From Postdoctoral Scholar to Senior Scientist in a BioTech Startup: Meet Dr. Dalton Chavez!
At OmniVis, we pride ourselves on being learners from a diversity of backgrounds all contributing to our common mission of elevating humanity in healthcare. We are a motivated team who learns from each other and persists through challenges to help everyone on the team grow and reach their fullest potential.
Today, our Employee Spotlight showcases our Senior Scientist, Dalton Chavez! Meet Dalton and learn about his journey to OmniVis.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I was born and raised in the Bay Area. As a kid, I always liked math and biology. In high school, I went on a field trip to Genentech, and it was fascinating to see the state-of-the-art laboratories and cutting-edge work occurring there. It sparked an interest in me to look further into the field of biotechnology. After high school, I went to college at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and majored in biomedical engineering. I worked in a professor’s laboratory for 3 years where I did research involving cell- and tissue-related laboratory techniques. After completing a BS and MS, I worked at Santa Cruz Biotechnology for a year, where I performed more cell- and tissue-related laboratory techniques. Then I did a PhD at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), where I got to work with professors whose work I read about during my research at Cal Poly. After UAB, I worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where I continued research related to what I did at UAB. Now I’m a Senior Scientist at OmniVis.
What does your day-to-day look like? What are your key responsibilities for OmniVis?
We just signed a lease for our first laboratory in California. I’m in charge of setting up the laboratory, which involves everything from deciding which instruments to purchase to developing a comprehensive biosafety manual along with biosafety training modules that I can use to train future laboratory employees. I also interview candidates for new laboratory positions. The new employees will be integral to helping OmniVis move toward launching its first product. Now that the laboratory is ready to go and new employees are being hired, I’ll be running experiments that will also help OmniVis move toward launching its first product. I also reach out to potential partners who could manufacture reagents and parts of our device. Finally, I look for, write, and submit grants that we can use to fund our research programs. As part of this process, I look for ways to increase OmniVis’s chances of being awarded grants. For example, I recently served as a grant reviewer on an NIH study section focused on digital health solutions for COVID-19, where I got an inside look on how proposals get evaluated.
What is your favorite thing about working at OmniVis and what do you think makes OmniVis special from other biotech startups?
My favorite thing about working at OmniVis is being around the high level of scientific expertise seen in the CEO and the cofounders. They are all PhD scientists and engineers focused on creating products that are built on solid foundations of science and engineering. This will help ensure that reliable, functional products get created. OmniVis is special compared to other biotechnology startups because global health is a core focus of the company. OmniVis is not just another healthcare company focused on diseases affecting only the United States. Instead, OmniVis focuses on diseases affecting a range of low-and middle-income countries, which is an approach that has the potential to re-balance some of the staggering inequality that exists today.
What has been your favorite project you have been working on and why?
We just received the first batch of cholera bacterial cells in our laboratory. I love working with cells, especially cells as fascinating as cholera bacterial cells. We have to follow certain laboratory precautions when working with these cells due to their pathogenic nature. It has been very interesting learning about the cells and the necessary precautions. We will also soon be receiving a qPCR machine that I’ll use to confirm the presence of the cholera toxin gene in the cholera cells. These topics and these laboratory procedures are naturally fascinating to me, making this project my favorite so far.
Is there anything else you would like the readers to know?
When I started college, I knew almost nothing about biotechnology, engineering, and research. None of my family members have ever worked in biotechnology. In college, my older peers would talk about “research,” so I decided to look into “research” myself. I identified a few professors whose research I was naturally interested in and approached them during office hours. I decided to work with Dr. Kristen Cardinal, who is a super-star mentor and translational researcher. I performed 3 years of research in her laboratory, published a first-author paper based on the research I did with her, learned about Ph.D. programs, and learned about high-impact product-focused research that occurs in the industry. This experience made me realize a couple of things about myself that might be true for others too: (1) working on things I’m naturally interested in makes it easier to devote lots of time to those things and more likely that I’ll make big achievements and (2) seeking out truly spectacular mentors in my areas of interest can open incredible doors.
Fun Fact About Yourself!
I love swimming! My mother took me swimming a lot when I was a baby, and I took lots of swim lessons as a kid. Throughout high school, I was on the swimming and water polo teams and did lifeguarding and swim teaching. In college, I was on a master’s swim team. Today, I do lap swimming for exercise and love it as much as ever. But since COVID-19 has been around, swimming pools have been closed, and I haven’t been able to swim — I’m a fish out of the water!
