LabOps Leadership_Keli Rodriguez: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Kerri Anderson:
By building a platform to share challenges, thoughts from leaders, and network together, the LabOps Leadership Podcast is elevating LabOps professionals as well as the industry as a whole.
Samantha Black:
With the intent of unlocking the power of LabOps, we deliver unique insights to execute the mission at hand, to standardize LabOps, and empower LabOps leaders.
Kerri Anderson:
I’m Kerri Anderson.
Samantha Black:
And I’m Samantha Black. Welcome to the LabOps Leadership Podcast.
Samantha Black:
Awesome, today we are here with Keli Rodriguez, who is Senior Manager of LabOps at EpiCypher. Super excited to have you here today, Keli, thanks for joining us.
Keli Rodriguez:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited.
Samantha Black:
Awesome, so let’s jump right in. And can you tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today?
Keli Rodriguez:
Yeah, I grew up in New York for the first 22 years of my life. I went to the State University of New York at New Paltz for my undergrad. I graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science in Cellular and Molecular Biology, and then I just happened to have so many credits that they were like, hey, you have these two minors, and one of them was chemistry and one of them was evolutionary biology. So I graduated from there in 2011, God, that was a long time ago, and I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do for the next stint in my life, so I actually was a traveling phlebotomist for the Red Cross for a year and a half, so I got to travel all over the Northeast and set up blood drives and get blood to people who need it. And then I moved to North Carolina, I worked at LabCorp for about five years and got transferred around different departments because I wanted to learn different things. So I was a cytogenetic technologist there for about five years and then EpiCypher fell into my lap and that was the best decision that I ever made. I knew what I was looking for in the next step in my career, I wanted to go for a smaller company that was more like a family, not only so that I could show what I could do and shine, right, but so that I could really connect with who I was working with. So I got the job at EpiCypher and I started off on the low end of things. I was an RA 1, about four months later I became an RA 2, and then a year after that I became an RA 3, so very quickly moved up the ranks. And then I tell everyone that I was an RA 3 for 28 days, because that’s the truth, and then basically the higher-ups at the company said, oh my gosh, we need someone to run this lab, we need a lab manager and we think it should be you. And I said, no. I was like, no, I don’t think this is for me, I don’t think I can handle that. But I thought about it for a little bit and took it on, and I’ve been doing that now for almost three years, so.
Samantha Black:
That’s incredible. That’s serendipity, like being, the right place at the right time. And as I’m sure we’ll reference several times in this episode, I’ve already talked to several other people at EpiCypher, and I can know from the company’s history and from other companies’ histories, there is like this critical inflection point where it becomes like a critical position to fill, like you literally can’t run anything efficiently unless you have this person who is working behind the scenes and pulling all the strings so that’s just great timing. I guess that’s really fun. No, so can you just tell us a little bit about how you support the business and maybe what a day-to-day looks like for you?
Keli Rodriguez:
Yeah, so it was totally different three years ago when I started as the lab manager. Then, I was actually a hybrid role because they didn’t have someone to take over all the projects that I was doing on the bench, so it was crazy. I was doing two different things. I was creating structures to help everyone in the lab, and that could be like electronic structures, it could be ordering structures. It was a number of things. So I was trying to do that, plus still run all my experiments on the bench, so it was crazy. But my day-to-day, now we’re a small company, so typically what happens until you reach a certain point is you wear multiple hats, you have lots of things that fall under your belt and everyone will tell you, if you ask at EpiCypher, I run around crazy, I’m like a chicken with their head cut off. I’m doing all different things, but I handle a lot. So I create the inventory workflow that we have for the company that we use, and that took months to create, I built it from the ground up. So basically we can go from something in R&D and we can bring it to QC and then we can launch it with everything that goes along with launching a product, which is a lot, and we’re not going to go down that rabbit hole, and then we sell it. I also handle everything from an R&D perspective, so I control all of the inventory that comes in and comes out on a daily basis along with my right-hand person, Rachel is my assistant lab manager, and Rachel is amazing. I wouldn’t be able to do my job without Rachel, and I also do a lot of accounting that has to do with inventory. I handle the electronic lab notebook that every scientist uses at EpiCypher. We use Lab Guru, and it’s a great platform. It’s very customizable and they’ve been able to grow with us. I also handle our project task management platform, which is Rindle. So a lot of this stuff happens in the background, right? I’m not out in the lab with them doing all this stuff, I’m in the background making sure that everything is triggering appropriately, everything’s moving along the pipeline like it should. Yeah, so day-to-day for me is different every day, it depends on what time of the month it is. There might be, we’re about, like, for example, next week we’re getting our, all of our pipettes calibrated, so I’m going to gear up to make sure everyone has what they need because we have a whole flow and a whole system so that people can turn in their pipettes and then get the pipettes that they turned in back. Because before I was in charge of it, pipettes were just everywhere, and then nobody could find their pipettes afterwards. So yeah, day-to-day is definitely different, every day, every week, every month.
