One Day, One Job » medicine

Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research

Willy Franzen — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:28:02 +0000

There are countless celebrities who support charitable causes. There are many who throw their full support behind a single organization; however, few celebs are as personally invested in their charitable work as Michael J. Fox is. Why is he so invested? Because his life is on the line. He is suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, “a degenerative disease of the brain that often impairs motor skills, speech, and other functions.” If you’ve seen Michael J. Fox on tv lately, you’ve seen what Parkinson’s does to the human body. It’s a tragic disease that will hopefully be cured due to the work of the New York City based Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. As an accomplished actor and someone who is living with Parkinson’s, Michael J. Fox is the perfect person to lead the fight against the disease.

Outfox Parkinson’s

The MJFF’s mission is pretty simple; they are “dedicated to finding a cure for Parkinson’s disease within the decade through an aggressively funded research agenda and to ensuring the development of improved therapies for those living with Parkinson’s today.” The Fox Foundation has already funded $142 million in Parkinson’s research, but they’re clearly not satisfied stopping there. To accomplish that, they need a top notch staff, so it’s no big surprise that they’re hiring. If you head over to the MJFF’s Jobs page you’ll see 5 open positions. 3 of them require significant previous work experience, but the other 2 seem well suited to new college grads—Grant Administrator – Research Programs and Development Assistant. You can apply by sending a cover letter and resume to foxjob@michaeljfox.org.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

What have you heard about the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research?

Public Library of Science

Willy Franzen — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 12:07:27 +0000

Most scientific literature isn’t what I’d call an easy read, so I wouldn’t be surprised if most of you aren’t beating down the doors to get your hands on the newest research papers. Unless you are a big consumer of research literature, then you probably don’t care much about the openness of scientific and medical publishing, but you should. Open sharing of information can significantly promote innovation, and who can argue against wanting more advances in science and medicine? The Public Library of Science is all about open sharing, as they are a San Francisco, CA based “nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource.” They were founded in 2000, and since then they’ve been pushing for scientific and medical journals that “are immediately available online, with no charges for access and no restrictions on subsequent redistribution or use.”

Open Up Your Job Search

The Public Library of Science has three main goals that are hard to argue against:

Open the doors to the world’s library of scientific knowledge by giving any scientist, physician, patient, or student – anywhere in the world – unlimited access to the latest scientific research.
Facilitate research, informed medical practice, and education by making it possible to freely search the full text of every published article to locate specific ideas, methods, experimental results, and observations.
Enable scientists, librarians, publishers, and entrepreneurs to develop innovative ways to explore and use the world’s treasury of scientific ideas and discoveries.

If you love science and think the open source movement is one of the coolest recent social movements, then a job at the Public Library of Science would be a perfect fit for you. You can check out all of their available opportunities on their Jobs page; however, none of the jobs currently posted are explicitly entry level. Depending on what kind of things you’ve done up to this point, the Production Editor and Agile Quality Engineer positions might be worth checking out. You can apply for a job at the Public Library of Science by sending a resume and cover letter to jobs@plos.org with the job title as the subject line.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

What do you think of the Public Library of Science’s push for openness?

Project HEALTH

Willy Franzen — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:05:25 +0000

It’s no secret that poverty and poor health are deeply related. Limited access to healthcare is part of the reason, but there’s a lot more to the story. Nearly everything that we do in our lives has some bearing on our health outcomes, and a life in poverty creates factor after factor that leads to poor health outcomes. Project HEALTH is a non-profit organization that works in Baltimore, MD; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; New York, NY; Providence, RI; and Washington, DC to break “the link between poverty and poor health.” Honestly, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I think that poverty and poor health will forever be intertwined, but battling poverty will be the key to creating better health outcomes for lower-income people. I guess it all depends on how you define poverty.

A Project for You

Despite my confusion with Project Health’s tagline, I think that they’ve put together two awesome programs that show that they really do get it. The first is Family Help Desk, which offers clinics where “physicians can ‘prescribe’ food, housing, health insurance, job training, fuel assistance, or other resources for their patients as routinely as they do medication.” I always thought it was kind of silly that our medical system focused mostly on prescribing medication and not on making recommendations about other areas patients’ lives, so I think that Project HEALTH has nailed it here. It should be so surprise that:

The Family Help Desk’s straightforward, preventative referrals to government and community resources – such as affordable housing, child care, employment, GED classes, and job training – enable families to avert crises and to access increased income and education, which have been documented to result in better long-term health outcomes

It sounds like an amazing program! Project HEALTH’s second program is called STRIVE and it’s “an afterschool intervention that provides low-income teens with sickle cell disease with the mentoring, peer support, academic assistance, and disease management education they need to manage their condition effectively and realize their full potential.” It also sounds like it’s doing some impressive work. Another part of the Project HEALTH story is that most of their projects are staffed by college volunteers. On that note, they do have jobs beyond the volunteer level for those of you who have graduated. Project HEALTH’s Jobs page has 6 openings posted right now. 5 are as Family Help Desk Program Managers (in Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Providence, and Washington, DC) which seem to require some prior work experience, while the other job is clearly entry level – Family Help Desk Program Assistant, Baltimore. You can find out how to apply from the job descriptions.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

What do you think about Project HEALTH?

