Seti Arabshahi

Persisgen develops recombinant biologics and vaccines through technology transfer and scale-up. Their R&D facility housed multiple ventures running in parallel, which meant exposure to different teams, problems, and approaches all at once. I got hands-on with protein purification and analytical systems (FPLC, HPLC), contributed to workflow design discussions for drug development pipelines, and learned how bench-scale experiments translate into manufacturing realities. Also discovered that monitoring a bioreactor run can make you surprisingly protective of bacteria you've never met!

Here, in one of the country's leading research and public health institutions, I worked on producing DNA extraction kits for blood, urine, and saliva samples, mastering sterilization protocols, and building fluency with core diagnostic tools: Real-time PCR, centrifugation, spectrophotometry. If PersisGen taught me how biotech scales up, Pasteur drilled in why precision and safety come first. Every shortcut you skip in a diagnostic lab is a result you can't trust.

The role involved identifying standout entrepreneurs, scientists, and business leaders across the country, reaching out cold, and helping them shape their stories within TED's framework. Part research, part persuasion, part storytelling coach. You go in thinking you're curating speakers. But after enough conversations with people who've built remarkable things, hearing how they think, and especially how they frame setbacks, you realize they've been curating you all along. :D

Walked into the Vice Dean's office after finishing the Bioinformatics module to geek out about books I'd been reading during the term. Somewhere between referencing papers and suggesting how the module could be restructured, he stopped me: "Would you teach this? To students a year above you?" That's how I became the department's first TA. One class turned into several, then spilled across departments (Programming and Data Structures for Applied Statistics, Bioinformatics for Sciences and Advanced Technologies in Biology). Turns out, curiosity that can't stay quiet sometimes builds its own job description!

Joined during Covid to fill the extra hours quarantine handed me; and stumbled into a crew of sharp, ambitious students who made me want to keep up. After a few months of remote collaboration, I joined in person. Helped shape event planning and operations, then took the lead on their flagship "Miniature Talk" event. From team building and online campaigns to rebranding and running the show on the day. The collaboration didn't end on Dec 2022. I later joined USERN's Network of Interdisciplinarity in Neonates and Infants (NINI) as Publicity Manager and along the way, co-authored my first book chapter, published by Springer.

Over four months in this leading biotech manufacturer of molecular biology kits, I rotated through production, QA, QC, sales and marketing, and R&D. Checked thousands of vials under light until my eyes begged for AI and robotics to rescue humanity from production lines. Learned to manage large datasets in QA, stay disciplined in QC, pushed myself to build confidence in sales, and burned through every grey cell prototyping a bioreactor in R&D. The thread had to start somewhere. This was it.

Dissertation (Distinction): Scientific Feasibility and Market Intelligence Report on Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI) The question: can we actually grow biological neural networks for computation, and if so, does the business case hold up? I traced the current investment landscape, identified short- and long-term beneficiaries, and assessed whether SBI could represent a meaningful shift in how we build and [potentially] safeguard intelligence. The research also gave me the chance to discuss the science underlying DishBrain and the Free Energy Principle with Prof. Karl Friston.