Introduction by Director Kelly Jordan-Sciutto, PhD

Welcome to the Summer 2022 issue of The Dish. I hope you’ve been finding time to enjoy the beginning of summer, and the renewed energy that so many of us feel with the change in season and the return of warmer weather. Here at Penn BGS, we’ve been grateful to be back in our on-campus community and celebrating the end of the academic year.

We’re immensely proud of everything that we have accomplished together this year. In May, after two years of virtual graduation ceremonies, we celebrated the Class of 2022 with an in-person commencement, and also acknowledged the hard work and resilience of students from both the Classes of 2020 and 2021. We were thrilled to have this chance to honor our graduates’ outstanding accomplishments. Though we still face challenges and uncertainty due to the pandemic, completing this year — in person and on campus — is an encouraging milestone.

We have a wonderful issue of The Dish for you this month, and I’m excited to introduce its contents; but before I do, I once again want to take a moment to commend the strength and resilience of the students, faculty, and staff here at Penn BGS. Throughout the difficulties of the past two years, they have continued to learn and grow together, collaborating and contributing to their fields. It has been gratifying to see our community reconnect and rebuild this year, and to see Penn BGS learners continue their work on campus in our labs and classrooms. I am honored to work with our students, faculty and staff to identify and develop the best resources and opportunities that will allow the members of our community to thrive. I am very grateful to the many partners invested in supporting graduate training in BGS.

In this issue, I’m pleased to introduce you to Donita Brady, PhD, Presidential Professor of Cancer Biology and Assistant Dean for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity in Research Training. In her time at Penn, Dr. Brady has demonstrated clear leadership and, through the IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Learners) Research Program, has galvanized the entire Perelman School of Medicine to meaningfully expand support for our diverse community of learners. Here, she’ll share more about the critical programs offered as part of IDEAL Research and how they address diversity and equity to create a community of belonging for all BGS students, faculty, and staff.

You’ll also hear from recent BGS graduate Jacob Paiano, GR’20, who is exploring new frontiers in genetics in the lab of Dr. Norbert Perrimon at Harvard Medical School, thanks in large part to the diverse community of scientists and researchers he had the opportunity to collaborate with and learn from as a Schmidt Science Fellow.

As the features in this issue demonstrate, the diversity of our growing BGS community — in our backgrounds, in our expertise, and in our lived experiences — has created an environment where our students and faculty have room to flourish. Despite the challenges of the past two years, we have maintained, and in many cases enhanced, the excellence and reach of our work. In fact, we’re preparing to welcome the largest class in our history this coming fall. We know that these numbers are a sign of the outstanding research being done at Penn and the strength and support of our graduate programs for our graduate students.

As always, it is my honor to reach out and connect with this wonderful community. I offer my heartfelt thanks for your dedication to Penn BGS. Our success is made possible by your generosity and commitment. If you would like to provide additional support for the exceptional work of our students, please consider making a gift today. And, as always, feel free to reach out to me at jordank@upenn.edu to discuss the work and direction of Penn BGS — or to share story ideas you’d like to see in the pages of The Dish.

Thank you again, and please enjoy our Spring 2022 issue.

Kelly Jordan-Sciutto, PhD
Professor of Pathology, Department of Oral Medicine, University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine
Associate Dean for Graduate Education and Director, Biomedical Graduate Studies, Perelman School of Medicine

Faculty Feature: Donita Brady, PhD

Few can speak to the Perelman School of Medicine’s efforts to build a diverse faculty as powerfully as Donita Brady, PhD. Recruited through one of the University’s term Presidential Professorships, she is the Harrison McCrea Dickson, MD and Clifford C. Baker, MD Presidential Associate Professor and serves as Assistant Dean for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity in Research Training. Now, she leads the graduate student portion of the Perelman School of Medicine’s IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Learner) Experience Program, also known as IDEAL Research.

The Perelman School created this enhanced structure by expanding the activities of the Program for Diversity and Inclusion and Office of Research and Diversity Training.  All of its education programs are now unified in meaningfully supporting its diversity of learners — from Undergraduate Medical Education and Master’s and Certificate Programs, to BGS, the Biomedical Postdoctorate Programs, and the Medical Scientist Training Program. Dr. Brady and her counterpart, Horace DeLisser, MD, Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion for IDEAL MEd, are able to work in close coordination with the School’s Education Council, Senior Vice Dean for Medical Education, Suzanne Rose, MD, MSEd, and Vice Dean for Inclusion and Diversity Eve Higginbotham, SM, MD, ML.

