LabOps_Majors Badgett: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

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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:
Welcome back, everybody. We’re here today with Majors Badgett, who is laboratory director and clinical consultant at Ethos Labs. Thanks for joining us today, Majors.

Majors Badgett:
Thanks for having me.

Samantha Black:
Awesome, we’re excited to have you today. Let’s jump right in, and can you just start off by telling us how you got to where you are today?

Majors Badgett:
Absolutely, yeah. I’m from Dallas, Texas. I say y’all a lot. So it’s efficient, that’s how I talk. But I always liked science growing up and I knew I wanted to do chemistry, and so I followed my brother, who’s two years older than me, to a small school in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee called Swanee, where I got a BS in chemistry. And along the way I took a couple kind of upper-level classes where I took, I got to handle some mass spec and look at the data, look at the instruments, and determined that I was really instrument focused. I really liked tinkering, I liked playing with these really expensive, complex instruments, and that really made me want to go to grad school to learn more. And I went to the University of Georgia to get my PhD. I joined the Ron Orlando lab. Ron Orlando is a top researcher with mass spec and carbohydrates, protein analysis. And so over my five-year grad school career, I got to write over ten publications, one published in Nature. I had a very successful grad school. I met my future wife there. She moved to Cincinnati to be a professor of finance. She got a PhD in finance, way smarter than me, and she moved when I was starting my PhD, so we did a little long distance there, so I knew when I graduated I would go up there to be with her. So that led me to Cincinnati and we settled there for a little bit. It was really tough for me to find a job, so I had a PhD, I had a great track record, but there was a really big saturation of PhDs that were applying to the top companies. So in Cincinnati, P&G is one of the top companies, Medpac, there are a lot of big ones, GE is huge up here, Johnson and Johnson as well. And what I found was I had applied to over 200 different jobs and really not gotten back, received a word from a lot of them. And it was really infuriating because I was like, what did I do wrong? I figured my PhD would have some weight, that I’d get a good job, that I’d do research and really be impactful. But I struggled, and so for about 6 to 8 months after I moved up here, I was just questioning my degree, I was tutoring other people, trying to learn how to code, just completely transforming the way I live my life. Eventually, I got an opportunity at a small mom-and-pop pain clinic just running their lab, which was basically one mass spec and an analyzer in a closet. And I did that, worked there for about a year and a half, and then got poached to be the lab director here at Ethos, which is a much bigger lab with a lot more stuff going on. So it’s been a winding journey, one that I definitely didn’t expect, one that I had no idea where I would end up, but I’m lucky to get here, but I don’t know if I could do it again. Like I couldn’t plan that out or anything like that. …

Samantha Black:
We could talk for a long time about that whole thing.

Majors Badgett:
A lot there, there’s a lot there.

Samantha Black:
We don’t do that. I also had a similar experience coming out for my PhD and everybody said, oh, it’s going to be simple and it’s not. So that’s a different podcast for a different day. But I think it’s really interesting going back to what your interest is, I think that’s, maybe you have to dig a level deeper to find that next best interest and how that can work for you. So I think it’s interesting about the equipment because, actually Kerri and I have talked to a lot of people on this podcast who have PhDs who are lab managers, and that is like not the first impression that a lot of people get about lab managers, but it often can be a good fit for PhDs or somebody who has gone to school for a long time. So can you talk a little bit more about like how you use your PhD in your position now? Because I think that’s super interesting and maybe something a lot of people haven’t thought about.

