Agricultural Scientist at Bayer
The Beginnings of a Scientist
Dr. Daniele Filiault was a high schooler when she knew she wanted to work with plants for the rest of her life. She graduated from Cornell University in B.S General Agriculture, but was unable to get lab experience while an undergrad. She then proceeded to hands-on research at Penn state working with vegetables. Soon after, she attended University of Wisconsin-Madison in M.S Horticulture focusing on turf grass. During her time working with turf grasses, she created cultivars for vastly different markets. This experience helped her gain a foundation of population genetics as well as field trials. After receiving her master’s degree, she went to work in a human oncology lab. Here she learned what she didn’t want to do with her career. Her heart wasn’t in it, and she wanted to get back to working with plants. Finally, Dr. Filiault achieved her Ph.D. in Plant Biology from UC Davis. In her Ph.D program, Dr. Filiault found a true love and passion for quantitative genetics and plant genomics. She finished her time in academia with over 11 years of postdoc research at Gregor Mendel Institute. During those 11 years, she published papers on population genetics and GWAS. While at the Gregor Mendel Institute, she managed field experiments in multiple sites for multiple years, which allowed her to further develop leadership skills.
Bayer, and Moving to Industry
The company she decided to transfer to, Bayer, is separated into multiple divisions. These divisions include pharmaceuticals, consumer
health, and crop science. Within the division of crop science, different projects are moving forward in order to meet the needs of all types of farmers. These projects include work on breeding, genetics, and technology.
When transferring to Bayer, Dr. Filiault had to do a rigorous onboarding and learn about patents, but afterwards she was able to begin her work. Using her background in computational biology, she works to optimize crop breeding to bring new cultivars to market quicker with a higher quality of traits. Her daily schedules vary due to having a hybrid work system, but they mainly include meetings with other teams or her own, as well as blocks of time coding. Her position provides her with a large amount of genomic resources and the freedom to work on projects she creates, as long as it moves the company forward. She mentioned that in order to work in this environment you have to be a good communicator of the work you do, especially when discussing your work with people unfamiliar with the concepts on another team. Furthermore, you need to have logistical and organizational skills to balance all the tasks you need to do. Her favorite thing about working within agriculture is genomics, finding out how chromosomes and genomes work. Although it is hard to do at scale, she is excited to be able to communicate her research with the public, aiming to be in the “500 Women in Science”.
Scientist Career Advice
Graduate students that marks the beginnings of independent research and new found freedom. Without a professor’s hand-holding, grad students have the freedom to choose, to fail and to succeed. Dr. Filiault will provide some advice and share experiences with beginning as a Scientist.
How are the creative liberties under an industry job setting?
DF: You have to convince them (higher-ups.) You can’t do just anything, but
that’s everywhere when doing research. They’re not just going to give you money. If you are in academia you have to go through the grant system to give you money. If you are in industry then you have to convince y0ur leadership team
to fund you.
What would be the benefits of post-doc research in your experience?
DF: When you're in a post-doc you get more independent and ability to drive in your own ideas. You get to develop your own research program. When you get a Ph.D you get a little bit of that and kind of depends on what lab you’re in. When you’re in a post-doc you get more chances for personal development and often chances to start supervising other people. Supervising is really important. I think people often forget that people work together and that’s a skill you need to learn to develop.
What would you say would be the necessary skills to be in your field?
DF: One of the things is that you need to be a really good communicator. I think people forget, you need to be really able to communicate your ideas to people. There are multiple ways either through giving talks, through writing, or even informal presentations. You have to be able to communicate really, really well. Even if you do really good science, if no one else knows it then what is the purpose. Looking more at “hard” skills, computer programming was mentioned as being very valuable to her position and career advancement. Specifically, as a computational biologist, she uses R and Python, as well as cloud computing.
How do you deal with unsuccessful experiments?
DF: Number one don't take it personally. It is always the toughest thing. It's an experiment that didn’t work so try not to get discouraged. Instead, I think about why it didn’t work because sometimes the reason why the experiment didn’t work is a cool reason. An experiment is not a failure. It is giving you new information and an opportunity to try something different. It gets you closer to answers. It is an opportunity not a failure. If an experiment failed you didn’t fail. One thing I like to tell my students is if your experiment worked the first time then it will never
work again. If it failed the first time then that is a good sign. Go back, think about the experiment and try again.
