Ecem Uluegeci
Harvard College
Boston (42.3° N, 71.0° W)
featuring Alican Ozkan, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Boston (42.3° N, 71.0° W)
Many students go through the dilemma of choosing between the industry and academia especially as their graduation approaches. That was one of the highlights of my conversation with Dr. Alican Ozkan. I was especially excited about this interview because Dr. Ozkan is currently working at an institute that I have been following since I got interested in biotechnology.
Dr. Alican Ozkan is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, a cross-disciplinary research institute at Harvard University, which focuses on developing bioinspired materials and devices. He graduated from the Middle East Technical University – Northern Cyprus Campus, Turkey with a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering and received his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey. He has recently obtained his PhD degree from the University of Texas at Austin. In our conversation, we talked about his research interests and what keeps him motivated to pursue them.
As a mechanical engineering student, he “did not have a lot of enthusiasm toward the incorporation of biology and [engineering]” before starting his PhD research. However, he still wanted to get out of his comfort zone and work on the technologies that can be applied to life sciences. In the first years of his PhD, he worked on the organ-on-a-chip concept in collaboration with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Dell Medical School. At Wyss, he is currently working on increasing the cellular complexity of these devices as well as discovering the interaction between difference compartments of tissues.
Something that fascinates him in his current workplace is having a team of diverse engineers, molecular biologists, and clinicians collaborating on the same project. He believes this makes the Wyss Institute a special research center, which brings people from different backgrounds working on the same problem while looking at it from various angles.
To him, academia provides enormous amounts of flexibility to pursue one’s interests. Being able to work on the scientific questions that he wants to find answers to is a great motivation source for him. I always thought one of the challenges of being in academia is keeping yourself motivated to do research on the same subject for a long period. Seeing the potential applications of his research keeps Dr. Ozkan motivated because he believes that his research will help improve the treatments of various diseases.
Dr. Ozkan’s advice to the undergraduate students interested in staying in academia is for them to experience what research is like as early as possible; if possible, during their undergraduate studies. He thinks that getting a master’s degree facilitates the transition from undergraduate to postgraduate research for those who plan to stay in academia or those who are uncertain about their future plans. He encourages students to get involved in the grant writing process and publishing papers at the early stages of their academic careers. Finally, he emphasizes the importance of finding self-motivation to pursue their research interests to overcome the challenges that they might face during their careers in academia.
Highlights from the interview:
Everyone’s family, their community, and their life circumstances create an initial role for them in society. What was expected of you and how did those expectations shape you into choosing your current career?
My parents are both chemical engineers in Turkey. My mom was in academia, and my dad worked in the industry. Becoming an engineer was never forced on me, but my strong interest in mathematics and physics led me to study mechanical engineering. However, I would like to note that my parents have always been supportive of me and have motivated to improve myself scientifically.
What led you to your current position as a researcher? And what does this position entail?
Ever since I started my doctoral studies, I have always wanted to collaborate more frequently with clinicians and life scientists. In the first years of my PhD work, we were making these devices called Organ-on-a-chip at the University of Texas at Austin. Our progress on the engineering side in the first years of our work helped us set up a collaboration with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Dell Medical School for our devices to be used as preclinical tools. In my current work at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, we have direct access to patient biopsies that can be incorporated into our microfluidic models and devices. These models reveal findings that conventional systems cannot, help us make a diagnosis and come up with new pathways and solutions to prevalent diseases.
Were you always interested in life sciences, or did you get interested later in your career?
Not in the first years of my academic career, but I later recognized the potential applications of microfluidics in the field of biology and this got me interested in life sciences. In my undergraduate years, I was working in the field of microfluidics, creating microscale channels that you can flow any kind of fluid like blood or cell culture media; or even water and air. Microscale channels have many different applications. I was using this technology to synthesize small nanoparticles that can be used for magnetic resonance imaging. But the major advantage of this technology was to create very fast reactions. In a batch, you can synthesize these nanoparticles in three days, but in these microfluidic channels, you can complete this process in just a few minutes as compared to hours. That’s a huge improvement. Microfluidics already has a lot of different applications; Organ-on-a-chip is one of them, circulation tumor cell isolation from blood and single-cell encapsulation and their genomic sequencing are other examples. I have always been interested in bio-related microfluidic approaches. Before starting my PhD studies, I did not have a lot of enthusiasm toward the incorporation of biology and [engineering], but I wanted to make another attempt in the biology field to get out of my comfort zone. Organ-on-a-chip is a perfect example of combining engineering and biology by incorporating blood flow or airwaves, airflow, and mechanical stretching motions, or even creating architectural complexity so that you can recapitulate complex disease models. I spent five years at the University of Texas at Austin, collaborating with MD Anderson, where we used patients’ cells provided by our clinical collaborators and incorporated them into our microfluidic devices and recapitulated the same disease model observed in humans. There’s a lot of new potential applications of these organ models as Organ-on-a-chip models. Right now, we are trying to increase the cellular complexity of these devices and are tuning the extracellular matrix that we put inside the Organ-on-a-chips. For instance, cancer has different stages, it progresses, and every patient is diagnosed at different stages. Some patients can be at the fibrotic or cirrhotic stage when the tumor tissue much stiffer than the earlier stages. The stiff tissue alters the chemoresistance of the cancer cells. We are able to calculate the stiffness factor so that we can incorporate this in our organ-on-a-chips and estimate the true response of the cancer cells to the chemotherapeutics. Stiffness not only controls chemoresistance but also alters the vascular barrier permeability, that controls the amount of nutrient and drug delivered to the tissue. We were able to capture this in my previous work as well.
