Speaker Series - Weslee Glenn, PhD
What is the BA Speaker Series?:
The BA Speakers Series will bring in PhDs that have transitioned to non-academic careers and experts that help PhDs in this process. Each day of the series we will have a speaker from a different field who will give their insights on transitioning out of academia, what it is like to work in their field of expertise and strategies for building transferable skills such as networking. Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions to these experts as part of an informal discussion during this event. Join us for the first event of this series! Details below.
Date:
September 29th, 2020. 5-6pm.
Location:
Zoom. RSVP for Zoom details. Attendance will be capped at the first 20 RSVPs in order to promote discussion.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Weslee Glenn is a Principal Scientist at Provivi, Inc. in Santa Monica, California. Before his time at Provivi, his academic and professional interests focused on (1) understanding and engineering the processes that plants use to make the natural products that we humans co-opt as medicines and (2) developing technologies to understand how plants respond to stress, which will ultimately enable the facile engineering of important food crops. His work has been funded by several national fellowship competitions including the Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, the United Negro College Fund/ Merck Post-Doctoral Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. Dr. Glenn completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he developed Bioorthogonal Non-Canonical Amino Acid Tagging (BONCAT) to study protein synthesis in plants. His post-doctoral work was published as a ‘Breakthrough Technology’ in the journal Plant Physiology. Prior to Caltech, Dr. Glenn earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in chemistry in 2013. While at MIT, Weslee was the recipient of many research fellowships and awards, including the MIT Institute Fellowship, the Henry Hill Research Award and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award for his work in stereotype threat and diversity training. During his Ph.D., he also completed a stent as a visiting research scholar at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England. Dr. Glenn’s current interests include sustainable agriculture and integrated pest management. In addition to his work at Provivi, Weslee also serves on the Environmental Advisory Commission for the City of Pasadena. Weslee is also deeply involved in and committed to promoting diversity in STEM fields.
Focus:
STEM, Biotechnology, PhD in Industry