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Career profile: Maria Fälth Savitski, Head of Computational Biology in Global Computational Biology and Digital Sciences, Boehringer Ingelheim, Biberach, Germany
In this blog interview, we talked with Maria Fälth Savitski – a speaker at Boehringer Ingelheim’s upcoming Transforming Science Day event taking place at EMBL Heidelberg on February 25th – about her excitement for the innovative, interdisciplinary and collaborative research happening in industry, and her tips for early career researchers considering industry R&D.
You were a PhD student in Uppsala and postdoc at DKFZ and you are now Head of Computational Biology at Boehringer Ingelheim. Could you explain how your career developed, in particular how you got your first industry role?
At the end of my postdoc, I was really thinking about what I would do next: would I stay in academia or would I go to a company? I was very, very lucky – through my network, I got to know about Cellzome. They were looking for people with my skill-set, so I decided to actually go on that track to see what it would be like.
I started as a senior scientist, and quite quickly started leading a small team and eventually building up a larger team there. For quite some years, I was doing a lot of hands-on work myself, but still having a few people that I was leading. However, I was also interested in doing more, and wanted to broaden my skill-set. I also started speaking out: I wanted to see more, I wanted to be setting strategy. That, in combination with having a really good mentor who put me totally out of my comfort zone and managers that supported me, helped me progress my career.
So, when you started the first role, how did you find being a senior scientist compared to being a postdoc? What were the main differences and was there anything that surprised you?
What surprised me at first was just how large a company was, the amount of people and resources available, and the different processes and structural setup compared to academia. What I really find as a huge difference is that in a company, you’re not alone. You have many more people driving the same project together, and that is something I really enjoy. It’s valuable to have people to communicate with while you’re doing things and who you can get active feedback from. You have that engagement from a group of people all the time, and you have common goals, which also makes it, for me, much more fun and collaborative to do things.
One other thing that really surprised me is the capability of the pharmaceutical (pharma) industry for generating data. In pharma, it’s the quality of data that counts, so if it’s a poor experiment, it will be redone. This was also one thing that I found really rewarding.
On the flip side, you can find super interesting things in the data, and at other times you find that the data is not leading to the goal you are working on and so you have to stop investigating that. That is sometimes where I miss aspects of the academic setting, but working in pharma has so many advantages that it makes what I do so rewarding. There’s a give and take to any career choice you make, and you have to decide what motivates and inspires you.
You mentioned that you were at the start very hands-on and you’ve become more strategic. How else has your role evolved as you became more senior?
I’m working much more with people and developing people. I had to learn to not have to know all the details – instead, I need to put the pieces of the puzzles together in the bigger picture. It’s also important to trust that the people that are on my teams are working to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle. That is something I learned and actually really enjoy now because when you do the analysis you see the data in one way; when you start overlooking how someone else does the analysis, you see another picture. That also comes with growing, seeing the bigger picture and also being able to help the people in your teams to position what they are doing in a more holistic context.
It’s also important to recognize that drug discovery is such a big area and I’ve been mainly working in the early research stage. But to be successful, you also need to understand what it actually takes to get a treatment to a patient. Being able to interact with so many different people and understanding the fuller picture of what the team aims to achieve in the grand scheme of things is so important and I really enjoy the constant learning and helping lead our team to evolve and grow together.
You can really tell from your voice, your enthusiasm for that. For those who really like still doing the hands-on stuff, is it also possible to stay in a hands-on role?
In companies there are usually different ways of progressing your career. Often there’s a more a scientific track, and another that is more of a managerial track. For example, some people may not be interested in being people managers, and that’s OK. If you don’t enjoy it, I don’t recommend to do it, because it takes a lot of energy as well.
I have people on my team who have worked at Boehringer for quite some time who are still doing the hands-on analysis because this is what drives them, but then they also have opportunities to do more project management if they so choose. They would often work more perhaps with external partners or have postdocs working with them. So they grow their role and they also grow the area which they are accountable for, but without leading people directly. So there are many ways to get the best of both worlds, you just have to find the right career path for you.
For quite a long time, I was doing hands-on work because I also like it, and there’s times where I feel like when someone shows me a data set – and I feel that there is something in that that is not what it should be. Admittedly, I’m often tempted to start doing analysis on my own and I have to tell myself to stay in my lane, and as a people manager a big role is to help steer and guide the team and recognize that you can’t do everything yourself.
As head of computational biology, you have a lot of responsibility. I can imagine that work-life balance is a bit of a challenge. How have you managed that throughout your career and what strategies have you found helpful?
Yeah, it’s a tricky question. I’ve been quite harsh with myself on finding boundaries between work and family life, because I don’t like when I am in between. So, when I stop working, I try to stop thinking about work and then I focus on my own life to really have those boundaries.
I have two kids who are seven and nine now. I also actually did my steepest career progressions after I got my kids, because I learned to be more effective. I learned to focus more and also got better prioritizing and delegating more.
