Engineering a Cool Career in Biotech - and Volunteering Along the Way

What kind of opportunities can an engineer find through their work? Plenty, at Illumina! One employee shares how she makes a difference.

Originally published on Illumina News Center

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / April 18, 2024 / Inside a lab that is off-limits to most employees, Staff Engineer Allie Duchnak coordinates hundreds of details for highly confidential projects. Based at Illumina's San Diego headquarters, her interdisciplinary team, Advanced Platforms, builds test beds for components that may one day become part of a sequencer.

If you were allowed a peek, you'd see a lab filled with fluidic tubes, flow cells, computers, imaging, and syringe pumps. "What we do looks pretty ugly," Duchnak laughs. "There are parts and things going in all different directions."

The first project she worked on that made it to market became part of the Illumina NovaSeq X Sequencing System. She had joined the project in 2019, but the work began even before that. "Everything else I've worked on is still not yet a product," she says. Her timelines stretch into next year or 2026 (and that's fast-tracked, believe it or not); more commonly she works within a three-to-five-year timeframe and generates ideas for items that are a decade out.

Duchnak studied nanoengineering at the University of California, San Diego, but she always wanted to do something related to health and health care, and she found her way to Illumina through her on-campus volunteer work. As an undergraduate, she got involved in Global TIES (Teams in Engineering Service), which pairs students with not-for-profits to deliver a useful engineering task. In TIES, she was part of a group developing a low-cost HIV monitoring system at the university's San Diego Center for AIDS Research. At the same time, she and her undergrad teammates founded a startup, which led her to transition from nanoengineering to bioengineering and biology.

After a year in the San Diego Center for AIDS Research, Illumina hired her-just as she happened to begin a master's program in biotechnology. "I ended up doing both because it just didn't make sense to turn either down," she says. Illumina is her first job in the industry.

On top of her engineering work, Duchnak continues to volunteer through internal opportunities at Illumina. Since 2021, she has served as a volunteer manager for The Future Is Bright, a cornerstone Illumina corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative. This monthlong genomic literacy campaign, tied to DNA Day on April 25, sends volunteers to schools near Illumina sites, including San Diego and Foster City, California; Madison, Wisconsin; and various international offices. Illumina employees connect with students by hosting career panels, implementing genomics curricula, and leading hands-on experiments, such as extracting DNA from strawberries. Illumina's goal is to reach 5 million STEM learners by 2030, with the idea of fueling a diverse pipeline of future scientists.

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