Laura Sanchez

Meet Laura Sanchez

This is an intriguing challenge, as an academic scientist I have the supreme pleasure of teaching undergraduates in courses, and training up and coming scientists in the lab. Towards thinking about helping analytical scientists become tomorrow’s science leaders, I see the following action items based on my own experiences in teaching and training in the research lab:

Funding is becoming harder and harder to acquire to support training, especially in light of a number of training grant opportunities that were just terminated by NIH and NSF. It is imperative that we train the next generation of analytical scientists in both their fundamental knowledge of instrumentation and application to biological problems. I have observed that without training in application and consideration of the statistics and caveats associated with working with complex biological systems, strong fundamental scientists struggle to make a translational jump, which can inherently limit job opportunities. 

Training in how to approach problems and contextualize literature to help justify the development of new, cutting-edge instrumentation is critical. Enrollment at the undergraduate level in Chemistry is declining across the US, and likely the world. I would posit that this is due to students selecting interdisciplinary degree opportunities, but this can come at the sacrifice of depth of knowledge with specific topic areas, such as analytical chemistry. We should actively be advocating for the inclusion of (bio)analytical chemistry in these interdisciplinary degrees at both the graduate and undergraduate level and actively developing course-based undergraduate experience (CURE) labs and promoting the development of these labs within our journals. Access to well designed experiments in analytical based journals would help in advancing educational missions.

Finally, as someone that frequently interfaces with biologists it is important to also develop and foster shared terminology and be honest about the limitations of the technologies we employ. Too frequently, I find myself having to explain caveats to analyzing data acquired from external cores or services that were only shared as a CSV file or excel sheet. Transparency and access to data is critical in helping others realize the power the technology holds. 

The future will be bright; I have been impressed with the passion that the next generation of analytical sciences has towards solving outstanding problems related to climate change and biomedical health inequities. We should ensure that they are well equipped to address these challenges through hands-on lab experience, fundamental training, and knowledge for how to generate and test meaningful hypotheses.