What keeps you motivated about your work?
I think making a scientific discovery is the top one. Knowing that we might be one of the few labs that can make discoveries in these top-end engineered Organ-on-a-chips. Working with the actual biopsy samples to isolate cells, analyze extracellular matrix properties such as stiffness and components between different patients and to incorporate in our devices makes our work even more unique. These advances will improve treatments; we will get into more personalized treatments with these devices. That’s very motivating for me.
How did you decide to stay in academia instead of working in industry?
In academia, you have more flexibility on what you work on. I don’t have a lot of background in the industry; so, it might be wrong to make assumptions. However, in academia as long as you work on an issue that is of interest to you, and you are answering a novel, important, and impactful question, you can establish strong collaborations, get funding from large agencies and feed your enthusiasm to make a scientific discovery. When you have your own research lab, you can pursue your own research ideas and I think having that opportunity is invaluable.
How do you feel about the research funding process?
It is definitely concerning because if you don’t have any funding in your lab, then you cannot do any research. It’s the number one rule of the universities in the US. That’s something we need to swallow and keep working on because there are a lot of good researchers out there making a lot of progress in their work. It is a tedious progress, but the funding agencies don’t have unlimited resources to fund all the laboratories; they can only fund the most important projects that can answer the biggest and critical questions.
Do you think there are any misconceptions about your job, about being a researcher?
The most common misconception about people working in academia, especially in my home country, Turkey, is that academics work 40 hours per week. I don’t believe many people realize the extra work we put in our spare time, on holidays and weekends. I think academia is an underestimated field; people don’t see what goes on in the background, how much effort and time we’re putting in the laboratory, or how many nights we’re staying awake to solve the problems or to find reasonable explanations to the findings of our research and experiments.
Can you describe the team dynamics in your group in terms of structure, organization, and other characteristics?
What fascinates me about my workplace is that there are clinicians, molecular biologists and engineers from different backgrounds collaborating on the same projects. Furthermore, these team members have also specialized in the disease model that they have been working on. That is to say, every research member has their different expertise and perspective on how to tackle the problems that we are facing. Moreover, occasionally these disease models are combined to investigate the biodistribution and interaction between different organs. That’s the biggest novelty of our work, which at the same time makes Wyss a top-notch research institution. For those who are interested, I would like to invite you to check out our website and publications.
What advice would you give a student interested in staying academia after college?
After college, getting a Master’s degree would be a good transition to academia. Students can always turn their master’s degree into a PhD then if they feel like the research is what they want to do, and they can continue to build their academic career. During their undergraduate years, younger researchers should get involved with the research activities of one, maybe more laboratories, participate in publishing papers, and have a sense of what the research environment is like, what kind of sacrifices you need to make a good scientific discovery or progress. Having an internship at different companies is also valuable; it helps them observe the differences between academia and the industry. I would definitely recommend for them to attend workshops on grant writing, take active roles in writing proposals, and apply for scholarships/fellowships. Applying for scholarships/fellowships is going to be really minor compared to these big grants, but still, it’s going to be a good learning process for them. Lastly, self-motivation is very important. Like I said, a big portion of the experiments we are running fail because they’re very novel; there will be some problems to troubleshoot, problems you have never faced before or anticipated because you’re doing those experiments for the first time. So, you will feel down a lot during your academic career, but you need to have the self-motivation to keep moving forward because without that, you will not be able to get into the lab, work hard to complete your project and make an impact.
Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee. This article only aims to share personal opinions and learnings and does not constitute the interviewee’s current or former employer(s)’ position on any of the topics discussed.