Biotechnology

Hi, my name is Dr Jason Steele. I have a PhD and I am the discipline lead for biotechnology.

Biotechnology is the application of biology for technology so if we think about things like what’s happening now, COVID 19 so many of the things like diagnosis of it, coming up with vaccines, coming up with other treatments, testing those treatments, that’s biotechnology.

So biotechnology is something that’s really cutting edge. In terms of career opportunities one of the big things that people will often do out of biotechnology would be to go into research. So you may go into a PhD or something like that and go into cancer research, infectious diseases, that’s a whole bunch, a whole range of things that you could go into in terms of research. But there are also other things that probably you don’t necessarily think about, you can go into things like pharmaceutical sales, you can go and work for a pharmaceutical company in terms of research and development or quality control.

Our first year students throughout a common first year which is the same across any of the medical sciences and then in second year you start to do some of those fundamental units that are sort of specific or have more specificity for biotechnology. Things like molecular biology which is a which is a big one being able to genetically modify things. We then do things like immunology so you’re getting this foundation of knowledge and we just keep building on that and so in the third year you actually will do real biotechnology subjects where you’re actually looking at taking those and the knowledge that you’ve developed over those first two years and actually applying it in a more real-world situation to actually get the opportunity to go and do work placement in industry or in research centres. I have a student that I just organised her placement, she’s down in the Centenary Institute in Sydney working on gene therapy treatments, so that’s the sort of things that you can do with our work placements.

Those are the highlights of my career in biotechnology and sort of touched on this a few times was actually taking an idea and moving that all the way through to clinical trials. And so it was a vaccine or it is a vaccine for breast cancer, in the clinical trial that we had set up you’re actually getting people that are surviving longer from something that I actually worked on and that’s something that is a you know, it’s a real buzz, it’s something that you know that your brain can actually come up with something that can actually help people in the long run and I think that’s really something that you could do from biotech.