Sneha Mittal has landed a job that fuels her passion for cancer research. The 2023 alumna of the Computational Biomedicine and Biotechnology (CoBB) MS program is a bioinformatics analyst at New York Genome Center in New York City.
Mittal developed an interest in research at a young age by participating in school science fairs in her hometown of Lancaster, PA. She always knew she wanted to be a scientist, and the CoBB program equipped her with the skillset needed to turn her dream into reality.
“It helped me with my technical skills and being able to program and analyze big data,” she said. “CoBB encouraged me to ask biological questions and think like a scientist.”
The classes she completed in the CoBB program also exposed her to different aspects of biotechnology and helped her decide on a career path. One of her favorite classes was Personalized Medicine.
“I knew I liked cancer research, but I didn’t exactly know where to step in my career,” Mittal said. “That class really helped me to focus on the different kinds of careers that could be explored in biotech and biomedicine. I got to learn something new every week.”
While earning her master’s degree, Mittal completed an internship at Eurofins Viracor Biopharma Services. An internship gave her the chance to try a variety of job duties, including applying statistics in support of data analysis, creating methods and pipelines for product development, and working closely with research and development bioinformatics projects.
Mittal now works as a bioinformatics analyst, a job that combines her interests in cancer research and data analysis. In this role, she performs computational analysis on genomic data. Her daily tasks involve writing computer code in Python, analyzing data pipelines, and collaborating with PhD students and postdocs.
Her most recent research project is on high-grade ovarian cancer. Mittal and her lab are studying transcription and slicing events and how they affect the evolution of cancer cells. As part of this project, she also studies how algorithms work with RNA binding proteins.
“It’s such a big field and so much can be done,” Mittal said. “There’s so many different kinds of cancers, and microenvironments are all so different in each of them.”
One thing she loves about her job is learning from her colleagues at weekly lab meetings. Each week a different lab member delivers a presentation on their research at the lab meeting. Mittal’s lab is home to more than 50 scientists, so there is no shortage of new ideas.
“It’s always really cool to hear what someone else is doing and how it’s completely different from what I’m working on even though we’re still in the same space,” she said.
Mittal moved to the Big Apple from Pittsburgh last year to pursue her bioinformatics analyst job, a move she describes as the “best kind of change.” She loves the city and the rich research environment it offers. As she progresses in her career, Mittal is looking forward to developing her research skills even more.
“Most of the analysts over here end up falling in love with research,” she said. “I was kind of on the fence with that when I first started, but now it’s 100% true.”