Amaris Castanon
I have been in the biotechnology field for over 10 years, and I currently serve as a senior field application scientist at Fujifilm Biosciences, where I focus on bioprocessing and cell and gene therapy. In this role, I am the primary technical resource for the entire West U.S. territory, including part of Canada. My day-to-day involves a lot of travel, customer calls either on-site, in office, or remotely from home, and delivering presentations at international conferences representing the company and all of its portfolio products. Every customer has different needs, so there's no same day, which makes my job very fun in that regard. Before joining Fujifilm, I worked as a field application specialist at Sellink, a biotech company that specializes in developing bioprinters for disease modeling. One of my most notable achievements has been my contribution as a scientist to patients through the development of a diagnostic for antiphospholipid syndrome, a very neglected autoimmune disease that is commonly misdiagnosed with lupus. Working in Dr. Parangelli's lab, we developed a diagnostic that would be specific and would prevent patients from getting misdiagnosed and ultimately getting mistreated. I have also leveraged my bioprinting skills to train the FDA on utilizing this technology, as they are now replacing animal testing with bioprinted tools and completely emptying their animal facilities to start fully developing disease models with bioprinted tools. Given my expertise in this very new field that is revolutionizing the entire biotech industry, I created bioprinting courses available online on Udemy for students and young professionals wanting to get into the field. Looking ahead, I would like to progress in my career into a role that would allow me to work more in developing collaborations between institutions and helping institutions transition into fully synthetic models and non-animal alternative models, which I have a very special place in my heart for, mainly to avoid animal cruelty in research but also to develop better, more representative models for the human body.
• University of Texas Medical Branch
• Galveston
• Texas
• University of Sheffield
• University of Texas at El Paso
• University of Barcelona (visiting researcher)
• Dean's Award
• University of Texas Medical Branch
• Golden Award for Translational Research
• Dean's Award for Best Poster Presentation
• University of Sheffield
• National Science Foundation Grant
• Hispanic Scholarship Institute Grant
• Presidential Scholar Full Scholarship
• University of Texas at El Paso
• Marie Curie Scholar Grant
• Poster Award for Biochemistry Research Presentation
• University of Texas at El Paso COURI Program
• Sigma Psi Scientific Award
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say it's very easy to be intimidated in science, because it's been a traditionally male-dominated field. So when you start out, it can be, I guess you can feel out of place very easily. So, what I would give as advice is to explore the options that light your heart on fire and find the passion within biology, because biology is such a large field that there's so many areas you can go into. And there's so many ways you can help the world and help humanity with biology. You know, I would say try not to focus on feeling intimidated, try not to focus on the past. Simply focus on what makes your heart go really, really on fire. What makes your heart grow into passion? And focus on chasing that within the pursuit of your research fields.
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Locations
FUJIFILM Biosciences
1013 Mohegan Lane, El Paso, TX 79912