Written by Scott Heimlich, Vice President, Amgen Foundation
Blog
Can you imagine the implications to the country and society if we were better able to harness and unleash the talent all around us? What if opportunity and culture unlocked the ambition and dreams of more people – young and old – to achieve their potential? We’re barely scratching the surface.
The path from Amgen Scholars to working at a major pharmaceutical company has been anything but linear for Jan Botthof. Between his undergraduate work, PhD program, and now as a trainee in the International Future Leadership Program for Product Supply at Bayer, Botthof has taken time to try different roles and figure out the best balance of science in his career. Through his journey, Botthof has learned that many career options are available to those with science skills that go beyond traditional benchwork.
Kudos to Amgen Scholars alumni Corshai Williams and Enrique Garcia-Rivera for so eloquently sharing their stories at The Atlantic Education Summit (per this 10-minute session). To learn more of Corshai’s remarkable story, see this profile in the Baltimore Sun.
This question is so fundamental, and yet too often it’s not even asked by those funding and working towards social impact.
We assume it was asked and answered by someone else at some earlier time, or that this initiative with its holistic approach to the whole person can’t be reduced to a single or even set of metrics. Or maybe it’s that we simply don’t have the time and resources to build that data-driven culture that allows us to adjust our strategy and actions based on whether our indicators of success are flashing green or red.
Amgen Teach Science Projects Workshop In The Future Classroom Lab, 5-6 April
The workshop was co-organised by the Amgen Teach and Space EU projects and had 12 Amgen Teach Ambassadors and 10 Space EU Teacher Training Institutes (TTIs) participating during a 2 day event at the European Schoolnet headquarters in Brussels
The workshop brought together STEM teachers from across Europe with the aim to train the newly appointed Amgen Teach Ambassadors who will be disseminating the Amgen Teach project at national level.
The science community really is a small world. Nick Watkins and Rocío Mercado met years ago in chemistry lab at at the University of California, Berkeley. Mercado mentored Watkins when she was a graduate student instructor and he was a second semester undergrad. While they have remained in close contact since, it wasn’t until they were contacted for this story that they realized they shared something in common: They are both Amgen Scholars who participated in the program at Caltech, years apart.
I joined the teaching service as I realised that teaching was very meaningful and rewarding, especially when students came back after their graduation to express how much we, as their teachers had impacted their lives and how we had influenced their career choices.
The international reach of the Amgen Scholars Program is broader than ever before, with 8 new institutions in Asia, Australia, Canada, and the United States joining the Program in 2019 – bringing the total number of global sites to 24. As the Japan Amgen Scholars Program enters its fifth year, Steve Sugino, Vice President of Amgen, caught up with its Directors, Dr. Ichiro Sakuma, Professor at The University of Tokyo, and Dr. Fuyuki Ishikawa, Professor at Kyoto University, about their views on innovation, memorable student moments, and more.
Written by Scott Heimlich, Vice President, Amgen Foundation
Blog
Day 1 (March 4, 2019)
First off, a thank you to the Lemelson Foundation for inviting me to speak at their session tomorrow on A New Paradigm for Tomorrow’s Workforce. I look forward to joining my fellow panelists from Lemelson, the Digital Harbor Foundation, McKay High School, and MIT to discuss this important issue.
Becky Pferdehirt knew she wanted to be a scientist ever since her high school biology class. Seeing a DNA band move through agarose gel got her hooked on discovery, and she became driven toward a scientific career that she hoped would “leave the world better than I had found it,” she says.