Samantha Black:
Yeah, and it sounds like you’re in charge of all the tools that enable the science. And so I’m wondering if you could just talk about, you said that you like the tools that you have, but what’s your process for picking some of these new tools? Because I think there’s an automatic way to do things or semi-automatic and then there’s manual. So obviously you’ve moved from manual to more of an automatic process, but there’s a lot of tools available, there’s a lot of options. Like how do you even know where to start? Or what advice would you have for people who are considering your best practices?
Keli Rodriguez:
So when I started at EpiCypher, we were just regular notebooks. We would just cut out pieces of paper, paste it into the notebook. So actually a colleague of mine started the research that we got into for the ELN, and I joined midway when I joined EpiCypher and we had a bunch of different qualifications that we wanted the ELN to have. We wanted it to be user-friendly, we didn’t want it to kind of be able to dictate how we were going to be able to do our science every day. That kind of comes with a downfall, right? Because then you have to have someone to take the time to build up the system, even though the frame is there, you have to build what lives inside of it, and that ended up being me. And we had it narrowed down to six different forms that we were going to use, and then we demoed six of those, then narrowed it down to four, and then narrowed it down to two. So it was a process, I think it was like a three-month process. And then we even went so far as demoing how different types of laptops would interact with the platforms because we wanted to be able to give people laptops to work at their bench, so that it’s like a dirty laptop, and then a laptop to work at their desk, which is not a dirty laptop. So we’re like, okay, do we want a Samsung? Do we want a Chromebook? Do we want them to have tablets? So we even demoed that, so it’s a lot. We ended up landing on Lab Guru and it was a great option. Right now we are looking to expand how we use Lab Guru since we’ve grown so much in the last two and a half, three years, so that’s our ELN platform. Our project management platform, that one I did not introduce. That has to do with our marketing manager, who, her name is Leslie. She found Rindle through a very similar process of demoing a bunch of different, basically, task management platforms that exist out there, and she really liked Rindle. It was a small company, got started up, I believe they’re out of Connecticut, and I actually know the person who created it, his name is Brian, he’s amazing. I work, like if I ever need anything, I just click on his calendar link and he’s able to help me with anything that I need. So that’s a really great working relationship to have and that’s why we’ve stuck with Rindle for so long. And a lot of people rely on Rindle at our company because it keeps all the tasks on schedule. You can see whose hands is this task in, who needs to do this before it can move to QC or launch, or basically whatever task you’re working on in the lab, you can see where it is, where it’s going to go next, is all the QC data done. So that, we wanted a lot of versatility with that platform because we really had to make it our own, because what EpiCypher does is very niche. We do R&D, but we also sell things commercially, we also provide services, so we do a bunch of different things. So we needed something to really be able to work with what EpiCypher does.