The National Academies

Willy Franzen — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 13:16:29 +0000

Today on One Day, One Internship we’re taking a look at internships with the Space Studies Board. That brought our attention to The National Academies, which is a non-profit organization that consists of the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and the United States National Research Council (NRC). Although it may sound like they’re government agencies, they’re not. They do, however, get most of their funding from federal and state agencies. Despite that fact, they remain independent when advising the nation on Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

Don’t Worry, It’s Not More School

Although The National Academies is an extremely academic environment, they’re not technically in the business of education. They are key advisers to our federal government on a wide range of scientific topics, so if you have a background in science, you might want to check out jobs at The National Academies. They currently have 28 openings, and a decent number look like they might be suitable for new college grads. All of the jobs that we’re looking at are based out of Washington, DC; however, The National Academies occasionally has opportunities at exotic locations. Jobs that you might want to check out include Web Programmer at the Division on Earth & Life Studies, Research Associate (here and here also) at the Institute of Medicine, and Program Assistant at the Transportation Research Board or the Division of Earth & Life Studies, Media Associate, and Accounting/Financial Assistant. To apply for any of these jobs, you can do so online directly from the job description.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

What do you know about The National Academies?

Exponent

Willy Franzen — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:00:28 +0000

Imagine getting a job as a MythBuster, except instead of debunking urban legend, you’re investigating real life problems that plague businesses and sometimes hurt people. That’s what you could be doing at Exponent. Founded in 1967 by five Ph.D.-level researchers, Exponent was originally known as Failure Analysis Associates. They started out in the energy industry studying stress and fracture mechanics, but very quickly they were “investigating and analyzing accidents and failures of all kinds.” They eventually became The Failure Group, and were listed on the NASDAQ with the ticker FAIL. In 1998 they realized that they had outgrown their name, and changed again to Exponent, because it means “one who expounds or interprets.” We don’t usually get so deep into how a company chooses it’s name, but with the popularity of the FAIL meme (see also: FAIL Blog), we thought that you might be amused.

Failures Need Not Apply

Despite their fascination with failure, Exponent has a staff of nearly 800 people with backgrounds in over 90 scientific and engineering disciplines. In other words, people who work at Exponent deal with failure often, but they try to keep it at an arm’s length. Are you still not sure what we mean by failure? Here are some examples of projects that Exponent has worked on: investigating defects in automatic revolving doors; determining the path and altitude of Delta flight 191 which crashed and killed 134 people; recreation of the accident that killed James Dean for an NBC series, and testing the Suzuki Samurai for rollover vulnerabilities. There are many more projects that Exponent has worked on, and you can view multimedia presentations on many of them in the Exponent Multimedia Archive. We could keep writing about Exponent’s work for hours – it’s that interesting – but they have a plethora of entry-level job opportunities that we need to talk about.

Entry-Level Jobs to the Xth Power

Exponent’s web site is about as entry-level friendly as we’ve seen, although they could do a better job of making sure that new college grads can navigate to the right jobs. When you visit Exponent’s Careers Page, you’ll notice that they’ve prominently linked to their University Recruiting page. Their approach to University Recruiting on the web is really cool, but it’s not intuitive. There’s a text box that allows you to enter in your school name to search for current alumni from your school and to learn about upcoming recruiting events on your campus. There’s also a list of the 20 schools from which they employ the most alums. For instance, take a look at Cornell’s page (I’m not biased or anything – GO BIG RED!). It’s a really cool way to engage students, but it only works if the students go to a school that Exponent has a page for. A lot of students probably end up on the University Recruiting page and don’t know what to do next.

This is where a little searching helps. If you visit Exponent’s How to Apply page, you’ll see information for entry-level candidates. Here they direct you to contact their College Recruiter, Jenny Irwin, at jirwin@exponent.com or to take a look at their entry-level job listings (these are opportunities specifically for new grads). Here you’ll find a ton of fascinating jobs in a variety of locations. We will warn you, however, that seemingly all of the entry-level jobs currently listed with Exponent require some sort of advanced degree (MS or PhD). Since so many Engineers seem to stick around and get a Masters, we thought it would still be appropriate to feature Exponent’s jobs today.