Majors Badgett:
Yeah, that’s a great question. My PhD really focused around using mass spec for protein and carbohydrate analysis, so proteomics has been pretty well established. Carbohydrate analysis is an emerging field, there’s really not a lot of information there, because typically, of microheterogeneity, which is basically a million things, can be in one position, and so it’s incredibly hard to determine what’s actually there on a carbohydrate. So I got this kind of really cool balance with analyzing something that was already established in terms of proteomics, but also something that was completely new and not a lot of people knew about. And for me, it’s less so the actual stuff I was looking at, right? For me it was all about the systems. And so I was able to develop models to predict when peptides and glycans would elute using a specific type of column, a hylic stationary phase, so that you could simplify the analysis portion of what you’re looking at. And I got to work with a lot of different mass specs. I got to work on a Finnigan LTQ, which was an old-school mass spec that I got my PhD on, also Absci 4000 triple-Quod, some thermo, high-tech orb traps, just every single cool thing that was there. And for me, I was just geeking out, I loved it, loved getting my hands dirty, love taking apart the instruments, doing all that kind of stuff. So there’s a level of depth and understanding that you really have to have in order to make a mass spec or just a specialty type instrument work properly because there’s so many different components that if you don’t know where to start, you don’t know how to fix it, or you don’t know where bad data is coming from, or you don’t even know how to recognize bad data, there’s so much that goes into it that you have to be very well versed in all of the individual components that make up an instrument, right? And so I tend to think of mass specs in NMRs as being the most complex lab instruments that there are because of what goes into them and how to figure out if they’re actually performing correctly or not. A running joke that whenever anyone else would use my Finnigan LTQ, they would completely break it. Like I would have someone who had been in mass spec for 20, 30 years come, run a couple instruments on it, and I’d come back and I’d be like, What the hell is this? What the hell did you do to my instrument? It’s funny, just because they’re so finicky, but they’re so complex and cool. So with that experience, I went into toxicology, which is not sexy at all. It’s probably the most basic of mass spec that you can do, right? Hey, I want to look for cocaine in a patient. I know cocaine is mass, let’s look for it. Oh, it’s there, oh, it’s not. Very simplistic. Obviously, I’m oversimplifying it. But so for that, knowing the mass spec side of things, right, it was really easy for me to develop methods and know if something was working or not. Regardless of what I was looking at, right, I could definitively tell if a machine was working and if good data was coming out of it. Now, what that data was and how to interpret that data was a little different. And that’s where I had to teach myself, Hey, what does it mean when, you know a metabolite is present and the parent’s not, or vice versa, or this is present or that that kind of stuff. But having that experience of these really high-tech instruments helped me be able to solve a lot of complex problems, not just with the instruments, but also with the data that’s generated to where I could really tackle a lot of challenges just because of that experience alone. I don’t know if that answers your question or if that was a roundabout way, but yeah.

Samantha Black:
No, I think that’s great. I think it’s, so I’m always so intimidated by equipment, and so I think there’s, for a lot of scientists or a lot of people who work in labs, there’s like an assumption that we make that equipment works the way we want it to, and that is, maybe you’re just shining a light on the fact that maybe we should be more careful about that. And I think that’s what this whole podcast is about, is, you know, what it takes to support science and think that equipment is maybe one of the most important parts and certainly one of the most expensive parts of the process. So I think, no, I think that’s really cool and unique, and I think that yeah, I just think it’s super interesting that coming from that experience, you’ve been able to like make a little niche for yourself and really find a way to leverage that. And it sounds like your interests are really aligned to what you’re doing. So that’s always a bonus too, so I think that’s great. It’s interesting talking about maybe your experience and not working in like research and development, but more like on the clinical side. Can you talk a little bit about how that has been working in like a clinical lab where maybe like throughput is more of a concern than it is like discovery, in that side, and how important it is to maintain labs in the clinical setting?

