Blue Hen Scientist Tackles COVID-19
A University of Delaware alumnus from the Class of 2014, Sam Modlin is a project scientist at Laboratory for Pathogenesis of Clinical Drug Resistance and Persistence (LPCDRP) and chief scientific officer of the newly-incorporated company InBiome, which he started in the fall with co-founder Dr. Faramarz Valafar.
While both the lab and company are focused on studying the genome of the pathogen that causes Tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Modlin and staff realized that their methods for genomic analysis could be applicable to other infectious diseases. Therefore, by mid-March [2020], Modlin’s team pivoted some of their efforts to focus on COVID-19.
At UD, Modlin majored in neuroscience, a far cry from his current field in infectious diseases, but not without transferable skills from his UD experience and education. Under his own proclamation, Modlin didn’t excel as a student in the classroom, so it was important for him to find things outside of the classroom to build his professional skills and confidence.
“As a peer advisor for the Psychology Department, I got incredibly valuable experience in public speaking, planning/coordinating, and in advising. In my current roles, I have to do a ton of all of those things. I would have been far less developed along these trajectories and less willing to take on these responsibilities had I not become comfortable with them at UD.”
Another piece of his UD education changed the course of his career: undergraduate research in Dr. Anna Klintsova’s Neuroplasticity Lab.
“[It] made me realize that I really enjoy research and built up my scientific communication skills substantially. Just as importantly, I learned that I am not very good at ‘wet-lab’ work, nor do I enjoy it. That was very valuable to learn, and was what guided me toward Bioinformatics, which is what I got my graduate degree in, and landed me in Dr. Valafar’s lab.”