Authors: Andrew Calvillo and Alexander Noriega
Dr. Daniele Filiault was a high schooler when she knew she wanted to work with plants for the rest of her life. She graduated from Cornell University in B.S General Agriculture, but was unable to get lab experience while an undergrad. She then proceeded to hands-on research at Penn state working with vegetables. Soon after, she attended University of Wisconsin-Madison in M.S Horticulture focusing on turf grass. During her time working with turf grasses, she created cultivars for vastly different markets. This experience helped her gain a foundation of population genetics as well as field trials. After receiving her master’s degree, she went to work in a human oncology lab. Here she learned what she didn’t want to do with her career. Her heart wasn’t in it, and she wanted to get back to working with plants. Finally, Dr. Filiault achieved her Ph.D. in Plant Biology from UC Davis. In her Ph.D program, Dr. Filiault found a true love and passion for quantitative genetics and plant genomics. She finished her time in academia with over 11 years of postdoc research at Gregor Mendel Institute. During those 11 years, she published papers on population genetics and GWAS. While at the Gregor Mendel Institute, she managed field experiments in multiple sites for multiple years, which allowed her to further develop leadership skills.
Bayer, and Moving to Industry
The company she decided to transfer to, Bayer, is separated into multiple divisions. These divisions include pharmaceuticals, consumer
health, and crop science. Within the division of crop science, different projects are moving forward in order to meet the needs of all types of farmers. These projects include work on breeding, genetics, and technology.
When transferring to Bayer, Dr. Filiault had to do a rigorous onboarding and learn about patents, but afterwards she was able to begin her work. Using her background in computational biology, she works to optimize crop breeding to bring new cultivars to market quicker with a higher quality of traits. Her daily schedules vary due to having a hybrid work system, but they mainly include meetings with other teams or her own, as well as blocks of time coding. Her position provides her with a large amount of genomic resources and the freedom to work on projects she creates, as long as it moves the company forward. She mentioned that in order to work in this environment you have to be a good communicator of the work you do, especially when discussing your work with people unfamiliar with the concepts on another team. Furthermore, you need to have logistical and organizational skills to balance all the tasks you need to do. Her favorite thing about working within agriculture is genomics, finding out how chromosomes and genomes work. Although it is hard to do at scale, she is excited to be able to communicate her research with the public, aiming to be in the “500 Women in Science”.
Scientist Career Advice
Graduate students that marks the beginnings of independent research and new found freedom. Without a professor’s hand-holding, grad students have the freedom to choose, to fail and to succeed. Dr. Filiault will provide some advice and share experiences with beginning as a Scientist.
How are the creative liberties under an industry job setting?
DF: You have to convince them (higher-ups.) You can’t do just anything, but
that’s everywhere when doing research. They’re not just going to give you money. If you are in academia you have to go through the grant system to give you money. If you are in industry then you have to convince y0ur leadership team
to fund you.
What would be the benefits of post-doc research in your experience?
DF: When you're in a post-doc you get more independent and ability to drive in your own ideas. You get to develop your own research program. When you get a Ph.D you get a little bit of that and kind of depends on what lab you’re in. When you’re in a post-doc you get more chances for personal development and often chances to start supervising other people. Supervising is really important. I think people often forget that people work together and that’s a skill you need to learn to develop.
What would you say would be the necessary skills to be in your field?
DF: One of the things is that you need to be a really good communicator. I think people forget, you need to be really able to communicate your ideas to people. There are multiple ways either through giving talks, through writing, or even informal presentations. You have to be able to communicate really, really well. Even if you do really good science, if no one else knows it then what is the purpose. Looking more at “hard” skills, computer programming was mentioned as being very valuable to her position and career advancement. Specifically, as a computational biologist, she uses R and Python, as well as cloud computing.
How do you deal with unsuccessful experiments?
DF: Number one don't take it personally. It is always the toughest thing. It's an experiment that didn’t work so try not to get discouraged. Instead, I think about why it didn’t work because sometimes the reason why the experiment didn’t work is a cool reason. An experiment is not a failure. It is giving you new information and an opportunity to try something different. It gets you closer to answers. It is an opportunity not a failure. If an experiment failed you didn’t fail. One thing I like to tell my students is if your experiment worked the first time then it will never
work again. If it failed the first time then that is a good sign. Go back, think about the experiment and try again.
Authors: Andrew Calvillo and Alexander Noriega