Majors Badgett:
Of course, that’s actually one of the toughest things that I see in terms of hiring, where people that have a research background sometimes either do not do well at all in a clinical environment or they do really well, it just depends on who they are. I’ve taken chances on a lot of people that have panned out terribly and other people that have been absolutely tremendous. For myself personally, it’s different at the director level just because in terms of the day-to-day, my day-to-day is different almost every day because of what’s going on in the lab. I do my monthly sign-offs, I have my monthly checklist for what I need to do to make sure that this lab is accredited and up to standards. But we have so many ongoing projects, we have so many issues that pop up that we have to tackle. We have expansion goals I’m working on, purchasing new instruments, all of that kind of stuff that’s really different. And that’s where my research side comes in handy because I like change, right? I have to like change to be in this position. It’s one of the things that I think I’m good at, even though I’ll sweat and get anxious and all that kind of stuff. We went through a lot of change over COVID and we came out of it really seriously just incredible with what we’ve learned and what we’ve grown from it. But, so my position is, I think probably on the better side of just I don’t really need that that clinical side, that repetitiveness that like I need to do everything the same way outside of a couple items that I do have to make sure that are happening that way. But everyone else underneath me, besides maybe my supervisor, managers, they really do have to have that clinical aspect. So it’s very much focused on SOPs, this is what you do, this is what you don’t do, follow this, say anything if you see anything, it’s very to the T because we have to be able to replicate a small process thousands to tens of thousands of times a day. And so some people are really good at it, some people are not. We have an Accessioning department, which is one of the hardest jobs in terms of receiving patient samples from a client, putting all of that information into our LAS system, and then going through the process. If one thing is messed up there, it can mess up the entire process, and then I’ve got to get on the phone with the client to say, hey, I’m sorry about this, we messed something up. Something as tiny as that can make massive repercussions on the back end, and so we have to be extremely detailed with everything that we do. There was someone I remember that I hired who had a master’s in science that really liked where his head was at. He had really cool research, and so I was like, I think he would fit perfectly in this. But one of the questions that I asked was like, how do you balance that research side with the clinical side? Because you haven’t been in the clinical side, you’ve only been in research, and you can’t take your time to fix issues in a fast-paced lab like this, you have to know what you’re doing, and he had some great answer, but then when he got into the lab, it was just awful. He had his research train where it was like, oh, I need to think about this for a while and I’m going to work through this. No, you can’t do that. We have next-day turnaround times on our tox analysis, on our FBI analysis. We have to be able to get stuff out quickly, but also be confident in the data that we’re producing, that’s the hardest line to toe. And so it really hasn’t been hard for me, like I said, just because I’m able to use my research brain in a lot of different capacities with new projects. For a lot of other people, that is one of the toughest things that they’re going to have to deal with.

Kerri Anderson:
Yeah, so something you mentioned about working in many different capacities, when I talk to a lot of people in lab operations, something I hear is that just because you have the title of lab director, there’s often many different things that can fall under your umbrella and your scope of work. So I’d be curious to hear, you mentioned purchasing, what falls under your category.

Majors Badgett:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I kind of joked, probably over a year ago, that I had about six titles. I was lab director, I was clinical consultant, I was technical supervisor, I was our microbiology supervisor, I was a serology supervisor, I was so much, and part of that was as, growing pains, right? As we grow and build and add more volume and add more capabilities, we have to get to a point where we can hire people underneath me in specific positions, but there’s a lot, right, and I think my duties change every day, right? I’m in charge of our, kind of, validations team, which does a lot of method development, routine validations, verifications. I’m in charge of all of our scientific lab departments, so we have microbiology, we have conformation, we have initial testing, we have accessioning, we have serology. I’m in charge of our instrumentation department, so everything regarding the instruments, right, purchasing, hiring, service, service contracts, everything. So I think the stuff that I’m not in charge of, I guess that would be easier, is everything that’s closely related to the lab but is not science. So shipping, customer service, HR, billing, stuff like that, sales, field, all of that stuff that’s ancillary that relies on the lab to get this stuff done. But everything else is, y’all can see from the boards behind me, I have a lot going on here and those are all of the departments that I manage and guide. So at this point, we have two tremendous people underneath me that can accomplish a lot of things to where I can focus on really what I need to focus on. But I think it just ebbs and flows depending on what the day is, what the main priorities are, a lot of different things.

Kerri Anderson:
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s, the interesting thing is a lot of people have a background of science when they get into this and the next thing you know, you’re finding yourself having to have a business mindset and there’s a whole bunch of different areas.

