Experience Assessment
1. The nature of your appointment, were you part of a team effort or expected to carry out independent analyses?
My job as a research assistant for ARC Arnot
Research and Consulting required me to work both with others but also independently. My colleague Alexandra (Alex) and I were initially provided with ~60 papers, by Dr. Arnot, to review and collect biotransformation and metabolism information to add to a pre - existing database. On our first meeting, we divided the papers amongst us and began to work on the papers individually. We would modify the database based upon the information that we would gather from these papers. However, to ensure that we were both inputting the proper information into the database,
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Were you involved in a single project or a series of smaller projects, or were you working in the role of a general assistant?
The task of reviewing papers to collect in
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vitro biotransformation rate data initially required myself to become acquainted with pharmacokinetics (PK), in vitro
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in vivo biotransformation (IVIVE), physiologically based pharmacokinetics (PBPK), some mathematical equations used in the model s, and much more. I was assigned a starter exercise of reading some papers and imputing data into an Excel spreadsheet. This was to become familiar with the grand scheme project of working either from bottom up (from in vitro to liver clearance using IVIVE models then from intrinsic clearance to in vivo models using PBPK) or top down (vice versa) to estimate drug liver clearance. I was later assigned my project where I had search for literature for pharmaceuticals provided to me by collaborators in the Neth erlands at Utrecht University. This was on a much smaller scale but it still contributes to the overall project once completed.
3. What skills did you find the most valuable, and were these related to your M. Env. Sc. course work, or could they have been?
The most valuable skill in my arsenal was the tool of scanning a paper for