Meet Dr. Danielle Twum

Have you always been interested in STEM as a child?

As a child, I was interested in science. I didn’t know about the term “STEM.” I think I learned about that way later in life. But yes, I was interested in biology and physics. I don’t know about chemistry, but I was very interested in biology and physics. I’ve always been interested in anything scientific, but the term STEM—science, technology, engineering, math—as I said, I learned about it way later in life. But I’ve always been interested in understanding the way the world works, which we know now, is STEM.

What made you want to pursue biology and cancer immunology in particular?

As I said, I’ve always been interested in biology. I thought for the longest time I was going to become a medical doctor. But then I went to college, and I took one class. That class pivoted me into research, and then later on into cancer research.

From then on, I went into cancer research because, unfortunately, I lost an uncle to a brain tumor. I wanted to understand what cancer is—what this disease is. That question led me onto a path. The thing about research, which I love, is once you ask one question, it leads to more and more questions. What I learned in getting my PhD is that a PhD is a very flexible degree. Once you get it, you can pivot it into different careers. Becoming a cancer immunologist made me very malleable. It made it so that I can take my knowledge of how the immune system works in cancer and apply it in so many different fields.

Right now, I’m working as a medical science liaison, but I have worked as a field application scientist, translational science liaison, and business development manager. If they pull you into any receptacle, you can take it because that’s what a PhD teaches you. A PhD teaches you how to learn. So, I think it wasn’t just learning and going into my field of cancer immunology, it was getting a PhD. That was the cherry on the top.

Did you have an all-time favorite subject or class during school?

One of my favorite classes was fashion. I bet you didn’t see that coming. I took a ‘Fashion Throughout the Ages’ class as part of my French minor in college.

Actually, I will say my all-time favorite class was ‘The History of Sugar’ also in my French class, which looked at how the impact of sugar affected the slave trade, colonization, and just how the thirst for sugar changed the world. It changed geography. It changed language. It changed the spread of language in the spread of culture, and you could literally draw it all down to a T. It was a very, very impactful class, and it was taught all in French!

Those are my two favorite classes. None of them science.

Why did you choose to pursue a career in industry rather than academia?

For me, it’s the flexibility of it. That’s a word you’ll hear me use a lot: flexibility. I love flexibility. I love the option to try different things, as evidenced by the fact that my favorite classes were not science classes. I also intentionally went to a liberal arts school because it gave me a chance to take classes from different departments. I don’t think that we should all be boxed in, right? I think we should have a chance to explore our different interests because we’re made up of multitudes. We should be allowed to see where our strengths are and see how we can combine our strengths into greatness.

For me, that’s what industry represents. In industry, you get exposed to so many ways you can take what you’ve learned and turn it into something better. It gives you a chance to rotate in different departments and say: “I’m kind of good at this… could I go work here and apply whatever knowledge I’ve already acquired and make it better?”

What inspired you to enter the Three Minute Thesis Competition as a PhD student?

This was the era when I knew I was going to leave academia, so I was trying to practice interviewing for jobs in industry.

One of the things I was told was that you have to be able to talk about your work in three minutes because most elevator rides are short, and you just never knew who you might be connecting with. You never knew when you would network, so you just always had to have an idea of your work in your pocket. You also never knew if you were going to be working in a purely scientific place or perhaps somewhere non-scientific. So, you had to have a scientific version of your work and a non-scientific version of your work.

The Three Minute Thesis competition was a challenge to have a non-scientific summarization of your work—one without any scientific jargon. Imagine talking about cancer metastasis, which is the spread of cancer, without saying the word metastasis. That was the challenge: to talk about your work without scientific jargon. I couldn’t have done it without my best friend. The thing that freaked her out was that I remember we had practiced and refined my speech so many times, but then I took a shower right before the competition, and I changed it…

And what motivated me? Number one, I was about to job hunt. Number two, if I won, the first prize was $1,000, and the second prize was $750. As a graduate student at the time, $750 was my biweekly salary, so if I could win that, that was a paycheck! Those were great motivators, but also it was an exercise. It was a challenge to see if I could talk about my work without falling back on the terms I knew and felt comforted by. I can always talk about metastasis. I can talk about transcription factors. But how do you talk about transcription factors to a 12 year old? Yeah. That’s why that was a fun exercise. So that’s why I did it.

Why is science communication important to you?

I think scientific communication is critical. Seeing as we just came through one of the deadliest pandemics in recent history to our knowledge, we saw the breakdown of scientific communication. We saw misinformation fly rapidly because of the internet. We saw a tool that was created to spread information be misused to spread misinformation.

I think in addition to scientific communication being used to restore trust in science, it should also be used to educate the general public and also be used to alleviate fear. I think at the base of everything is fear. Once people understand how things work, it’s less scary. For me, as I said at the beginning, biology is comforting. And the reason why it’s comforting is because once I know how something works, it’s less scary. I think that for a lot of people, fear is at the base of believing misinformation more than anything else.