Majors Badgett:
Yeah, yeah, that’s a really hard thing because I’m always a scientist first, right? So when someone is like, hey, we need this done, I’m always thinking about the impact. How are we going to get this accomplished? What kind of people I need to hire? The answer, all that kind of stuff. But what’s really nice for me and what’s been great about working at Ethos is that our CEO and owner has a science background. My boss, the VP of LabOps, has a science background, and instead of saying, hey, we’re not going to purchase this instrument, right, because it’s too expensive, if I plead my case and say, hey, we really need this, it’s really impactful, it can increase throughput, it can do this or that, they listen, which I know a lot of other companies where you have business people at the top that don’t necessarily understand science, it can be really difficult. So I’m pretty lucky to have a lot of incredible scientists around me to support what we’re doing.

Kerri Anderson:
Yeah, absolutely. It is helpful when you have people that understand the why of what you need.

Samantha Black:
I’m curious, in your days, like we talked a lot in the beginning about how you like to tinker with equipment and do that type of work. How much of your day is dedicated to that versus, it sounds like you’re probably just having a lot of meetings all the time, like how do you manage the people side of it at this point?

Majors Badgett:
There’s a lot there. Yeah, I would say most over 50% of my day is meetings and answering emails, which as a researcher, I absolutely hate. I like to get in there and do stuff. But the good news is there’s a lot of projects that I do need to get in there and do stuff. For instance, last May, we just unveiled our blood testing lab, so I did a lot of work to try to get that up to speed, and that was hematology, Immunoassay, Eliza Chemistry, so a lot of instruments that I got to play with that I got to develop methods for, validate all that kind of stuff, it was really fun. Right now we’re actually upgrading all of our mass specs in our labs, so we have about 22 total MS systems that do toxicology and biomarker analysis, and then we have three maldi-tof that do PGX as well as COVID testing to support our micro lab. I am currently upgrading all of our Agilent 64 exec instruments, so we have 64, 20, 64, 30, 64, 62, to Agilent Old TiVos, which are top-of-the-line mass specs, they’re a lot smaller and so we can fit a lot more of them in the room, but they’re also more sensitive, more specific, they have better specs. And so we got to demo an instrument last year before we wanted to purchase anything, we just wanted to see how it performed, and so I did a lot of method development there and got hands-on experience with the instrument. And now I’m working with my validation team to upgrade all of our methods to the Old TiVos. When I was thinking about, are we going to go with the Agilent Old TiVos, are we going to go with someone else, I actually got some really cool opportunities with Waters and Thermos to, Thermo Fisher, to visit their facilities and see what they could do for me, so it was like getting wined and dined. It was really unique, I felt like a rock star touring a site and having dinner with people that really wanted me to buy a bunch of mass specs. So I don’t get to use them as much as I wish I could, but I’m still very heavily involved in the method development that goes on around the lab, and that requires a dedicated hand. And when I have time, I’m always trying to run around the lab, see what people need from me, I try to fix issues. We’ve been upgrading our liquid handlers as well. We just bought an ML or a Hamilton starlet. We just bought some bio high-fives which are top-of-the-line liquid handlers that I’ve gotten to use and do method development on, all that kind of stuff. So it’s been fun, I always like to tinker. If there’s a chance for me to tinker, I’m going to take it, but it’s getting harder and harder as lab director to do that.

Samantha Black:
I’m just going to, I’m going to go on a quick tangent here. With all of this data that you guys are pulling in, besides equipment, I’m wondering like, what other tools are you implementing to help your team across all these processes? What other technology are you guys using or have you found can really help like the LabOps and the efficiency of your process?