Samantha Black:
Yeah, no, I completely understand that it’s a solution that maybe is made for one section of your business and you’re trying to apply it to all five different versions of your business that you needed to handle. I can understand that. Well, I’m glad that you guys found something that works for you. I think it could be tough, there’s just like there’s just so many options out there and the technology is, seems to be advancing so fast that by the time you validate what you decided, there’s more and more options available. So I know that there’s some like buyer’s remorse there sometimes because you’re like, oh, I didn’t even know about this when I did it. So we’ve heard that other people struggle with that, so it’s just good to know that. So long as you do your due diligence like you can feel good about what you’ve selected.
Keli Rodriguez:
Yup!
Samantha Black:
I am curious because you are the lab manager and you have, EpiCypher has so many different things that they’re doing and you handle so many different types of activities. Where do you feel like you’re making the biggest impact in your role on the overall process? Or, maybe it’s R&D, or maybe it’s commercially? Like where do you feel like you have the biggest impact?
Keli Rodriguez:
I guess my immediate answer right now, because we’re going through it right now, so another thing that you can just add to my list of what I do is I handle all of the lab structure organization, and that leads into a bigger bucket of what I do, which is all the expansions that is currently happening because EpiCypher is growing. So we actually, just at the beginning of this year, obtained three new suites in the building that we currently reside in. And so that means that people are going to have to move, we’re going to have to shift to what group is going where, we’re going to have to bring in new equipment, new infrastructure. There’s one lab that has to be completely built from the ground up. We didn’t get necessarily a shell casing, but we got a completely blank, newly renovated suite that’s beautiful but there’s nothing in it. There’s no lab benches, there’s no equipment, there’s no sinks, there’s no ER power, nothing like that you have to think about as you are getting ready to basically build a lab from the ground up. So that’s been where my passion has been lying as of lately, and again, that’s why I’m going to reference Rachel again. Rachel’s been amazing. I wouldn’t be able, she handles some of the other things that, as I’m working on the expansion and building up all of these different things and making sure all of these moving pieces fall into place so we can move, Rachel’s handling all these other things like R&D inventory, accounting reports, making sure that the lab has everything that they need to do the science every day, we work really well together. But that’s been where my passion has been lying as of late. I did my first mini-expansion a year and a half ago when we expanded the first time, and it’s a lot of work to organize, and I learned so much, I will tell you that right now. I was not good with like electrical work and fax systems and duct work and everything that goes along with that. I learned so much just doing my everyday job to make sure we could move into this new space. So, and don’t think there’s like a class out there that you can take that’ll teach you how to do that. But I would say the biggest thing for me is like just general lab organization and infrastructure. Because if you don’t, if you don’t have a level structure at the base, then, as you grow, it’s not going to be successful.
Samantha Black:
Yeah, that’s very interesting. And I feel once you, if you walk into an established lab or an established company, especially the bigger it gets, there’s specific people to handle each of these little components. Sometimes there’s a dedicated facilities manager who can deal with HVAC and all of those things. But sometimes as a lab manager, you have to step up and figure it out. And I think from talking to so many different lab managers and LabOps teams, it’s a really good fit for personalities. You guys like having your hands in a lot of pieces of the pie is, from what I can tell. And so while it’s a challenge, I know, and it’s, nobody else is going to do it, and I think that it’s like that puzzle that you guys like to figure out. So we’ve heard that from other people, but I can see where that would be a challenge, a good challenge. Like it feels like you’re growing and expanding, so that’s awesome.
Keli Rodriguez:
Yeah.
Samantha Black:
Going back to the challenges, though, I’m wondering like, what are some of the biggest things that you struggle with in your job?
