I fell out of love with the lab and was in love with business

Bioinformatics in Lithuania: a guest postdoc at a bioinformatician’s office, the Van Andel Institute, Toronto, Canada

Vugene in Lithuania is based at the Sunrise Valley Science and Technology Park in Vilnius, close to the University’s Life Sciences Center, with a second office in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city. There is a company that offers data science for data science and machine learning.

I was born nine years before Lithuania gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1990. I did not attend school that had compulsory Russian lessons. I went to the free University of Bozen–Bolzano in Italy for a master’s degree in computer science and stayed there for my PhD, after Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004. The news service worked out the most important events in a given time period, and the mathematics and algorithms that it used turned out to be very relevant in bioinformatics.

A while back, I was drinking beer with some of my brethren in Toronto, Canada. One of them was Arturas Petronis at the University of Toronto, who studies genetics. I said that I wanted to stay in the computer science field, but wouldn’t want to work at a tech company like Google or something. Instead, I wanted to do something that contributes to human health (my older brother and sister are both physicians). He said, try bioinformatics, it’s the future.

My first foray into health was in 2011, as a visiting postdoc working with Petronis at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada’s largest mental-health teaching hospital. I worked there as a biological data-science consultant and travelled back and forth between Canada and Lithuania for years because that year I was also appointed as a bioinformatics researcher at Vilnius University’s Institute of Mathematics and Informatics. I worked all night and day.

I became a bioinformatics scientist at the Van Andel Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I realized that the work of a bioinformatician is very limited in academia. Universities hire one bioinformatician for all the experiments because they have many people who do them. You have to do a lot in the lab: run the server that does computation, manage the data, and write the code. The project becomes very long. It can take a couple of years to arrive at a result that is publishable. It is interesting at the beginning, but you feel lonely after a while. I thought that if I had a team of people working with me, and I could optimize these processes, it would be much faster.

Having a base in the US allowed me to make it possible for the institute I was working with to have a contract with Vugene. I certainly didn’t have to explain where Lithuania is — it was a gate opener.

By this time, the COVID-19 pandemic had hit and I had decided to return to Lithuania with my wife to build the company there. I was doing everything on my own.

Bioinformatics led one scientist home to Lithuania: Her thesis on the expression of endogenous retroviruses in Parkinson’s disease

Our clients include research laboratories looking at the origins, causes, treatments and diagnostics of various complex disorders, such as cancers or neurodegenerative diseases. Quality control, processes raw data, and statistical analysis are some of the things Vugene does.

The first hire was a big step. The people who joined me were very lucky. A third-year genetics student at Vilnius named Milda Milit came first. I became her supervisor for her dissertation and we worked together on her thesis on the expression of endogenous retroviruses in Parkinson’s disease. She worked part-time for Vugene, programming and building models. She is currently doing her master’s while working here.

It’s a lot of work in Lithuania when you’re studying. I’ve taken on four students — three undergraduates and one doing a PhD. This is in addition to two postdocs, and a chief executive and a designer.

Source: How bioinformatics led one scientist home to Lithuania

A student at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Lithuania: a part-time product-manager post during the COVID-19 pandemic

Outside work, life is good here — we have fast Internet, free education and good health care as standard. On top of that, many people have a strong desire to do good things. It feels great to be here as the country is changing quickly and for the better.

Sailing is very popular inLithuania and has always been important to me. It is a good way to get away from my work. In a race, I have to concentrate and stay alert for an extended period of time under extreme physical stress — it takes 100% of my mental capacity, there’s no time for anything else.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was an undergraduate molecular-biology student at Vilnius University in Lithuania, I loved laboratory work. When labs closed during the Pandemic, I lost my motivation.

In 2021, during the fourth and final year of my degree, a recruiter contacted me about a part-time junior product-manager post at the Vilnius site of biotechnology firm Thermo Fisher Scientific. A company was making reagents for messenger RNA vaccines and building a new facility to make them on a large scale.

Thermo arrived in the country in 2010, when it acquired Lithuanian biotech company Fermentas for US$260 million. The site in Lithuania manufactures products for life-science in the area of genes and cell biology. It also has a research and development centre.

Caszyme: a business-development manager at the Vilnius site of the firm Northway Biotech, Vilnius University Hospital, Sweden

It’s common for science students to work during their studies and for me it provided a chance to see what working in the biotech field was like, and to find out what options I had with a life-sciences degree, other than working in the laboratory.

The company discovers and develops tools for diverse applications. It has 17 scientists and is growing all the time. In January, we moved premises to a larger building opposite the Vilnius site of the firm Northway Biotech, and close to Vilnius University Hospital.