Dr. Brady recently sat down with The Dish to share more about IDEAL Research, efforts to create a more cohesive and inclusive community across the School, and what IDEAL Research means for the BGS students and faculty — both now, and in the years ahead.

Tell us more about IDEAL Research and your role in the program.  

IDEAL Research is really a reimagined office. I took on this position as assistant dean in March 2021, and in this role, I help set our mission and vision and steer our faculty and staff towards achieving many of our goals within the office. That is, we are here to strengthen the quality of education and produce innovative research and models of healthcare delivery by fostering a vibrant, inclusive environment and fully embracing diversity. All in all, my focus is on our diverse community of learners.

Can you talk a bit about the role that IDEAL Research plays in creating a more diverse and inclusive community across the Perelman School of Medicine?

One of our new programs is our Recruitment Ambassadors program, where we go to different undergraduate institutions and provide them with information on our research training opportunities. This expands our reach because now we can have IDEAL Research fellows or faculty go out, and we have trained them on the programs so that they can be our ambassadors to other institutions and help us recruit into our program.

Two other pipeline programs are our Summer Undergraduate Internship Program (SUIP) and PennPREP, which are research training opportunities we offer to undergraduates or post-baccalaureates from underrepresented backgrounds. SUIP is a 10-week long program where students are embedded in a research lab for what might be their first hands-on research experience. We have found that if they have a good experience that summer, the rate with which they’ll apply to medical school and PhD programs is over 80 percent – and many end up coming to Penn. PennPREP is catered towards recent graduates who want to have a more intensive experience, which allows us to prepare them to apply for PhD or MD/PhD programs by helping them prepare personal statements and present their research, making them more competitive applicants.

What were students telling you about their needs when it came to issues of inclusion, diversity, and equity?

I think students were really looking for someone who could meet them where they are. Yes, representation matters, but we can’t necessarily change who encompasses our faculty overnight. What we can do is provide faculty and other trainees with the right resources and the right training to allow them to show up for their peers who are facing these issues. Most of the time, what they need is someone to listen to them. The next step is then determining whether there will be any accountability, and how can we help reconcile or mediate those relationships.

We realized from our Combating Racial Inequities committee that we have to the change the way we go about these efforts. Through this committee, we realized that a lot of the work that was already being done needed to be expanded, but that every person in the community can come to the table to help. So, what we’ve done is established new ways of approaching the work by leveraging the “community gear.” What I mean by that is, instead of it just being on the shoulders for the staff that are in the IDEAL Research office, we now engage the faculty and the students at Penn to help us achieve our goals, because it’s really a lot of work to put on these programs and to provide the support that a lot of our trainees need.

What types of programs have been implemented or created to aid this work?

A great example is the Trainee Advocacy Alliance. This began from a partnership with several graduate students who came up with the idea for a minority support network. We found that we were doing a good job of bringing students to campus, but once they got here there wasn’t a lot of detailed support for anyone who was dealing with discrimination and microaggressions related to their identity. We needed to train faculty and students to serve as touchpoints across the University to help those trainees who might be struggling.

 In your opinion, why is it essential that we have a better understanding of inclusion, diversity, and equity as it relates to biomedical research specifically?

I guess I would always go back to the research, which tells us: if you have a more diverse and inclusive research group, then you will have an increase in the creativity and impact of the work that ends up coming from it. I think we require a diverse makeup of this community in order to bring new ideas to the table. Someone’s lived experience is going to alter, or likely be different than, the way someone else approaches a question — questions we’ve been dealing with for hundreds of years! If we allow everyone to participate, which is the real goal of many of these programs, we can accelerate the rate with which we make discoveries.

With IDEAL Research’s work in mind, what is your hope for the future?

We focus a lot on the numbers, the demographics. When we think about what our classes look like, what the professors look like, we want it to represent the place in which we live, and I think that’s an achievable goal.

What we really need is to work on the belonging that needs to be there once you’ve reached those numbers. Does everyone in the environment feel like they belong there and can contribute to it? I think that is the real goal, so then the question becomes, how do you measure that? I think we are learning that we are going to have to continue going back to the people we are trying to serve and keep asking them how we are doing. “How are we improving your lived experience here at Penn Medicine?”

Q&A with Jacob Paiano, GR’20

As a PhD candidate in the NIH-Penn Immunology Graduate Partnership Program, Jacob Paiano focused on fundamental questions around how cells purposely initiate, process, and repair DNA breaks during cell division while avoiding catastrophic consequences. During his time at BGS he developed next-generation sequencing strategies to better understand DNA repair in various contexts important to human health, including meiotic germ cells, human neurons, and cancer cells.