Keli Rodriguez:
So currently right now we do have the ELN, like I’ve talked about before, we have a lot of databases that live within that ELN, so that we can track everything that everyone’s using, it’s called tagging so that we’re able to basically make sure all of the QC data is accurate. We know exactly what antibody they’re using, what protein they’re using, because a lot of our science is based off of different lots that we have, and everyone in science knows that science can change at the drop of the hat. So we have moved to obviously being more electronic and more automated with the ELN, but there’s one piece that we’re missing, which is the barcoding aspect because it’ll make it easier for the scientists, I would say then we would probably almost have completely moved to automated. So right now we’re kind of half and half and that is the next big project that I’m going to try to take on. And it’s a little bit outside of my wheelhouse because the way that the barcoding system works, I’ve never done anything like that. I’ve never created entire systems and databases to code for barcodes. I’ve never done that, so that’s going to be a really big challenge. I tried to do it when I first became lab manager and it was, I just didn’t have the time to dedicate it to it fully because you can’t have, barcode what they’re using, you need to complete it. So that’s going to be a really big undertaking and it’s going to be a challenge. That’s a very specific example. A general example would be, we’re growing, so we have a lab full of brilliant, amazing scientists that they’re all different, they all have different personalities, they all have different ways of interacting with people, different ways of interacting with the science. And so that’s just something I think not necessarily maybe as a lab manager, but as a leader, you have to learn how to deal well with people who have different personalities. And I think that’s always maybe a struggle for some people.
Samantha Black:
Yeah, I think that’s another thing about lab managers, is you interface with so many internal and external people. I think it can just, not even being a lab manager, it’s difficult. So I can’t imagine, like everybody has internal external customers, but scientists tend to be a breed of their own sometimes, so I don’t envy you with that. But yeah, I think that’s something we’ve also heard a lot of. And it’s again, another thing that people really enjoy about the job is they like … with people, and I can understand that, like being a people person and getting to getting some satisfaction out of that, I can totally understand.
Keli Rodriguez:
I am a people person, so I always tell them that my motto is #MyDoorIsAlwaysOpen because I want them to know that they can come and they can talk to me, they can tell me if they’re having issues, and a lot of them do utilize that policy, which is great, and that’s one of the joys of my job. And you’re right, I don’t just deal with the scientists, there’s vendors that we constantly are meeting with. There’s the directors of, who owns our building that we rent from, like we have to work with them if there’s any infrastructure changes that we want to do, these expansions that are gearing up to do, I can’t just make decisions off like the decisions that I want to do. I have to make sure that all the decisions I’m doing okayed, green light, like green lighted from above, and that I’m also not like breaking any rules, any laws that basically are the people who own the building don’t want us to do.
Samantha Black:
Yeah, those things, those pesky laws. Yeah, no, so I think that’s really interesting, and as you grow and expand, I think you’re adding more labs, you’re adding more scientists, you’re adding more data. Being a little bit like forward-thinking, maybe just as LabOps as a whole, like what do you see for the future? Do you think it’s more in this automation and just getting better tools as we go along? What is your kind of like if you could look into the future, what do you see for LabOps, what direction, and even like in your current organization, like at your current company, what do you see is going to help you get there?
Keli Rodriguez:
I definitely think automation is going to help. I would also say probably as the science expands, LabOps needs to expand as well because right now it’s just me and like I said, Rachel, and then I also have a lab associate who’s absolutely phenomenal, her name is Janet. And we’re going to need more of that, just basically that infrastructure that’s going to support the science and the business as a whole, right? Because lab managers, at least for the type of lab manager that I am, yes, we support the scientists and I support the lab, but we do a lot of other things like the inventory that we do doesn’t just lie with R&D and the science, it’s commercial, it’s a whole, has a whole commercial aspect to it. So I think as the science expands and we bring in more science, we’re going to also have to bring in more people for LabOps. The science itself is becoming more automated, which is great, so if the science becomes automated, it would be great for different aspects of lab option lab management to become automated. And like I said, the first step for us to do that is going to be to barcode everything that the scientists use.
Samantha Black:
Yeah, that’s a huge endeavor. So, but I think given the amount of data that you’re dealing with now, and also from the commercial side, I do realize, like sometimes you get a little bit more grace in the R&D space if something, oh, we can backtrack it, but like when you get to the commercial side, like customers have very little grace for that. And so I can understand working backwards, like you’re almost going at the highest standard. You’re not just dealing with R&D, that kind of wiggle room, so you have to work at the highest standard. So it’s almost maybe a little bit more difficult for you guys because you’re working at that highest standard and trying to apply that to everything else you’re doing. So that’s really interesting, and not every situation is that way for many other lab managers. Yeah, so just super interesting. I am just wondering what your biggest takeaways are from doing this. We’ve talked a lot about the future and some of the stuff that you’ve done along the way, but what is like one of the biggest lessons or takeaways that you have, and maybe what advice you would offer other lab managers or LabOps people who maybe are just starting out? What can you tell them?