Some of the most recent listings on Exponent’s site include Engineers, Vehicle Engineering (Menlo Park, CA and Natick, MA); Scientists, Public Health & Industrial (Menlo Park, CA; Bellevue, WA; Wood Dale, IL; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Oakland, CA; Irvine, CA; Philadelphia, PA; Alexandria, VA; and Washington, DC); and Engineers, Technology Development (Menlo Park, CA; San Diego, CA; and Washington, DC). There are many more opportunities listed on their site, and you can apply online through their applicant tracking system. If you want to work for Exponent but are just finishing up undergrad, then you better start thinking about graduate school.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Do you feel like your entry-level job search is a failure of such grand proportion that Exponent may have to investigate what happened? Subscribe to One Day, One Job (it’s free), and make sure that doesn’t happen.

Shriners Hospitals for Children

Willy Franzen — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:37:00 +0000

We hope you had a safe 4th of July. Unfortunately, every year some people don’t. Fireworks are a lot of fun, but they can result in some really nasty burns and injuries. Since we encouraged you to blow stuff up yesterday, we thought we’d counter that by featuring a non-profit organization that helps children who endure severe burns. The Shriners Hospitals for Children do exactly that. Who are Shriners? They wear funny hats. They drive little cars in parades. They’re Freemasons. And most importantly, they help kids through their hospitals. That’s going to be our focus today, since new college grads probably aren’t too interested in being part of a fraternal organization that seems like it probably has an average age north of 60. Then again, you probably got all hot and bothered about your college’s greek organizations and secret societies.

What Do Red Fezzes Have to Do with Burn Treatment?

So a group of Freemasons decided to start a non-religious fraternal organization for fun and fellowship based on a Middle Eastern theme, what the heck does that have to do with kids and burns? Somewhere along the way the guys in the organization decided to do some serious philanthropy, so they started Shriners Hospitals for Children which “is a one-of-a-kind international health care system of 22 hospitals dedicated to improving the lives of children by providing specialty pediatric care, innovative research and outstanding teaching programs.” Their three focuses are orthopedic care, burn care, and spinal cord injury rehabilitation. Over Shriners Hospitals for Childrens’ 86 years, they have provided free medical care to more than 865,000 children. Wow.

Do I Have to Wear a Funny Hat to Work There?

We don’t think wearing a red fez is a required part of the dress code, but we can’t make any promises. Shriners Hospitals for Children is headquartered in Tampa, FL and has hospitals in Boston, Canada, Chicago, Cincinnati, Erie, Galveston, Greenville, Honolulu, Houston, Salt Lake City, Lexington, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Northern California, Philadelphia, Portland, Shreveport, Spokane, Springfield, St Louis, Tampa, and Twin Cities. They have jobs available in just about every field imaginable, especially in medical related areas. Quite a few of these jobs are appropriate for entry-level candidates, but we’re not going to go through each of them. Shriners Hospitals for Children has a lot of job openings, and they do a nice job of organizing their Job Opportunities. Although their Careers site isn’t flashy, it should be easy to navigate. If helping children who are enduring seemingly unthinkable medical conditions is something that you could devote your life to (and you’re not going to Med school), there are few better places to begin a career then one of the Shriners Hospitals for Children.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Have you ever seen the Shriners drive their little cars around?

Epocrates

Willy Franzen — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:00:09 +0000

We didn’t get a whole lot done yesterday. We were slightly distracted by the events going on at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), where Apple announced a 3G iPhone along with some amazing software updates, and a daytime Yankees game on tv. A lot of people complained that too much time was spent at WWDC talking about software, but we couldn’t get enough of it. A couple really cool apps in the medical field (Modality and MIMvista) were showcased, but neither of the companies that developed them appeared to have entry-level jobs; however, Epocrates is a company that was featured at the announcement of the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) and is also putting the iPhone into use in the practice of medicine.

Decision Support Tools in Your Pocket

Apple always brags about how many songs you can fit in your pocket with an iPod. Not to put down musicians, but being able to have an entire medical library in your pocket is way more impressive. Epocrates “develops clinical information and decision support tools that enable healthcare professionals to find answers more quickly and confidently at the point of care.” They do this by making the tools easily useable on mobile devices like an iPhone, Blackberry, or Palm Pilot. Now, when you go into your doctor with a weird rash that he’s never seen before, he won’t have to open up a 27 pound book – he’ll just reach for his iPhone and find the best way to treat it. It might be disheartening to know that most doctors don’t have all the answers in their head, but at least they can have them in their pocket.

