Stanford Biosciences students talking

Alumni Career Experiences

The skills that trainees have developed at Stanford have proved transferrable to any number of fields, whether in pursuing a postdoc and academic research or a career within areas like industry, government, and business.

Alumni career experiences

Stanford Biosciences alumni share experiences from their fields and give advice on getting the most out of graduate training.

Devavani Chatterjea—Associate Professor of Biology, Macalester College
Julie Granka—Population Geneticist
Miling Harrington—JD student, Columbia Law School
David Johnson—CEO, GigaGen
Jessica Linderman—Postdoctoral Fellow, NYU School of Medicine
Sandeep Ravindran—Science Writer, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

More alumni career experiences coming in October.

Overview of Career Options

CEO Internship Program

Roadmap: Getting there

Give us feedback

Stanford Biosciences, 1967: First synthesis of biologically active DNA in test tube
Stanford Biosciences, 1970: Development of the florescence-activated cell sorter
Stanford Biosciences, 1971: Discovery of RNA priming of DNA synthesis
Stanford Biosciences, 1972: First construction of a recombinant DNA molecule containing DNA from two different species
Stanford Biosciences, 1973: First expression of a foreign gene implanted in bacteria by recombinant DNA methods
Stanford Biosciences, 1984: Isolation of a gene coding for part of the T-cell receptor, a key to the immune system's function
Stanford Biosciences, 1987: Purification of first stem cells
Stanford Biosciences, 1988: Discovery of the nuclear factor of activated T cells
Stanford Biosciences, 1990: Discovery of "Off-switch" for genetic reproduction in bacteria
Stanford Biosciences, 1995: Development of the microarray technology that allows researchers to see at once which genes of the thousands present in a cell are switched "on"
Stanford Biosciences, 2000: First use of gene expression profiling to distinguish cancer sub-types
Stanford Biosciences, 1990-2001: Participation in the Human Genome Project; Stanford is 9th worldwide in contributions to the genome
Stanford Biosciences, 2001: The first molecular snapshot published of the protein machinery responsible for transcription in yeast — RNA polymerase II — in action; this helped explain how cells express all the information the human genome
Stanford Biosciences, 2002: First use of RNAi to switch off genes in mice. RNAi offers an extremely selective method to "mute" a single gene amongst the thousands in the genome, helping provide precise information about the role of the gene
Stanford Biosciences, 2009: A researcher sequences his own genome for less than $50,000 and with a team of just two others
Stanford Biosciences, 2007: Array tomography invented
Stanford Biosciences, 2007: For the first time, researchers use a healthy person's complete genome sequence to predict his risk for dozens of diseases