BACE Credential Earner: Samuel Camilli

Name:

Samuel Camilli

Organization:

Boston University

Position:

Graduate Student Researcher

> About:

Samuel Camilli is currently a first-year master’s student in the Pathology Laboratory Sciences program at the Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine. His thesis work focuses on DNA damage repair (DDR) mechanisms and their intersection with genomic instability in human health and disease. The particular model Samuel is using to study DDR is triple-negative breast cancer, a highly aggressive form of breast cancer with poor outcomes.

Research has helped Samuel build problem-solving and critical thinking skills that he is sure will benefit him on the road to becoming a physician. He believes understanding research and the innovations it drives in medicine are critical to providing the most up-to-date care possible for his future patients.

> Academic and Career Preparation:

Earning the BACE credential helped Samuel as a student, a mentor, and a scientist. As a student, the BACE content solidified his foundation of understanding in the biological sciences, while building upon it with instruction on the biotechnology industry and institutional guidelines for practicing safe, quality research.

As a mentor, he designed and led a cohort of 20 students through a course featuring curated set of comprehensive resources aligned with the objectives tested on the BACE. He and two other students designed the course and led all of the students through practical laboratory sessions to coincide with the instructional content. There was a high pass rate among the first cohort, and so they trained another group of ambitious students to take on the next cohorts. More than a year has passed since the cohorts began, and the program is still going strong at his alma mater institution: the University of South Florida.

Lastly, as a scientist, Samuel believes earning the BACE credential set him apart from others in his field. Having an industry-level credential as an undergraduate demonstrates to researchers that he can excel in academia or industry. In fact, the BACE credential allowed many of the students in Samuel’s first cohort to find their first lab position. It is usually difficult to demonstrate lab skills before your first position in a lab, but BACE creates exactly that opportunity for many students.

> Job Description:

As a graduate student, Samuel’s day-to-day duties primarily focus on his thesis work. He performs tissue cultures on breast cancer cells to ensure healthy growth and maintenance of different cell lines and utilizes many molecular biological techniques to characterize the behavior of his cells in response to DNA damage.

Most recently, he used an irradiator to introduce double-strand breaks in the DNA of cells. He then performed an acid extraction to remove the chromatin and quantified proteins, localizing to it using a Western Blot. This is just one example, but some other techniques he will be learning are comet assays, chromatin staining, immuno-precipitation, RNA sequencing, and colony survival assays.

> Best Thing About Your Job?:

Samuel’s favorite part about his current position is the creative freedom to steer his project in any particular direction. He says he doesn’t necessarily have criteria for the results he needs for his thesis but rather, he feels the process is more organic and the biological techniques will guide his understanding of the mechanisms occurring in his cells. He thinks his thesis work has the perfect balance of structure and ambiguity that keeps the science so exciting, while keeping him confident in the project itself.

> Lessons Learned and Advice:

A huge lesson Samuel has learned is that biology and nature itself are impossible for us to control. Even when you account for seemingly every variable in an experiment, there will always be some natural variation in the results you obtain. His best advice is to ensure you are taking the time necessary to understand how the science is working and why you are doing the experiment, and know that you will have to repeat it regardless. Repetition is the best way to build confidence in research.