Becoming The Solution
Gale Wichmann joined the MBP’s Industry Advisory Board to do what she wishes others had done for her – serve as a mentor for career development.
It only took one meeting for Gale Wichmann (WCAS ‘95) to know she was in the right place as a new member of the Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) for Northwestern Engineering's Master of Biotechnology Program (MBP).
The IAB is tasked with ensuring the MBP curriculum remains aligned with what the industry needs from new graduates. Wichmann is in a good position to know those needs. She is the senior director for strategic partnerships at Amyris, a biotech company focused on clean chemistry to promote a sustainable planet.
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“I have benefited immensely from mentorship in my professional career, but I didn't get that mentorship until rather late in my career,” Wichmann said. “I really wished I had had some better mentorship as a grad student, as a postdoc, and as an early scientist.”
When Wichmann arrived on campus for her first MBP meeting in October, she was eager to interact with students and offer guidance as a nearly two-decade biotechnology veteran.
A highlight of the trip was going out to dinner with several MBP students.
“It was so awesome, so rewarding,” she said. “We talked a lot about various aspects of grad school and what they wanted for their careers, and it just felt really good.”
What also feels good to Wichmann is her career's new direction.
For more than a decade, Wichmann worked in the lab doing the science that led to Amyris’ innovations in sustainable biotechnology. The company uses synthetic biology to produce molecules identical to those that exist in nature for products ranging from cosmetics to pharmaceuticals.
But as her career progressed, she increasingly found herself pulled into discussions about the business realities needed to bring the science she was working on in the lab to commercial success. From there, a new role emerged.
In February 2023, she was promoted to her current position. In that role, she supports the company’s business development goals by working with scientists and experts across the company to determine the technical feasibility and risks, investment costs, and potential revenue the company could realize by developing a new molecule.
Those metrics regularly change as new processes for production drive down costs or new uses for a certain molecule are found that could drive revenue.
“I really get a lot of satisfaction out of making things run efficiently,” Wichmann said. “If you see the problem down the road and you can get the right people in a room to align before it becomes a huge train wreck, there is great satisfaction in that.”
The MBP’s IAB is now a new source of satisfaction for Wichmann.
She is impressed by the caliber of students in the program and encouraged to see how MBP is focused on giving students a variety of post-graduation career paths to pursue.
That wasn’t the case for Wichmann during graduate school, when the expectation was graduates would continue into academia, she said.
“There are so many options out there now where you can take your scientific degree,” she said. “I'm happy to be part of a program that is trying to train people for alternative careers. That’s the route I took, and I really wished I had had some guidance in that area, so now I hope to be that guidance for others.”