of parental care in pigeons. For the latter project, I developed an R Shiny application to allow rapid exploration of a very large, open RNA-seq dataset. This software can be easily and freely accessed online at https://raynamharris.shinyapps.io/musicalgenes/.
After my postdoc contract ended in 2020, I started working as a part-time, seasonal Parking Host at the ski resort Alpine Meadows. After a short three months, I was promoted to a Supervisor for my ability to learn new tasks, coordinate others, analyze data, and identify team needs. This job has given me new perspectives into the needs of teams and team members and different strategies for project management. I think this non-academic experience will help me better relate to the communities at large that the CZI science programs are trying to help.
In summary, I have spent a decade empowering scientists to conduct open, collaborative, and reproducible research, and I am confident my journey prepared me to be a Program Manager. I look forward to learning more about the CZI science programs and how I can contribute to its goal of curing or managing all diseases by the end of our lifetimes.
Sincerely, Rayna M. Harris, PhD