A research internship at a global pharmaceutical changed this former college basketball player’s career
In 2022, Sade Iriah was pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience at Northeastern University when she seized the opportunity to embed herself in industry research at Takeda Pharmaceutical, a Japanese multinational biopharmaceutical company.
Iriah worked with the imaging team at Takeda and says the experience was “amazing.”
“They really allowed me to be involved with the team in a way that wasn’t just like on-looking but actually doing and participating in the science,” she says.
However, the main thing that Iriah got out of the four months at Takeda, she says, was a network — valuable connections with top scientists.
“I got to see how they think about things, how they work through problems, how they attack different diseases in the world,” she says.
She began to think in new ways, Iriah says, which helped her during job interviews once she had earned her Ph.D. The internship exposed her to different aspects of science besides academic science, which helped her determine what kind of work she enjoyed and wanted to continue doing.
Iriah grew up in Toronto and was recruited to play on Northeastern’s basketball team. While working on her undergraduate degree and playing basketball, she says, she didn’t have the time to do full-time internships.
To make up for that Iriah started volunteering at different labs at the university, eventually making her way into professor Craig Ferriss’ lab at the Center for Translational NeuroImaging. She became the manager of the lab while getting her master’s in public health at Northeastern.
“I was able to lead some studies,” she says. “I was able to create my own questions and figure out how I wanted to get those answers. That was where I was able to publish my first few papers.”
Iriah chose to stay at Northeastern for her doctoral program, she says, because of the many resources the university had to offer its students. She was conducting research on neurodegenerative diseases, addiction and different psychiatric disorders using MRI technology when she heard about the highly-curated experiential learning opportunities in Northeastern’s LEADERs program.
LEADERs, which stands for Leadership Education Advancing Discovery through Embedded Research, is a customized internship program for doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers that integrates leadership and professional-skills education with a research project in industry or the public sector.
Link to the article: https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/01/03/northeasterns-leaders-program/?utm_source=News%40Northeastern&utm_campaign=ad9d7aa58f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_04_19_12_57_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-e5d10e1c7f-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D