Epocratic Jobs

Epocrates offers both free and paid products that are at the leading edge of medical decision making. They must be innovative to have been featured at an Apple event. With innovation comes growth, and it appears that Epocrates is growing pretty quickly. They have approximately 200 employees, and 15 new job openings (we hope that’s due to growth and not high turnover). Of these 15 positions, we identified 4 that might be well suited to a new college grad. We can’t link to the jobs because Epocrates’ Jobs List doesn’t want to play nice, but the entry-level positions that you might want to consider are Operations Administrator, QA Automation Engineer, QA Engineer, and Software Engineer. You can apply online, and you can also find a bit more about working at Epocrates on their Careers page.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Did you watch the WWDC Keynote? What are you most excited for? We’re pretty pumped about instant video highlights from MLBtv.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

Willy Franzen — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 13:00:15 +0000

It’s sad, but it seems safe to say that almost everyone knows someone who has been victimized by cancer. The good news is that constantly advancing medical knowledge brings us ever closer to winning the battle with all cancers. By combining medical know-how with a focus on people and the psychiatric effects of cancer, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has put itself at the forefront of the battle for almost 125 years. Whether you’re an aspiring doctor, looking to work in the healthcare industry, or have a personal vendetta against cancer, Sloan-Kettering has jobs that will help you pursue your passion.

We’re happy to see that Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has a great Jobs website with plenty of information to help job searchers learn more about what types of opportunities best suit them. This site is about as well done as any we’ve seen, and we also appreciated the fact that there is a special section for college students with a focus on entry-level jobs. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center offers four types of entry-level positions: Session Assistant, Physician’s Office Assistant, Research Study Assistant, and Research Opportunities (in Cancer Biology & Genetics, Cell Biology, Computational Biology, Developmental Biology, Immunology, Molecular Biology, Molecular Pharmacology and Chemistry, and Structural Biology). You can read more about each of these positions on Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s College Recruitment page.

You can apply for specific job openings, but it seems that entry-level candidates are better off applying for one of the four positions that we mentioned in the previous paragraph. Memorial Sloan-Kettering has been making the rounds at non-profit career fairs, so you may be able to catch them there to submit a resume, or you can contact Tara Stampe, their College Recruitment Coordinator, at stampet@mskcc.org. Jobs at Memorial Sloan-Kettering aren’t just available at their main campus on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but also at their other work sites, which include locations in New York City, Westchester County, Long Island, and New Jersey.

Note: On April 27th we revisited entry-level jobs at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Know of a great non-profit that needs to hire entry-level talent? Tell us about them in the comments, or e-mail us at info@onedayonejob.com.

Animal Replacement Technologies

Willy Franzen — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:00:12 +0000

Surgery takes practice. You can’t jump elbows deep into someone’s chest cavity and reroute traffic without having perfected the motor skills, knowledge, and composure required to do so. The problem is that practicing surgery is tricky. You need to do it on a living, breathing thing for it to be realistic. There aren’t too many people who are jumping at the opportunity to be cut up by aspiring surgeons, so that leaves only one viable option. Sadly, animals are used as proxies for human patients. Anyone would agree that this is an undesirable outcome, but there has been no other way to teach life saving procedures and develop new surgical techniques. The good news is that Sarasota, FL based Animal Replacement Technologies has created a brilliant solution.

We don’t have a lot to go on with Animal Replacement Technologies, but we thought that their story was intriguing enough to merit a post. They have engineered synthetic human tissues, organs, and body parts that mimic their living counterparts. Amazingly, these “body copies” are made of mostly salt, water, and fibers. Not only do these technologies save animals from the fate of being test subjects, but they also ” provide industry with the tools required to improve test data integrity, enhance device safety, shorten the development cycle, reduce time to market, minimize risk, and increase profits.” For a full overview of the company, you might want to read this article about Animal Replacement Technologies in Biz941. You should probably look at Animal Replacement Technologies’ own literature too. We’re totally over our head when it comes to the science behind these products, but we’re pretty sure that there are a lot of soon to be grads who would find it thrilling to be a part of this kind of project.

For students who have a deep interest in medical research, biological sciences, or materials engineering, a job at Animal Replacement Technologies would be a home run. They don’t have a Careers page, nor do they have any job openings listed online; however, their About page does invite interested applicants to send a resume to info@anireptec.com. Try cold calling (Edit: Animal Replacement Technologies founder Dr. Christopher Sakezles left a comment asking you not to cold call on the phone, but said that submitting a resume online is fine), and swing for the fences, even if it’s a low probability play. Maybe you can convince them that as a new college graduate, you’re just what they need and that they should create an entry-level position just for you

Disclaimer: When researching Animal Replacement Technologies, don’t click any of the links to videos (.mpg) on their site, especially if you’re using a Mac with Safari. Doing so froze our computer three times for some reason that we can’t figure out. The things we go through to bring you a new job every day…

Note: On April 25th we revisited entry-level jobs at Animal Replacement Technologies.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Know anything about jobs at Animal Replacement Technologies? Leave a comment.