Squeaky clean! Explore how membranes keep things in and out of our cells and how soap ‘pops’ the membranes of viruses.

Meet Bre MacKenzie!

Job Title: Principal Scientist, Lung Therapeutics, Inc

I am a research scientist that designs and performs laboratory experiments using human cells and tissues as well as animal models of human diseases, all of which help us to understand how new drugs work and whether they may cure lung diseases.

What is your favorite thing about your career? Although my career took a long time, a lot of sacrifice and hard work to build (highschool + 14 more years of education!) and was not always fun, especially in the beginning, I have now achieved a high level of expertise that is not only well compensated but also personally rewarding. I use my creativity as well as my knowledge every day. Currently, I enjoy maintaining a balance of working independently from home, occasionally in a laboratory setting, attending and presenting work at international conferences, and also collaborating with other leaders and experts from all over the world. We all learn from each other every day and are working towards the common goal of curing lung diseases.

What is one piece of advice that you would tell someone who is interested in pursuing your career? To be a good research scientist, means being inquisitive and creative as well as open-minded, very persistent and flexible. If you’re interested in becoming a scientist that develops potential new medicines, you should practice not only asking a lot of questions, but also thinking for yourself (independently) about different ways you can use to discover the answers you are searching for. You should also practice becoming comfortable and open with debating ideas and receiving criticism for your work and ideas as this will help you to improve your work. Finally, very often, it happens that good research scientists use all available information to form a hypothesis, then design very long, detailed, labor-intensive and expensive experiments, only to obtain results that prove their idea to be incorrect! That’s okay! The trick is to learn as much as you can from the unexpected results and try again until you find the answer! This gets easier with practice!