A Seven-Day Career Switch

Ana Martins (MBP ‘25) knows how fast a career can pivot. Sometimes it takes as little as seven days.  

A recent graduate of Northwestern Engineering's Master of Biotechnology Program (MBP), Martins spent 10 months contracting as a laboratory technician with global biopharmaceutical company AbbVie. She spoke with a friend from the company’s functional genomics team about how she wanted to work with 3D tissue models — the kind of systems she believes will transform drug safety research. 

A week later, the friend called her.  

“AbbVie had just posted a job description, and she sent it to me,” Ana said. “She said, ‘This is exactly what you were talking about.’” 

This role—an associate scientist position focused on investigative toxicology—became a transformational opportunity. Ana was hired full-time in November to focus on complex in vitro modeling, including organ-on-a-chip systems and 3D cultures. 

These technologies could complement or even reduce reliance on animal testing and represent a shift toward more predictive models that could accelerate safer therapies to patients, she said.  

“I’ve always thought that as we develop more robust in vitro models, that’s going to be the future of telling us how safe things are before we reach the point of human trials,” Ana said. “Animal trials hold a tremendous amount of importance, but there’s so much of a gap that remains.”

Ana previously contributed to early-stage therapeutic discovery at AbbVie through CRISPR-based genetic screening and in vitro disease modeling. Her work included implementing gene editing screens to map outcomes to genotypic variants for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other neurological disease studies. 

“It was very wet-lab heavy, which was a big shift for me because I did a lot of clinical work before MBP,” Ana said. “It was a really big transition.” 

That transition was powered by MBP.  

A self-described hands-on learner, Ana said MBP gave her tools she now uses daily, from case-study research skills and understanding the regulatory process to chemical engineering fundamentals that guide her work with tissue models.  

“A lot of the calculations I do on a daily basis came straight from MBP,” Ana said. “The program prepared me with a combination of soft skills and hard skills.” 

The program also gave her independence. Her research project—"Mitochondria Transplantation for Proinflammatory Macrophages"—pushed her to design protocols no one in her lab used before. That forced her to figure out complex challenges on her own, something she said prepared her for success in the working world.  

Now, as Ana works through her first few months in the new role, she said she sees a clear throughline from MBP to AbbVie’s cutting-edge work. 

“I saw a lecture at Northwestern about a huge organoid that was vascularized and how the entire system was built,” Ana said. “Nowadays I’m thinking, ‘We could make that at AbbVie. We could implement that someday.’ Because of MBP, I now have the skills to do something like that.”