Majors Badgett:
Yeah, that’s a terrific question. So I think we’re going in two different ways. Number one, we’re trying to go entirely paperless, which is really difficult in a lab, especially when we have clients that all they’ve ever known is paper, all they ever want is paper, they want faxes, they want everything like that. So when I got here, I was in awe of how much paper we use, right? Getting a requisition form from the client, putting into the LAS, from having tracking forms for each 96 … plate that we use in the process, from having certifying forms for data analysis, for all of this kind of stuff that kind of goes together, and that’s just for our toxicology assay. We have paper in so many other places that we really don’t need paper for. When a client asks me about something that was, in a patient sample that was ran over three months ago, I have to go sort through boxes to figure out what day was it ran, on what instrument, where, and then I have to go back to that instrument, go to the archive, try to find it, and then go from there. It’s just, it doesn’t make any sense. And so one of the things we’re starting to use is, and implement, our tablets across our teams, to where now you can make notes that are visible to all of your mates. You know, say there was an oxycodone spike for a patient that you want other people to be aware before we release that report, you can write that note down so that everyone can see it so whoever’s releasing can see, hey, Oxy Spike, I need to add a director’s note in here saying that the parents’ metabolite ratio was way too high, that kind of stuff. Then instead of looking at paper and wasting paper, it’s just easier to get that message across to your team. The other thing that we’re pivoting towards is remote work. So a lot of our data is being done in-house and there’s a level of, is that you have to have people here that are accessioning that are running the liquid handlers and doing sample prep and that are operating on those mass spec systems. You just have to have that, right? There’s really no other way around it. But in terms of the data analysis, right, you can have people anywhere. It really doesn’t matter as long as you’re set up to do that. And so a couple of months ago, we actually finished setting up our remote server to be able to process data on our Agilent Mass specs, which I’m really excited for. Certifying scientists that we’re going to hire should be remote, and we can play with those times to where we have data analysis happening 24 hours in a day, and it doesn’t slow us down at any point in the process. The final thing I’ll mention that we actually just started using is a software called Monday. Are you all familiar with Monday?

Kerri Anderson:
Yep.

Samantha Black:
Yeah.

Majors Badgett:
Oh, okay, yeah. So we knew nothing about it. But one of the things that our teams had really been looking to upgrade was just timelines for everything, right? How do we establish a timeline and then how do we stick to that timeline and broadcast it to all of our teams? So for instance, right now what we’re doing, our priority is adding fentanyl to our toxicology menu. So there are a lot of fentanyl analogs that are popping up as drugs of abuse. So you have carfentanyl, acro fentanyl, fluorenol fentanyl, just a bunch as well as other drugs like Xylazine and some netizens that are just popping up across the country. And so we’re trying to add that to our Arsenal, right, our testing menu. And so what I did was I worked with our validation team to basically sketch out a timeline, but my timeline was just on a whiteboard, right? And it was like, all right, this is the timeline, here’s the go-live date, this is when we need blanket done. So with Monday, you can establish everything that needs to be done, assign specific people to those tasks, and then update that with notes and files or whatever, right? So if the first step is, for that with safety, right, how do we improve safety across the lab in case someone accidentally ingested or inhaled or does something with a chemical that could cause an overdose? For two weeks, we tried to update everything about safety in our lab and we had that in the timeline. The next step was method development, and then at that point it’s external communication, it’s working on our LAS, it’s working on our portal, it’s going into validation and then updating other teams. And so you can map out everything and see where that progress is. And instead of sending a billion emails a day about, hey, what’s the status on this? Or, hey, we got this done, everyone can come in and see what that progress is. And you know what sales in the field care about and our clients is that go-live date, right? And so we try to map that out to where they go, okay, tentative go-live date is May 1st and if anything changes that get pushed back, push forward, whatever. But I think it’s really going to help our communication and the expectations to where we don’t have to waste a bunch of time on simply updating through emails or conversations or calls. There’s so much wasted there, time that you could do with other stuff. So our lab manager found that software, we’re starting to use it, we’ve been using it for about 3 or 4 weeks. I really like it a lot, so hopefully, we can take that to other teams.

Kerri Anderson:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Those sort of softwares and tools, they take a while to implement, I know they can be a burden at first, but they’re definitely worth it in the long. So I actually had a question circling back to when you were talking about buying the mass spec and being wined and dined by vendors and doing demos, that’s something I’ve noticed a lot of lab managers, lab directors don’t realize, that you can demo equipment and try things out. Do you have any other advice like that that you found helpful that maybe not everyone is aware of?

