Alumni Ever After

Amanda Levy Placone (left) and Jesse Placone (right) with their daughter Kyla (center).

Some may say fate brought together INBT and Materials Science and Engineering Department’s (DMSE) alums Jesse Placone ’13 and Amanda Levy Placone ’16, but they’ll tell you it was the annual DMSE softball game. Levy Placone’s own parents met while attending Johns Hopkins as undergraduates in the early 1980s and in 2014, the tradition was passed on when Jesse and Amanda said “I do.” While working in different disciplines, the couple is still immersed in the field which brought them together (the science, not the softball field).

Mentored by Kalina Hristova, core faculty member at the INBT, Placone studied thermodynamics of receptor tyrosine kinases dimerization. Levy Placone was mentored by Peter Searson, core faculty member and co-founder of the INBT, and studied the effect of astrocyte activation on the progression of brain cancer. The INBT caught up with these alums to see how their careers have developed since graduating.

INBT: Where are you currently working? Levy Placone: I’m a senior consultant at Guidehouse working on projects for clients in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. I started working in July 2019 and it’s been really interesting to work on a variety of projects across a range of therapeutic areas. I enjoy applying my scientific knowledge and problem-solving abilities while learning new knowledge in medical science and the life sciences industry.

Placone: I am an assistant professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. I am excited to establish their new Biomedical Engineering Program. I develop 3D printed bone mimetics for assessing cancer metastasis, specifically assessing cell-cell and cell-substrate interactions. I make decisions that impact curriculum design and foster undergraduate learning. Our new facilities are under construction and I’m helping design research and learning spaces to facilitate

undergraduate engagement in research from the ground up.

INBT: Tell us about your career path since you graduated.

Levy Placone: I was a postdoc for almost three years in a collaborative industry/academia lab at GlaxoSmithKline’s Center for Translational Neuroscience at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in San Diego. I was tasked with setting up a lab from scratch and to help develop the research plan. After the initial setup period, I mostly researched the effects of potential therapeutics for microglia inflammatory response.

While there I realized that I enjoyed the research planning phase, but the bench work was far less interesting. I decided life science consulting would be a good fit for my skills and interests where I could be involved in the science without doing lab work.

Placone: I knew that I wanted to become a faculty member working on cancer and the bone microenvironment. However, I knew that I needed to differentiate myself from my previous work. I pivoted for my first postdoctoral position to learn more about 3D printing. I leveraged my materials science background to develop new materials for 3D printing applications in John Fisher’s lab at the University of Maryland. To strengthen my expertise in stem cell work, I then moved to Adam Engler’s lab at the University of California, San Diego. There, I continued my work on endothelial cells derived from iPSCs, and supplemented it with work on mechanotransduction in cancer biology.

INBT: How has your training at INBT helped you with your career?

Levy Placone: The INBT collaborative nature helped me to understand fields outside of my own. Collaborating with other engineers, biologists, and clinicians showed me the broader picture much better than if I had only interacted with people in my field. Learning more about these fields, and how to communicate with a range of individuals and scientific backgrounds, has been extremely valuable to my career.

Placone: The INBT provided training that was helpful in disseminating knowledge to those outside of my research niche. The ability to effectively communicate with interdisciplinary teams has proven beneficial when working with clinicians in my postdoc positions.

INBT: What career advice do you have for potential or current students?

Levy Placone: I remember hearing someone say that the most important thing in a PhD was learning how to think. Learning how to ask the right questions and draw connections between seemingly disparate elements has proved invaluable in my career since my PhD training. I’ve since repeated this bit of wisdom to anyone who asks about getting a PhD.

Placone: Foster collaborations between research groups where there is overlap with your PhD. Bringing in external knowledge will greatly aid in overcoming challenges you experience throughout your academic experience. The insight of others trained in different fields can help shift your perspective and overcome old problems in new ways.