La Salle’s proposed Center for Integrated Life Sciences would expand career opportunities for undergraduate science students by broadening their view of post-grad pathways.

By Matthew De George

For nearly two years, new aspects of the world’s life sciences infrastructure have come into mainstream consciousness as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. People have gotten an inside look at how vaccines—like the mRNA vaccine which relies on technology largely developed in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania—can go from the lab bench into people’s arms.

Even prior to vaccine development and distribution, global shortages of personal protective equipment and testing kits served as the kinds of interdisciplinary puzzles that don’t fit neatly into one area of study, but require cross-pollination between disciplines.

The goals of the proposed Center for Integrated Life Sciences at La Salle University are multiple—and would look to address those puzzles.

Not only would the Center for Integrated Life Sciences bring products of the lab into the real world, it also would offer chances for La Salle students to connect more deeply with the web of life sciences career paths, companies, and institutes in Philadelphia. Whether that’s finding internships and jobs, or mentors and future collaborators, the Center would leverage those ties to bring real-world experiences to La Salle students.

“That’s very exciting to us because, in addition to trying to be a positive for our students, the best teachers are the people who are doing it,” said Jason Diaz, Ph.D., an assistant professor in La Salle’s Integrated Science, Business and Technology (ISBT) program. “Can we make really robust connections with the innovation ecosystem that’s happening, literally, in our backyard? Can we interact with these young scientists and entrepreneurs who are trying to do that and try to bring it into the classroom?”

Once available to the La Salle community, the Center for Integrated Life Sciences additionally would bridge the knowledge gap for students who may see acceptance to medical school or enrollment in a Ph.D. program as the only endpoints of their undergraduate studies. The new center would expose students to a broad, interdisciplinary range of course and career options, from adjacent sciences to business and entrepreneurial opportunities, expanding what they imagined was possible with their scientific interests.

Brian DeHaven, Ph.D., has seen the same story play out year after year.

On the first day of class, the associate professor of biology will ask first-year students enrolled in one of the department’s core courses whether they are on the pre-med track. In response, dozens of hands shoot into the air—easily the majority of the students in the room. If DeHaven were to move to a senior-level course at La Salle and ask the same question, drastically fewer hands would go up.

For many biology majors, medical school is a default pathway when they enter college. Most, however, change plans before reaching that goal. Some of that owes to a rigorous and selective course load. But some of the initial interest and subsequent waning, is a matter of the expectations they arrive with—that med school is the only outcome.

“A lot of people are pre-med because that’s what they are told exists while they are in high school, that that’s what your career should be,” said DeHaven, a microbiologist and virologist. “And as they go through college, if we’re doing our jobs well, they’re coming into contact with all these different careers and things they can do that they didn’t even know existed when they first arrived at La Salle.”

That’s why La Salle’s Department of Biology and ISBT are opting for a different tack, instead of passively allowing those selective forces to work on undergrads.

The Center for Integrated Life Sciences at La Salle crystallizes around the vision of the ISBT major with a more robust overlap on the biology side. ISBT already seeks to merge science and technology with business and applicable liberal arts. The point of ISBT, behind which the Center for Integrated Life Sciences would put more resources, is to show La Salle students the full innovation lifecycle of an idea or technology from lab to marketplace, understanding the business, supply-chain, and legal pathways required. As Diaz explained it, he wants La Salle students to ask, “How does a finding in the lab become a technology that’s solving a problem, then go out into the world?”

ISBT coalesces around three key themes: Energy and natural resources, information and knowledge management (essentially artificial intelligence and deep learning), and biotechnology. The Center for Integrated Life Sciences at La Salle would focus most heavily on the latter prong of ISBT’s curriculum at the outset.

The Center is designed to add new programs and expand existing ones by bringing them under one roof and one shared mission. Among the opportunities available to La Salle students is a new translational life sciences minor that includes hands-on experience with the pharmaceutical giant Merck, an accelerated bachelor’s-to-master’s program in bioengineering with the University of Pennsylvania, and an ISBT course with the Wistar Institute, through which students prepare Shark Tank-like pitches for uncommercialized technologies developed at the biomedical research institute.

The integrative function of the Center for Integrated Life Sciences at La Salle will offer biology majors new career paths they hadn’t conceived of before, said Stefan Samulewicz, Ph.D., an associate professor of biology at La Salle and chair of the Department of Biology. He is one of the plan leaders behind the Center for Integrated Life Sciences. It helps ISBT students ground themselves more firmly in the underlying science, he said.

According to Samulewicz, “It’s about expanding opportunities for students who want to be in the life sciences, maybe med school is no longer their first option.”