Majors Badgett:
So, yeah, demoing is absolutely terrific. It’s easier to do the more expensive it is, right? So for a mass spec where retail is going to be $300,000, $400,000, right? You want a demo that before you purchase it. Like you’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re just like, yeah, we’re going to buy a couple of these, right? So it’s really impactful because for instance, one of our assays, which is our FPI assay foundation pain index, so we look at 11 different biomarkers in pain. Right now it’s the only quantitative pain assessment in the world where we can look at biochemical origins that contribute to pain and then try to recommend supplements or recommendations that can reduce those abnormalities and hopefully improve the pain someone experiences. So it’s having incredible impacts, so a lot of people that use it and it ties very closely with tox in terms of, hey, are you taking your drug? And then also, here’s where you’re kind of biochemical pain is. And so with that, the method, the mass spec method, when I walked in the lab and I saw that for the first time, I was like, this is absolute BS. I don’t know how this method works. This should not work theoretically. And for us to be using that is like crazy, right? But it works, and over time I’ve warmed up to it a little bit, blew my assumptions about separations. And so with something like that was really complex and something that like, how the hell is this working? I knew whatever mass spec we were going to upgrade to needed to be able to run that. And so we knew it ran well on Agilent mass specs, and that’s what we’ve used. We looked at waters instruments, thermo instruments, bruker instruments, CIX instruments, and some others. And right off the bat I was like, that was my first question, it was basically like, hey, can you do this? Because I’m not worried about tox. If your mass spec doesn’t do tox like I’m going to know about that, right? Your mass spec should be able to do all of tox, that’s the bare minimum. But if you can do this biomarker assay, then hey, let’s talk. And so what was cool was some of these like Thermo basically have an in-house team that is just proof of concept, right? Where they can take something that you do in the lab and basically replicate and say, hey, look, we can do this right? You have to sign some NDAs and go through some red tape, but hey, we can do this, how about you visit, we talk about this and then hopefully you can purchase some of our mass specs. So demoing is incredibly important. There are a lot of instruments you don’t need to demo, right, a centrifuge, you don’t need a demo. But there are others that if you are paying, I would say over 50 grand for an instrument, why wouldn’t you at least want to know, can it do what I want it to do? Is it going to break down? Right? Because if you can demo an instrument for 2 to 3 months, some instruments just break down constantly or they have issues that you can’t resolve that you have no idea what it’s stemming from, you need an expert to come in, a litany of things. We’ve really had some great experiences demoing equipment, and I would recommend that for basically any high-end or routine equipment that you’re either going to buy a lot of or use a significant amount.

Kerri Anderson:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s where your research brain kicks in and you do the research on what you’re buying before.

Majors Badgett:
Absolutely, yeah.

Samantha Black:
Kerri, do you have anything else …? I could go on a lot of things, so.

Kerri Anderson:
I know I could too. Just any advice for our listeners that are wanting to get into this career?