I think scientists are trying their best, but without the support and necessary resources, they can only go so far. A lot of scientists tried on Twitter (now X), on Facebook, on Instagram. They tried, and I saw. I have friends who tried, and they argued until their voices were hoarse. But if you’re not getting enough resources from the government, you can’t get your message across. So, it has to be a concerted effort from those in power to try and get the right and correct message across to help alleviate fear. Fear is what makes people lash out, and science exists so that we are not scared. For me, science is why I usually am not scared. That’s my little moment.

Can you share some of the most exciting roles/projects you've been involved in?

My first role out of graduate school was a field application scientist, which is somebody whose one foot is in the lab and one foot is in the lab of another company. It was a very interesting role—one that mixes lab work and a lot of customer facing opportunities.

LevitasBio had a machine at the time that separated cells based on their density. Back when I was in graduate school, if you wanted to sort cells, you had to use antibodies. And you had to put these antibodies on the cell. Most of the time, what this does is that it can change the physiology of the cell. LevitasBio was working on a way to sort these cells without putting anything on it, by just using the inherent density of the cells. So I would go and install their machines in different labs all over Northern California, and I would broker a collaboration with the labs. Usually, the labs would have different cell types that we didn't have access to, and I would run experiments in those labs to get data of how our machines were behaving. Then, I would take that data back to LevitasBio. The role gave me a chance to work with other people and hone my skills of communicating science. I had to talk about the machine, learn a lot about the machine, and work with people that are not my office mates. It helped to have to talk to and learn about the types of cells they had so that I would know how the cells could potentially behave in our machines. I learned a lot.

Transitioning from graduate school into industry was like putting on new clothes that were my size, but made of different material, and I just had to get used to it. There was a learning curve for sure. It was a startup so things moved very fast. In a startup world, you are talking to the CEO at least once every three days. The CEO is always asking for your scientific opinion, so don’t say anything you can’t back up with science.

Working for Genoskin was different because Genoskin was a company that took actual human skin from whenever patients did a tummy tuck, and they kept the skin alive in their proprietary matrix. The skin is human, so you can inject it, UV-ray shock it, put topical creams on it. Anything you can do to the human skin, you could do to this skin. It was cruelty free because it’s just skin that they were going to throw away. It was also cool that Genoskin was based in France, so I was in the US working for a company based in France.

At Genoskin, I was a business development manager, so I was kind of in sales, but I was also a scientist. When I would reach out to companies, I would usually contact their chief science officer or their head of research, and we would talk about the science they were doing and whether Genoskin fit into their scientific project and plans. Whenever we would draw up a research plan, we would have to go through whatever experiment they wanted to conduct. Then, I would speak with our head of research, and we would have to see whether the experiment they were proposing was feasible or not.

I had to use my scientific background in both roles. These are all positions that are available to someone with a PhD, which I didn’t know was a thing that you could do when I was growing up.

Could you describe a typical day in your life?

I’ll usually wake up and deal with emails. Then, I usually do outreach to doctors I’m trying to set up meetings with. I try to set up meetings as much as I can in advance because doctors are very busy, so I try to be respectful of their time and their calendars.

If I do have a meeting, then I’ll get dressed and do a presentation. Sometimes I’m presenting my company’s pipeline to them. A pipeline is the portfolio of the company’s drug molecules and development. Sometimes, I am connecting either a doctor or their clinical trial staff to our clinical trial staff as the liaison. I’ll bring those two together and introduce them. If there’s a follow-up, I make sure I write up what the follow-up is and check in next week to make sure the follow up is done.

If I have to travel for conferences, I prefer traveling super early in the mornings so that there’s less likelihood of my flight getting canceled. When I go to conferences, I’m taking notes. I go to the conference to meet not only doctors I know but also to meet new doctors I don’t know. If a doctor gives a presentation that’s really impactful, and I think this doctor would be a good collaborator for my company, I go up and introduce myself and try to get a meeting with the doctor. There’s a lot of putting yourself out there and having thick skin. Keep trying and follow up.

At the end of the day, depending on the day, I’ll go to dance class!

What do you enjoy the most about what you do?

As a medical science liaison, knowing that my work—even a little bit—brings access to health care for patients is incredibly gratifying. My job is about building relationships between oncologists and pharmaceutical companies, so we’re helping to serve patients who might not even know about a particular treatment option. We’re finding out about patients that are being left behind. We’re collecting information about the clinical decisions of oncologists, and hopefully that’s helping to determine drugs that need to be made to help patients who need the treatment.

In these conversations, you also learn about different communities and their needs. Then, it helps in coming up with educational initiatives. I got into cancer work because my uncle died of a tumor when he was very young. I don’t think he even hit his 35th birthday. I don't want anybody to have a story like mine. That, to me, is why I do what I do.

Learn More:

• IF/THEN: https://ifthenexhibit.org/ambassador/D-01/