Keli Rodriguez:
So the biggest thing that I’ve taken away from this role, when I accepted it, I had a few fears, right? and I worked through those fears. I was like, okay, do I want to go off the bench? I thought I was really going to miss working on the bench and doing the science because that’s what I had done for the last six years, right? And I was like, okay, am I going to be able to manage people? Am I going to be able to lead people? Am I going to be able to do this? And am I going to be happy about it? I did not think I would enjoy it as much as I do. I love organization, I love structure, I love when people come to me with a problem because I love to problem-solve. I love to map out, okay, what if we do scenario A? Scenario B? I love to do that, and that is essentially what my job is now, people will tell you that I’m like a firefighter, they’ll call me Wonder Woman. There’s all these different things, because I will try to solve everything for them and I really enjoy that. Sometimes it’s stressful and tiring, but I did not expect to enjoy my job as much as I did, that was a big shock to me. I thought I was going to go into the lab management role and have to deal with more background stuff and not really enjoy it as much. But I really do, as you referenced earlier, pulling the strings and then watching down the road how what I did three, four, six months ago, a year ago is now impacting how things are done today. I absolutely love that, it’s a gift to see. Advice for anyone who’s starting off because I did not have, they make, no lab manager had existed at EpiCypher. I did not have anyone to really look up to who had done it before at EpiCypher, so luckily for me, I worked, we work in like a suite, like a plaza, so there’s other biotech companies that exist in the same building that we work in. And I, being an extroverted person, went around and just networked. I talked with other people who were in the same or similar role as to myself, and I just sat down with them for a little bit and I talked with them and I’m like, what’s your experience been like? I know that your company is different than mine, we don’t do the same things, but how did you build structure? How did you organize more? How did you create compliance? Because no matter what, nobody likes change, and when we have to make changes and then we have to get them to actually adhere to those changes, sometimes that’s a challenge. And so that’s what I would recommend to anybody, reach out and network. I belong to the LabOps Unite. So I am on all the email chains that happen and that’s also been amazing. I’ve been able to meet some really great people. They’ve been able to give really great advice. We’ve been able to exchange reagents and materials like during the pandemic. That was awesome because we, I think as lab managers, we all scattered because we couldn’t get in the materials that we needed and we were all there helping each other out. So the more you can network and the more that you can reach out to people who are in your same field and get advice from them and bounce ideas off of them, that’s a huge thing for me.
Samantha Black:
Well, great. That tees it up perfectly for my last question, which is if somebody wanted to network with you, if they wanted to talk to you or find out more about what you’ve done and learn from you or even just follow you, how can somebody do that?
Keli Rodriguez:
Yeah, I mean, I have my LinkedIn profile. I check it all the time so anybody can reach out to me there. We do have our EpiCypher.com website. That’s obviously more if you want to purchase stuff from EpiCypher, which is great, but there is other resources that you can get from EpiCypher.com. So yeah, I mean I’m open, I’m willing to talk to anybody. I’m extroverted, so I love to talk to people, and yeah.
Samantha Black:
Great, okay! Well, Keli, that’s all. We’re gonna put that in the show notes so anybody who is interested in reaching out can just click right there. But Keli, other than that, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you today. Thank you so much for sharing your story and your experiences and wish you the best of luck.
Keli Rodriguez:
Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Kerri Anderson:
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the LabOps Leadership podcast. We hope you enjoyed today’s guest.
Samantha Black:
For show notes, resources, and more information about LabOps Unite. Please visit us at LabOps.Community/Podcast. This show is powered by Elemental Machines.
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