I applied for a business-development manager role there and started work in March 2022, while doing my master’s degree, which I completed last year. My job involves relationship building and representing the company abroad.

Currently, Caszyme focuses on three elements. The research is about finding new nucleases for specific characteristics. Second is licences: the company has a platform of nucleases that it has already identified, and it offers licences for further development. The third component is analysis, which is accomplished by the help of Caszyme.

Some of the firm’s active collaborations include infectious diseases and agriculture.

‘Etudes d’ingénieurs en g’en’erie a l”ecosystee de Lithuanie (Lithuania)

There are many aspects to the industry inLithuania that makes it different from other countries. There are great universities that train scientists for the future. The scientists leave with theoretical knowledge and experience in the lab.

Second is that the ecosystem is not a big one. It’s very easy to get to know most people and that’s an advantage because it makes collaborations easier.

My proudest achievement is probably my personal growth. I can really see a difference between now and when I started working — I’ve gained knowledge and experience, and matured as a person. The promotion occurred in June last year, when I was aged 25.

I work remotely in the city of Kaunas, which has a beautiful old town and is known for its art Deco architecture. It’s easy to reach the office from the airports since we have three and the city of Vilnius only takes an hour and a half to get to. Some of my time is spent abroad — I’ve just come back from a technology summit in San Francisco, California, and now I’m in Rome.

I would like to work abroad for a while. Lithuania has wonderful countryside and is full of culture, too. Every year, in March we have an international film festival, which I have worked for as a volunteer in the past.

Source: I fell out of love with the lab, and in love with business

I’m going to Vilnius: an International Association for Science and Innovation at the EMBO Life Sciences Center in Lithuania, and I’ll be there for another year

If you find that you do not like working in a lab, my advice is to look for a job outside the lab. If it doesn’t, try something else and talk to people who have different positions in life sciences. Explore the opportunities.

Many people who have PhDs but decide against being scientists attend events and I talk to them. There’s nothing shameful in that. It’s important that people with a scientific degree are working in business development or operations.

It was attractive for two reasons. It was an area of excellence in my field; and it was a new institute. I had seen throughout my training that a lot of times it is difficult to implement best practices when you have been in previous administrations.

At Vilnius, I would be working with other new group leaders — six in total — so we would be able to shape the institute. We were taking our steps to independence together so it meant I wouldn’t be the one new person here. I arrived in July 2021, with my wife and dog.

We received lots of help from the beginning, including visas and permits, lodging, transportation, and city tours of Vilnius, which has a beautiful Old Town. In order to participate in the partnership I was given assistance with purchasing equipment and consumables, bringing students and employees on to the team, and figuring out the research ecology I was now part of.

Soon after I arrived, I started an international association to help support other people coming from abroad, providing mentors and acting as a liaison to help with administration. Social events and language classes are coordinated by the association. I advocated for having a language class at the Life Sciences Center. There are now two a week.

Once I arrived, I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got one more year that I’m eligible for this European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant.’ I got it on the first try, which is good, because that’s the only try I had. I received 1.2 million. The grant was the first ever awarded in Lithuania.

The grant will allow me to tell my team members how to use the tool sets safely and how to make it better, because I’m able to focus on the science. I won a second grant in January, an Installation Grant from the European life-sciences organization EMBO. It is the only one awarded this year in Lithuania. With the grant, I am looking for another postdoc student.

International research team in Lithuania: How I was lucky to move to the US and how I am supporting other researchers who have come to Lithuania, and what I’ve learned from studying abroad

Currently, I have six graduate students and postdocs, and six undergraduate students. It’s an international team. Until February, we had a master’s student from Lagos on the team. My group also includes a remote summer intern at the University of California, San Diego, and a PhD student from Pakistan. There are also Lithuanian-born scientists who have studied elsewhere and come back, as well as others who have never left the country.

The undergraduates spend 10–15 hours a week in the lab as part of their theses, doing primary research. It’s one of the things I love about Lithuania, students start their researchEARLY than in the US.

If research is not for you, you should learn that as soon as possible, so that you can find the right career path. Here, students get involved in the research, they understand what it takes, the ups and the downs and the strategies in general.

Source: How I’m supporting other researchers who have moved to Lithuania

The Bone Pilots: Where do I go from here? Where are I? Where I want to go? Where am I going?

I went back to the United States for two weeks last year and was very happy to see my family and friends. I am not certain if I will go back permanently. We bought a flat here. In my spare time, I’m recording a soul pop album with Eva. The band I used to be in was called the Bone Pilots. I still enjoy writing and performing. I also enjoy motorcycling, and I do acroyoga with friends.