Shahrzad’s placement with Revvity Discovery
Shahrzad Moradi Fard, a UEA PhD student completed her PIPS at Revvity Discovery Ltd as she wanted experience outside of academia as she starts to explore options in industry post PhD.
Revvity Discovery is a developer and provider of end-to-end solutions designed to help scientists, researchers, and clinicians solve the world’s greatest health challenges. They pair the enthusiasm of an industry disruptor with the experience of a longtime leader with specialised focus areas in translational multi-omics technologies, biomarker identification, imaging, prediction, screening, detection and diagnosis, informatics and more.
On her placement, Shahrzad completed a project on optimising plasmids with different promoter sizes in different cell lines. She learnt cell culture basics, how to take care of different cell lines, how to transfer them and check the efficiency of the transfection nu checking their GFP expression levels – these cell culture techniques were completely new to her. Learning all this from scratch not only expanded Shahrzad’s knowledge but helped to increase her confidence and time-management skills as she completed the project. Shahrzad commented,
“During my placement, I gained valuable hands-on experience in cell culture and CRISPR-based transfection and had the opportunity to optimise plasmids for the company. One of the most rewarding aspects of my project was identifying a high-performing plasmid that showed strong results across different cell lines — with potential to become the new backbone used in future workflows. I am profoundly grateful to have contributed something meaningful to the team.”
Shahrzad enjoyed having a shared research goal with the Revvity team. She found all the lab members in the cell line engineering team were happy to help and she enjoyed the collaborative discussions at lab meetings which focused on organisation, completing customer projects, manufacturing, efficiency as well as the science behind it all. She experienced how every person’s work within a team affects the outcome and how being organised is vital as all members of the team are responsible for completion of a project.
Her placement experience has deepened Shahrzad’s interest in biotech research as well as playing a significant part in her professional development.
Shahrzad’s advice to students preparing for their PIPS is to take advantage of this opportunity and the Mentoring Programme offered by UEA to experience something which will help future career goals.