Spotlight on Grace Hao, Product Development Engineer

Spotlight is a series of interviews with DNA Script's employees. Twice a month, learn more about our proud team members. What do they do every day? What challenges do they encounter? What are their perspectives?

This week, we talk to Grace Hao, Product Development Engineer in South San Francisco.

What is your background? What did you do before joining DNA Script? 

I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania and completed my undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins University studying Materials Science and Engineering in 2018.

I originally wanted to become a scientist and pursue a Ph.D. in microbiology or neuroscience. I did research in a lab focusing on the blood-brain barrier for four years at Hopkins. Although I loved being a biologist, I found myself drawn to the logic of engineering. I was more excited to create test structures on Solidworks than pass flasks of cells. But I am so intrigued by the impact of science on everyday life that I combined my passions and pursued a career in the biotechnology world.

I worked at a biotech startup in London as a Microfluidics Engineer and then moved to California to work at BD as a Verification Engineer for flow cytometry systems. When I joined DNA Script, we were just starting to grow the US team, so the lab was in its early stages. It has been very exciting to watch the team, the technology and the product grow!

What is your position and role today at DNA Script?

I work as a Product Development Engineer focusing on the hardware for DNA Script’s first system, SYNTAX??.

SYNTAX?? is a benchtop DNA printer that synthesizes oligonucleotides through an enzymatic process and provides users with oligos in a format that they can use immediately. This box is pretty spectacular as it offers an alternative to a 30-year-old organic chemistry process that usually fits into a large facility with reagent lines everywhere on the walls and a massive waste collection station that generally takes a whole room. With SYNTAX??, all the nasty chemicals are gone, and the facility fits on a benchtop open-air instrument. Pretty cool!

Our previous prototypes created these oligos, adding one base pair at a time, but all the post-synthesis processing (PSP) needed to be done by hand. The SYNTAX?? instrument automates the entire process and takes care of synthesis and PSP.

My role is to verify and validate that the instrument meets our technical specifications. This usually involves designing test cases to assess the hardware and software functionalities.

What does a standard workday entail? 

One of the more exciting aspects of working at a startup is being involved in multiple facets of the product development team.

I usually start by running a variety of tests on SYNTAX?? to assess its performance. By evaluating the yield and purity of the outputted oligos, I collaborate with numerous scientists, engineers and data scientists to understand if the results we acquire align with what we expected to see.

It is always insightful to see a scientist’s biological perspective on the process compared to my technical perspective, which focuses predominantly on the hardware of the system. Together we try to isolate the specific part of the process that is most likely to have impacted the results. Since we are involved in testing the instrument at various stages of the development lifecycle, there is a lot of troubleshooting involved.

Another big part of my day is providing support for our older prototypes that we use to validate our reagents, which includes maintaining the hardware and the Python database. It has been interesting to have a “peek under the hood” and understand the core hardware functionalities controlled by the software.

One of my passions in life is singing along to the Hamilton soundtrack in the lab — a little too loudly — but thankfully my coworkers don’t mind or haven’t heard me yet.

What are future challenges that you anticipate for your position? How would you like to grow? 

Once we launch our alpha program, I expect my day-to-day responsibilities to be quite different. We are currently in the planning stages for the commercial version of SYNTAX??, which requires us to redefine and outline numerous requirements. It is very exciting to see a biotechnological product from the beginning as an early prototype to its launch and be involved in every part of its developmental cycle. There are many moving pieces that need to be considered to build a successful instrument, including key aspects such as the website interface, the actual system itself, the manufacturing and shipping, the installation and support of the instrument and many more.

For the future, I will begin focusing on planning to test our next instrument’s capabilities and provide technical support for the SYNTAX?? instrument. By working with SYNTAX?? and the prototype, I’ve been able to have a strong grasp of the hardware functionalities needed for an automated lab system. However, I want to learn more about the intersection of the mechanical processes and the software of the product.

Overall, I am so happy to be a part of this company and tight-knit team, and I look forward to learning more about and working on our product. I can’t wait to see this box used by research teams soon and later used to develop or manufacture next-gen diagnostics or vaccines!