In January, Master of Public Policy (MPP) alum Tony Patelunas began as a Program Manager at
Tony’s goal of public service has been around for a long time, and may be inspired by his parents’ involvement and volunteering in the local community during childhood. He says, “I found something irreplaceably rewarding by serving a greater community and having a broad impact.” In college, he served in leadership roles within student organizations. Tony learned about how to bridge the gap between biology and public service after an interview with Senator Rush Holt. The Senator talked about the impact of being a scientist in a policy making role.
His journey to the MPP started during the second year of his PhD program when he took PP 5327 Analysis for Management Decision Making with Professor Mark Robbins. Tony was drawn to the course due to interest and an opportunity for insight into how policy decisions were made. He adds,
The course was heavily quantitative technique based (discounting, queueing, markov modeling, etc), but through a public lens (e.g. How do we decide when to open another toll booth on a busy highway? How do we decide if it’s worth opening a municipal bond for a project?). It was so much fun – I was hooked! I still have all of my assignments from that course and still reference them!
Prior to completing his PhD program in 2020, Tony hoped to be at the intersection of genetics/genomics, business/entrepreneurship and public policy. After seeking career advising, his dream role seemed to be something he needed to invent. Instead of creating a new role, he started a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health with the hope of having a science focus and opportunities to serve on committees that contributed to policy.
During this time, Tony was also helping to run a job board for scientists called DOCjobs.com. One post in particular, submitted by Seven Bridges, stuck out to him as a perfect fit. For Tony, Seven Bridges was, “… a small and growing mission driven company working in genomics on public projects.” (Note: Seven Bridges became a part of Velsera in 2023).
When asked about how he intertwines his scientific, policy and business skillsets, Tony had this to say,
My scientific training is useful when I meet with scientists that use the Seven Bridges data ecosystems (Cancer Genomics Cloud, BioData Catalyst Powered by Seven Bridges, CAVATICA) because I understand the research they want to do and their data needs which I translate back to our engineering and bioinformatics teams. My policy training is useful for practical skills (Bill Simonsen’s budgeting class set me up well to build yearly proposal budgets!) and understanding the potential impacts of new policies like the new NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy (picked up from Eric Brunner’s Policy Analysis and Causal Analysis courses). My business training was picked up outside the classroom (Accelerate UCONN, CT Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation program, managing DOC Jobs) but supports a Program Manager’s need to think about how we grow the company such as what areas are strategic for growth (company and market needs), what is the potential market size of a new platform, and how does a new contract affect our team.
Through NIH cloud platforms, Tony is able to assist in democratizing access and analyze publicly funded data. He explains, “my MPP training has helped me think about policies and how they affect researchers that access the platforms as well as the broader stakeholders given the public source of funds.” This perspective allows Tony to look at the difference in value for citizen scientists or patient networks versus academic researchers. The MPP also trained him to think causally through pseudo experiments where variables cannot be changed in a way that they would be in a lab. Lately, Tony has been,
…thinking through a natural experiment to determine if access to scalable computing resources (high-performance cluster, cloud computing, etc) affects the ability to contribute to science – this is a core question to democratizing science and the training I received in my MPP set me up to answer it.
For prospective School of Public Policy (SPP) students, Tony has this advice to share:
First, look for the intersections between your interests because there might be something that you are uniquely trained for. This requires extensive self reflection around what skills you have, what you enjoy doing, and what skills you need to build. It’s likely you have many skills or knowledge areas that you’re not taking into account when searching for positions. Second, find a team of mentors to guide your decision making in your career. I was told that I should treat a career like a company and have a board that asks difficult questions and can shed light on the unknown-unknowns of my thought processes. I have great mentors, including some from SPP, that help me refine my thinking and grow as a person and in my career.
We look forward to seeing how Tony continues to intertwine biology, business and policy! Have a story to share from our network? Let us know at sppmedia@uconnn.edu.