In this installment of the ABE Teacher Roundtable series, the following panelists discussed the urgency and importance of developing data literacy skills in our students and why they are so essential within biotechnology fields. Panelists discussed trends, technologies, and applications of data literacy, and skills teachers can be supporting now in the classroom.

Marty Samuels, Head of Content, LabXchange

Samuels is the Head of Content at LabXchange, a free online platform that curates and develops interactive content to inspire users to think of themselves as scientists and to approach questions scientifically. As a former Associate Director for Science at Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Marty has worked with faculty across the Division of Science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math, Statistics, Engineering, etc.) to incorporate authentic and motivating data analysis into their courses. Prior to that, Marty served as the Assistant Director for Undergraduate Studies for Molecular and Cellular Biology and Chemical and Physical Biology at Harvard, and taught over a dozen courses in these departments

Dan Gschwend, Director, Data Science, Amgen

Gschwend is a knowledge scientist and data strategist at Amgen. He has over twenty years of experience developing innovative solutions that transform leverage of data for decision-making within pharmaceutical R&D and Operations. Inspired by the structured design of highly connected information environments that neutralize organizational boundaries, he is driven to link and organize data for greater value, promote data sharing and re-use, and elevate data as a durable organizational asset. Dan leads the vision for Amgen's Enterprise Data Fabric, a corporate-scale knowledge network that reimagines how staff think about, interact with, and derive insight from data connected together.

Bryan Yee, Director, Knowledge Management, Amgen

Yee is a Director in R&D at Amgen. He is responsible driving the creation and continuous improvement of a modern and sustainable knowledge management practice, with an emphasis on facilitating the increased adoption of innovative approaches to drug development. Over the last 15 years, he has held various roles across Amgen, spanning information technology, process improvement, corporate transformation, and chief of staff/strategic planning. He holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Cal Poly San Luis Obipso, with an emphasis in Information Systems.

Stacey Brandsma, Data Scientist, Digital Health, Amgen

Brandsma is a Data Scientist on the Digital Health and Innovation team at Amgen. She has worked as a data scientist across many areas of the healthcare space including biotech, pharma, hospitals, and public health, with projects ranging from clinical trial analysis, controlled substance monitoring, and COVID-19 modelling. Prior to transitioning into data science, she worked in Zambia managing and monitoring various development projects. She is working towards a MSc in Computer Science at Georgia Tech in addition to her MSc in Analytics and BSc in Biology.

Wes Field, Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Digital Health, Amgen

Field is a Principal Machine Learning Engineer within Amgen’s Digital Health and Innovation where he works to deploy data science and machine learning to every edge of the business… and to give data scientists a tight, warm hug of technology! During his tenure at Amgen he has worked on a diverse array of projects including COVID wave modeling, identification of synthetic lethal gene pairs and clinical trial optimization. Prior to joining Amgen, Wes worked in the protein engineering domain of machine learning where he co-developed Protabank, an open source database for protein mutation assays. He has spent most of his professional career as a software engineer in the life science and biotech space and holds an M.Sc. in computer science from Technion.