Alumni Spotlight: Rosa Chen, Ph.D., '21 (Neuroscience, Toth Lab)

What made Weill Cornell an attractive program for you? 

What drew me to the program at Weill Cornell was how collegiate it was. It was clear to me that Weill Cornell attracted students who were looking for a community. 

While I was a student, I was involved with the Graduate Student Executive Committee, which helped me feel closer to my fellow classmates and become more active in the community. Some of my best friends, five years after graduating, are still my graduate school friends. 

Did you go from undergrad straight into your PhD?

After graduating, I took two years to work full-time as a research technician in a stress neurobiology lab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. I knew I wanted to do a PhD, but I also knew how much work and commitment a PhD was going to be.

I was very upfront with the PI that I wanted to go into a PhD program, so I asked to be treated like a graduate student. I asked for a real understanding of what a graduate program would be like, as well as a personal project to work on. 

How did your work experience prior to graduate school impact you?

My PI was a great advisor. She let me try to design experiments; she wanted to hear my ideas, and she supported me to publish a first-author paper on my work in her lab. 

Those two years helped me to understand what the next 5-7 years of a PhD would be like. I had a lot of classmates who went straight from undergrad, and it worked for them, but for me, it was important to have that step in between. 

What was the process of choosing your lab at WCGS?

Part of why I chose Weill Cornell was because there were several PIs I could see myself working with. I had previous experience with addiction neurobiology (as an undergrad) and stress neurobiology (in post-grad).

I rotated through psychiatric disease focused labs and ultimately joined Miklos Toth’s lab. Though he was a pharmacology faculty member, his research interests were very neuro-centric, and I was fascinated by his work on non-genetic multi-generational transmission: how something that happens in one generation is passed on to the next generation in a non-genetic way.

What was your research focus at the Toth lab?

My thesis work was focused on characterizing the bioactive compounds that were transmitted from a pregnant mother to the fetus and identifying the mechanism by which that predisposed the offspring to developing neuropsychiatric disorders.

We found a new role for a circulating cytokine, XCL1, as a pregnancy hormone. Our work showed that disruptions to XCL1 signaling during pregnancy not only impacted proper placenta development, but also proper emotional behavior in the offspring. Our findings support a wealth of human epidemiological studies linking maternal inflammation during pregnancy and later life psychiatric disorders in their offspring. 

Click the link to read a short feature on this work.

What was the process of figuring out your next step post-graduation? 

Going into graduate school, I was fairly certain I did not want to go into academia. Weill Cornell has a very active network of alumni in non-academia roles, and that was a key resource I leveraged to understand what types of non-academic roles were out there.

I attended different alumni career panels when I was a student, and I was very set on strategic roles in industry until a fellow classmate in equity research reached out to me about a role they thought I would be a good fit for. I felt that it would be a good step towards where I ultimately wanted to be, so I worked for three years at Leerink Partners, a healthcare investment bank.

What was the transition to your current role? 

I have since transitioned to Royalty Pharma and joined their new Search and Evaluation team. Search and Evaluation operates upstream of Royalty Pharma’s core investment process, and we hunt for innovative and promising drugs and programs to identify investment opportunities earlier.           

I love this role because I can leverage my scientific training and equity research experience to diligence a very broad range of preclinical and clinical-stage drugs, without being restricted to any particular therapeutic area.

What’s your advice for current students about figuring out the next steps in their career? 

Don’t be in too much of a rush to graduate. The PhD process is so hard sometimes that you can’t wait to get through it, but it’s also a unique opportunity to explore creativity and problem-solving. Having the freedom to chase after cool science is really nice. 

At the same time, leverage the resources that Weill Cornell offers. Even if you’re not interested in a certain career, go to the panel about it anyway. I never expected to work in equity research, and had I attended those panels during grad school, I would’ve been better prepared as I stepped into that role. There’s a very hardworking team putting on these events, so why not go and learn about the different career paths alumni have taken after grad school?       

Even if it’s not something you want to do, you’ll network with alumni and you’ll better learn what elements of each job you do like, to ultimately guide you in the right direction.      

What's your advice for prospective students on picking the right program for them? 

Look at the alumni network to see where alumni end up after their PhD. I knew I wanted to go the non-academia route, and there are a lot of Weill Cornell alumni who had very interesting non-academia careers after their time at Weill Cornell, and that was encouraging to me.