Moderna's Global Fellowship Awards
“We're aware of what a high caliber institution Northwestern is, so we set out to make it our target school last year. We were super impressed by the candidates and talent pool that we were able to interact with and bring on board as either co-ops or interns.””
Alesandra McLean, head of Moderna’s Global Early Career programs
“For me, Moderna was top of mind in terms of a company I’d love to work with,” said Randy Singh, research assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and a member of Prof. Shana Kelley’s research group. “They have demonstrated their capability and effectiveness in their vaccine program, especially when it comes to delivering treatments to specific tissues.”
Singh got his chance to work with Moderna in Fall 2023 when he received a Moderna Global Fellowship award, a program the company designed to support the next generation of scientists passionate about mRNA technologies for potential therapeutic or diagnostic applications. mRNA is a genetic material that was central to developing Moderna’s COVID vaccine, and could hold the potential to treat an even wider range of illnesses. Singh wants to harness the mRNA power demonstrated by the vaccine’s success, and has been researching opportunities for targeted cancer cell treatment since last year.
2023 was also the first year Moderna designated Northwestern as a priority recruiting school, partnering with the Northwestern Career Advancement and Engineering Career Development offices to strategically ramp up the company’s campus presence through career fairs, info sessions, and on-the-ground student engagement.
“We're aware of what a high caliber institution Northwestern is, so we set out to make it our target school last year,” said Alesandra McLean, head of Moderna’s Global Early Career programs. “We were super impressed by the candidates and talent pool that we were able to interact with and bring on board as either co-ops or interns.”
To encourage conversations with students, Moderna recruiters set up informational and networking tables in academic buildings and held casual conversations with students as they went about academic life. These activities generated significant engagement and interest, said McLean, and marked a strong start to Moderna’s on-campus recruiting efforts.
Reese Richardson, fifth year PhD candidate in interdisciplinary biological sciences, also received a Global Fellowship award in 2023.
Last October, at the start of the fellowship, Moderna held the Global Fellows Summit, where they invited recipients from across the globe to share their projects and ideas with other mRNA-minded experts. Richardson’s project was focused on examining and documenting the biases found in mRNA sequencing technologies, which are used in cutting-edge research on mRNA vaccines and gene therapies.
“My project was a bit different from everybody else’s,” he said, “but it was very valuable to get the opportunity to talk to everyone and meet people from so many different countries and so many different institutions.”
Singh, who also attended the Global Fellows Summit, said "it’s been a really great learning opportunity to come together as a community and think of creative ways to collaborate, as well as put forward more effective and durable therapeutics and diagnostics."
Both Richardson and Singh plan to dedicate their academic careers to growing and enhancing the power of mRNA. As young scientists, the chance to work with Moderna is invaluable.
“The overarching theme of my research is to translate the findings from the lab bench into the clinic for effective therapeutics for anti-cancer or diagnostic tools,” Singh said, “so the support from Moderna has been really great for me as a young scientist building on my career. I’ve had so many ideas over the years, but now I have the resources to be able to pursue those ideas.”
“We at Moderna very much view our early career programs as a strategic longer term talent pipeline,” said McLean. “It is such an important pipeline for us. We are really trying to recruit the best and brightest into our internship and our co-op program–plus, they can learn a lot about Moderna, and we can learn a lot about them.”
Maggie Waldron, Senior Associate Director on Northwestern’s Corporate Engagement team, has worked closely with partners at Northwestern and Moderna to support the relationship. “Successful, sustainable partnerships are built on understanding each other’s priorities and identifying multiple points of connection to build out comprehensive engagement on campus. So that’s been our goal here, to learn about how our faculty and students are interested in connecting to the company and what is top of mind for Moderna. From there, we’ve hosted faculty seminars and research conversations, built a thriving talent ecosystem, connected to alumni who now work at Moderna, and secured the two Global Fellowships that are supporting early career researchers. We’re excited to continue to grow this partnership as we look to the future.”