How Bench Scientists Are Getting Ahead With AI

About this episode

In this episode, Carina Clingman interviews Heather Karner about how bench scientists can leverage AI for career advancement and job searching.

You keep hearing about AI, but nobody is telling you how it actually fits into a biotech career or a job search. That changes today. In this episode, Carina sits down with Heather Karner, a bench scientist with a background in RNA biology who works alongside machine learning researchers in the Bay Area. Heather is actively job searching and has quietly become the go-to AI resource for her lab and her network, not because she is a tech expert, but because she started experimenting and never stopped. Together they share the exact AI use cases they are running right now: a personalized daily brief that flagged Gilead and Eli Lilly RNA acquisitions before they hit LinkedIn, a literature review workflow built for scientists, how to use AI as a tireless teacher for coding and lab protocols, AI note taking that surfaced 10 action items from a 10-minute meeting, and how to turn a rambling brain dump into a clear, professional message. 🤖 Use Cases Covered in This Episode Heather's Use Cases: Personalized Daily Brief: Build a morning brief agent in Notion (using Claude Sonnet) that scans for job search signals: funding announcements, acquisitions, clinical trial updates, and new papers in…

People in this episode

Host: Carina Clingman

Guest: Heather Karner

Topics covered

• AI in biotech
• job search strategies
• bench scientists
• literature review
• machine learning
• career advancement

Keywords

• AI
• biotech career
• job search
• RNA biology
• machine learning
• literature review
• coding
• lab protocols

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Gilead, Eli Lilly, AlphaFold, Cheiron

Places: Bay Area

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