Now, leveraging the strengths of his BGS education and the resources from a Schmidt Science Fellowship, he has embarked on a new chapter: pivoting to systems biology and working with fruit fly models as part of the next generation of interdisciplinary science leaders, working together to solve bigger problems faster and drive lasting change.

We spoke with Jacob about his experience at BGS, his current work in the lab of Dr. Norbert Perrimon at Harvard Medical School, and the significance of his Schmidt Fellowship.

Talk to us a bit about your path and the work you’re undertaking as a Schmidt Science Fellow.

I was in IGG (Immunology Graduate Group), and when I started, I was interested in how different immune cells communicated with one another to work as a complete system in a variety of disease settings. But as I was working on my thesis at the NIH — I was there for four years after taking classes at Penn — I pivoted away from immunology and started studying DNA damage and repair. The idea there was still trying to understand some sort of damage; in this case, instead of damaging a tissue and seeing how the immune cells come together to fix it, you have damage to the DNA, and I thought that there were a lot of interesting parallels to how DNA was repaired by proteins and how tissue is repaired by immune cells.

I think it was through that pivot that I made in graduate school that I realized for my post-doc I wanted to go even broader. Instead of just studying DNA or immune cell repair, I wanted to study how all sorts of cellular stress were dealt with.

So, with the Schmidt Fellowship, I didn’t want to just study DNA damage; I didn’t want to just study infections; I wanted to try to study more broadly how an entire organism maintains its health over time, and the mechanisms that are in place to do that. In the lab I’m in right now, we use fruit flies to study inter-organ communication, trying to understand how the different organ systems are in constant communication with each other. It’s been fun to ask a whole new set of questions and experiment in this way.

As a recent graduate, can you talk a little more about your BGS experience? How has it prepared you for your career?

The support through BGS is something that was really important to me. IGG was very nice to let me step outside of immunology to study DNA repair for my thesis. They were extremely supportive in letting me pursue exactly what I wanted to, in the way that made sense for me as I was growing as a scientist.

What I appreciated most about being in BGS and IGG was the exposure, and not just to immunology studies. In those first couple years, the courses I took and the professors that I met were highly influential as I made my graduate school pivot away from immunology towards DNA repair.

Having those kinds of connections through BGS, having that kind of exposure and that wide breadth of understanding and curriculum, really gave me some confidence to say, “There’s a field I’m interested in, and maybe I’m not trained in the lab, but I feel comfortable to talk to people and meet people in those fields and extend the research in that way.” I think gaining that confidence was really important.

What does it mean to you to be exploring your interests as a Schmidt Fellow?

It’s an incredible opportunity. I made a pivot in graduate school, and then I did it again. In research, especially early in your career, those types of moves are really challenging because it’s a little untraditional to be taking an interdisciplinary approach.

Schmidt is very special because it’s not just geared towards biology and medicine. Rather, it’s geared towards solving major problems that have complicated solutions, ones that we haven’t identified yet. And I think that’s what the Schmidt Fellow community is trying to do: they’re trying to identify people who are willing to take risks, explore new fields, and combine that knowledge with other fields in innovative ways. They’re taking people across biology, medicine, engineering, physics, and chemistry, and bringing us together as a community, teaching us how to answer questions in an interdisciplinary fashion. That focus is really unique. I mean, where else would I have the opportunity to be a close colleague of someone who is studying artificial intelligence? In that way, it’s been really amazing to think beyond biology.

It’s a community, and they’re encouraging us to be broader-thinking scientists, and really, leaders in whatever field we choose to pursue. I think that level of support and the emphasis on risk-taking is very special and different.

Make a Difference: Give to the BGS Fellowship Fund Today

As we have said time and time again, we simply could not be prouder of our Penn BGS students. The circumstances they have persevered through over the past two years are unprecedented, and this success has been possible in part through the commitment and generosity of the extraordinary Penn BGS community. It is your help that ensures Penn BGS remains a home for brilliant minds to thrive and forge their own path forward.

To offer your own support of their efforts — and the efforts of those who will come after — we ask that you consider making a gift to the BGS Fellowship Fund. You can make a gift online or send a check payable to "The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania" and include “Biomedical Graduate Studies Fellowship Fund” in the memo line. Mail it to:

Penn Medicine Development
c/o Torren Blair
3535 Market Street, Suite 750
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Thank you for your partnership.