Majors Badgett:
Yeah, oh man, and so, I told you how I got into this, I just fell backwards into it. There’s a science literacy that is terrific in terms of being specialized, but really poor at figuring out where opportunities lie or what industries to go into. When I finished up or was finishing up my BS, I didn’t want to be just a test tube pusher, right? I didn’t want to do that. My brain doesn’t work like that. I didn’t want that repetitiveness. I wanted something else, something challenging, something different, but I didn’t know what my options were with a BS. And so my only choice was to get an advanced degree. And for a lot of people that isn’t feasible, right? You don’t make money for the next five years, right? Your education is comped, but you’re scraping by, right, as a grad student in hopes of getting a job that you know is well paying. And then even when I got my PhD, I knew that, or when I was getting my PhD, I knew that like our lab had certain pipelines. Being at the University of Georgia, we had a lot of people that worked at the CDC or different areas around Atlanta, right, specific labs, but a lot of PhD people, our students go, okay, I’m either going to teach or be a, and in today’s world with science, you, it’s grim. But you have to wait for people to retire or die to be a teacher because there is this crazy saturation of people that want to teach at the top or paid enough to teach at the bottom. It is outrageously backwards, that’s where we’re at right now. And then for researchers, there are a lot of really good companies that need PhDs and specialty, specialists to be able to perform their research, but like I said earlier, there’s just this super-saturation of people applying to those jobs with PhDs. And so if I had known a path of being a lab director from the get-go, it would have been different, right? I could have done a lot to be able to prepare myself instead of just falling backward into this, and for lack of a better term, getting lucky, right? There’s so much that needs to be done at a high school stage or earlier to be able to say, here are some opportunities if you go in the STEM field, right, that really aren’t being discussed. And that is a shame because there are so many people with our brains that are very research, heavy research centric that don’t want to go into there because they’re either aren’t any opportunities or they don’t know, you know, what they want to do. And it’s funny because I say that and then I’m like, I was an idiot as a high schooler. So if someone had told me, hey, you can be a lab director, I’d be like, yeah, whatever, I’m gonna be a pro soccer player. But I mean, there’s still like that level of, there just needs to be more dialogue about it. And I don’t know how that is accomplished, but I know that instead of people just figuring out, oh, there’s a position open, I can take that, having a better plan to be able to get there is very important. I was talking about that with my wife, so I mentioned my wife has a PhD in finance. Excuse me, she’s, she was like finance, finance. She’s a cute little redhead from Mobile, Alabama. So she’s got this thick Southern accent, it’s hilarious, but she’s smarter than everyone that she teaches. So anyway, we were talking about it. I was like, I didn’t know how to balance a checkbook, I didn’t know all of this kind of stuff coming out of high school, and coming out of college even, I was an absolute idiot. Like, how in the world did I get to the point where I’m at right now? And for me, I always want to learn everything about something. I don’t really want to just half-ass stuff, I really want to take the time to learn it and accomplish it. And so it works for me because if I encounter a problem, I’m going to try to fix the problem or come to a solution. But for a lot of people, that isn’t the case, that’s not where their brain’s at and that’s perfectly fine. But there has to be more just general knowledge about opportunities and general useful skills that happen earlier on in life rather than, okay, I got my PhD, now stop.

Kerri Anderson:
Yeah, absolutely. So many people I know just fall into operations and it is one of those careers that people just don’t know about at a younger age.

Majors Badgett:
Yeah, yeah.

Samantha Black:
Yeah, I think it’s incredible. I think we all find our path eventually, but I think that it’s super interesting to hear about your experience as a researcher and in coming, and the value that you bring. I think every conversation that we have, somebody brings something different to the table. So I think this is just, I think of it as like we’re shining just a little bit more light on it every single time we talk to somebody. So it’s just another thing for people to think about and consider. And so that leads me to my last question, which is, if people want to talk to you and learn more about your experience or find out how you did what you did and how you got there, how can they connect with you, are you open to that? Like if somebody wants to get into the details with you, how can they do that?

Majors Badgett:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m more than happy to share my experience, and we have a lot of opportunities at Ethos and I have a lot of connections at other labs across the country. So I have a LinkedIn, name’s Majors Badgett. I’m rarely on it, so I apologize if I don’t respond really quickly. I also just have an email, a phone number you can actually go on, I think Ethos Labs website. I should be on there too, where you can contact me and we can set something up, but more than happy to talk about it. It’s something that I’m really passionate about and I wish more people in STEM kind of knew about opportunities there. So feel free to connect and I’d be happy to give you my advice, which may or may not be great, but can hopefully help out at some point.

Samantha Black:
Amazing, so we’ll tag those in the show notes of the podcast. So anybody looking to connect, they can just easily click through there. But Majors, thank you for taking the time today. This has been awesome. I think from the LabOps side, awesome information. So thanks for taking the time.

Majors Badgett:
Of course, thanks for having me. Y’all do a great job. This is a lot of great dialogue that hopefully people can listen to and go, oh, okay, that’s really cool, I didn’t know that. Thanks for having me and hope we all have a great rest of your day.

Samantha Black:
Thank you.

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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