At Boehringer, we have flexibility in how we work. Of course, I need to be present for meetings but, if I stop working at 4pm to bring the kids home from school, I can work a little bit in the evening and find my balance like that. I also think it’s sharing things at home helps to be able to get that focus. And then I really enjoy my job – that also makes it worth it, because I think if I’m happy, the rest of my family will be happy, too.
Then moving back to the career progression: were there particular skills and attributes you think were important for the first transition and then to progress?
I think what is often really important in industry is collaboration. You are not alone and you’re more successful if you can collaborate well and have that openness to also not be afraid of asking for help. At Boehringer, we have so many experts and you can gain something from each person you connect with. I think that that mindset is very important to adapt quite quickly. And then being open-minded for feedback is also something really valuable.
How to get into industry is another question. Here, using your network is very important. Try to get in contact with people working in areas and at companies where you think you would like to be and ask them for tips and feedback, including perspective on the best ways to write your resume and how to break through to position it in a way that help you stand out.
When our company is hiring, there’s often people contacting me via LinkedIn. It doesn’t mean that they get the job or that I can help them, but it can result in me looking for their names in the application round at least. So don’t be afraid to reach out and don’t be afraid to actively ask questions about positions that are advertised. That’s often well-perceived – though it needs to be tailored questions, if you are going to reach out.
Another thing that helps is being curious about things. If you read a job ad, it’s often quite difficult to know what’s behind it. So, ask people about it, – for example, ‘do you think that this is on my level?’. Because different companies are using very different names for the same type of position or role. When you submit an application it’s better if you understand what the company is looking for and you can tailor your resume and your application letter towards that.
Beyond what we already talked about, what do you look for when you’re, when you’ve hired for your team?
I also look a lot in how people would fit into the team. If you have a team of five or six people working closely together, you need to ensure that it continues whenever you add to your team. It’s also important to build a team with diverse thoughts, perspectives, and backgrounds, which I believe helps make us all better.
I also sometimes also look for complementary skill sets. So it can be that I open an ad for a specific position and I see a resume that actually gets me thinking about a skill set we may not have, which can also help intrigue me as a hiring manager. Communication is also often a point we look at. Within a company, it’s very important how you can work across different disciplines and how strong your communication skills are. For example, how well the person is able to communicate with non-computational people, such as the biologists, is critical.
You already hinted at some of this, but to make it concrete, what do you find most enjoyable and the most challenging about computational biology and industry?
I think the most rewarding part is working interdisciplinary across the organization. I really enjoy that and believe that this way of working will hopefully lead to us being able to impact people’s lives. I’m doing something that in the end is meaningful: whether we have positive or negative results, and always learning something that helps bring us a step forward in the biology towards finding treatments for patients.
What I find most challenging is that computational biology is still seen as something that you can do with a click sometimes, and that’s a big misconception. It actually takes time, as we are doing science as well. The analysis my team is doing is often at the end of the experiment, so finding the most optimal ways of working with the lab-based biologists and getting them the results they need can be challenging. However, we find efficient ways of working and maintain strong communication as a way to navigate challenges and problem solve together.
Computational biology has evolved a lot in the last years. With AI and everything coming in, do you have tips for scientists on how to stay up to date and navigate this?
I think it’s following their interest. We are very lucky in computational biology because we can quite easily also learn new skills or learn to analyse new data types. So, it’s keeping open minded, but also to continue doing what you find really interesting because then you’re doing your best and I think that usually helps you.
And what are you most excited about in the field right now?
That all of the omics technologies are evolving so quickly and we start being able to get multi-omics data from patient samples more regularly. I think that will open up a lot for us in the future, in what we can do in understanding diseases. So, I find it very, very exciting.
You mentioned earlier on about how important the mentorship was for you. Do you have any tips on seeking mentorship?
I think to be successful you need to define what you want to learn. With my first mentor, I let him know that I wanted to get into the more strategic area. I think it was also a lucky combination of things and that he was just an amazing mentor. I was going through change on my team and having him to discuss with just made me grow so fast.
He also put things into my head that were so far away from my comfort zone that I would never ever do that. But there were things on the way to that, where I dared to go because someone had put that far away goal. I dared to go a bit – and that was just amazing.
My mentor was a person who was not close to my area of expertise either. When looking for a mentor, it can be good to look somewhere totally different, because then you don’t end up discussing the science or the details of the topics. It opens up opportunities to discuss your development in a different way because you don’t have that common denominator of getting into the science.
Is there anything else we haven’t talked about that you really want PhDs and postdocs to know?
That the pharma industry is doing a lot of innovative research. I would also encourage PhDs and postdocs to register to attend our 3rd Transforming Science Day event at EMBL Heidelberg where they can hear from myself and other scientists, R&D leaders, and our partners about what makes innovation different at Boehringer and also the different opportunities that a career in pharma can present.
Maria can be found on LinkedIn here.
