Convergence is Here! How Can Life Sciences & Healthcare Accelerate Hiring of Data Science Talent?

October 23, 2019 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM

MassBio, 300 Technology Square 8th Fl, Cambridge, MA 02139

Add to Calendar 10/23/2019 4:00:00 PM 10/23/2019 6:00:00 PM Convergence is Here! How Can Life Sciences & Healthcare Accelerate Hiring of Data Science Talent? The convergence of biology, data and engineering is here to transform discovery, development, diagnosis, treatment, patient experience, and outcomes measurement. But there’s an exploding talent gap due to a fast-moving landscape. Last year Massachusetts employers posted over 23,000 jobs in data science across all sectors, doubling the number of postings in 2014. Within the life sciences that demand increased by 40% during the same four-year period – growth that dwarfs the available talent. How can life science companies and research institutions in Massachusetts make the recruitment case against the lure of tech giants like Google and Amazon? One way is to increase awareness of jobs in this field amongst college and graduate students who may not be aware of the opportunities to use their skills to solve some of our most important problems such as cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and antibiotic resistance.

In this forum, our panel of experts will provide examples of programs in place now, such as academic-industry consortiums, specialized internships, and other means to drive awareness among data science students of the tremendous opportunity that awaits them in the life sciences and healthcare fields. Panelists will outline the type of career opportunities available today and where they see demand moving to in the future. They will give examples of the specific data skills sought in candidates and the educational degrees most preferred. We’ll end with an open discussion of other ideas to fulfill the convergence skills gap and what we need to do to boost existing programs.

Anyone involved in talent acquisition, corporate growth strategy, digital / technology innovation, as well as academics and with a passion for transforming life sciences and healthcare should come and join the conversation.

Sponsored by the Human Resoures (HR) Forum Working Group. MassBio, 300 Technology Square 8th Fl, Cambridge, MA 02139
Vice President, Simulation and Modeling Sciences, Pfizer
Enoch S. Huang received an AB in Molecular Biology from Princeton and a PhD in Structural Biology from Stanford, where he was a NSF Pre-doctoral Fellow with Prof. Michael Levitt. He was a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow at Washington University School of Medicine, where he developed methods for protein structure prediction. After starting his computational biology career at Cereon Genomics, he joined Pfizer’s Cambridge laboratories in 2000. In 2001, he was appointed Head of Molecular Informatics and joined the site leadership team. In 2007 he accepted a global role as Head of Computational Sciences, responsible for developing new computational methods for designing new medicines. In 2019, Enoch was promoted to Vice President, Simulation and Modelling Sciences, and also charged with leading the Integrative Biology discipline for Pfizer Worldwide Research and Development. Enoch has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics at Boston University since 2001. He has served on editorial boards for Drug Discovery Today and Chemical Biology & Drug Design, and advisory boards for Brandeis University, Princeton Biomedical Data Science, the International Society for Computational Biology, the NIH "Illuminating the Druggable Genome" program, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. Enoch has also served on the program committees at the New York Academy of Sciences, the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and on NIH study sections. He has authored over 30 publications and released the Open Source software package PFAAT.