World, Meet BioDojo
An active community dedicated towards training future biotech innovators and shaping the new, cross-disciplinary bioeconomy
It’s been 6 months since we created BioDojo, and here we are! What originally started out as a group chat for supporting ambitious life sciences undergrads, grew into a community dedicating to training and promoting the next generation of scientists to contribute to the biotech sector.
Thank you for joining us as we take our first steps as a community, here’s what we have been up to!
What BioDojo is
BioDojo is a cross-disciplinary life sciences community for undergraduates with an interest in solving biological problems, and a unique skillset to bring to the table. Our community aims to accomplish 3 main things:
Lower the barriers to entry for high-potential life sciences undergraduates to join early and mid-stage biotech startups as technical roles.
Expose students to adjacent high-impact areas of biology and provide actionable ways to get involved or collaborate with someone in the field.
Foster a generational network of biological problem solvers that can lead to high-impact collaborations and projects.
To accomplish these three items, we provide the following:
A community that is ripe for small-team collaborations, workshops on how to “sell science”, and a talent pipeline to industry and venture capital contacts.
Bi-monthly community “deep-dives” into a particular area of interesting biology research. Each deep-dive consists of (i) a BioDojo-exclusive fireside chat for the topic, and (ii) a playbook that breaks down the scientific fundamentals of the field and the latest innovations.
We run our community as an organized discord server, with each cohort consisting of 25–30 like-minded students. We bond over everything from geeking out over cutting edge science, to discussing news about new startups, to jamming out over midnight-vibe Spotify playlists.
We are cross-disciplinary, not tied down to any university or institution, and care first and foremost about the people who join our community:
Looking at the Past 6 Months…
From world-renown PIs joining us for firesides, to deep dives into computational biochemistry, to celebrating our community’s fellowship acceptances — we’ve been up to a lot within these past few months since starting up.
Fireside Chats: Learning from the Best
Over the past few months, we’ve had the tremendous opportunity to be in great conversation with thought-leaders in their respective fields for our community deep-dives:
Juan Carlos Zuniga-Pflucker, PhD — Chair, Department of Immunology, University of Toronto; Senior Scientist, Sunnybrook Research Institute
Warren Chan, PhD — Director, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto
Bharath Ramsundar, PhD — Stanford University, DeepChem, Google, Deep Forest Sciences
Nozomu Yachie, PhD — Associate Professor, School of Biomedical Engineering, University of British Columbia
Public Events: Sharing the Knowledge
We’ve had the pleasure of hosting two public events so far — on the transition from SAAS to biotech (by Brandon White), and details on mRNA vaccines (by Wilson Poon).
Brandon White— on his transition from software engineering and SAAS at Uber, to working in biotech as an early employee of Freenome.
Wilson Poon, PhD — on how the Pfizer and Modern mRNA vaccines were designed, getting into the nitty-gritty biochemistry of its design.
Community: The Most Important Aspect
The diversity of expertise that makes up our current cohort is inspiring! Having a hub for life sciences talent to geek out and make meaningful relationships has been the most reward part of this whole journey so far.
As a community, we’ve explored developmental immunology, computational biochemistry, nanomedicine, and synthetic biology — supplemented by monthly themes, recurrent brainpods, and conversations with our guiding mentors (Ashton Trotman-Grant, Aishwarya Khanduja, & Ben Ouyang).
Only a couple months in, BioDojo has been making strides in the growth and development of our Bioneers. Follow us on Twitter to stay up to date with us and everything we’ve got going on.
We are excited to announce that we will be accepting applications for our 2021–2022 cohort. If you’re interested in joining the select few at BioDojo next year, fill out this form to apply.