Master of Translational Medicine Program at UC Berkeley & UCSF

The Master Translational Medicine program is a relatively unique educational experience. We're blending engineering and medicine and business to try to create the future of health care innovation. Being at UCSF and Berkeley, we are in this petri dish of ideas with a range that goes from basic science and business and law all the way to clinical practice. In this one-year program, they get to see how ideas get formulated, how they grow. So being in the Bay Area, you're seeing the leading edge of how health care technology innovation works and innovation in general. Deciding to come here was mainly because I love engineering and I love science and I love learning about the different technical devices on the market, but I'm also very interested in the business components and what really matters in terms of what will make a product successful and how do you test it, how do you get it approved, who's actually going to use it. And so by coming to this program, I get to learn all of that side of things. Our students work on a real-world project. So we're saying here is someone who's trying to develop a new medical device or a diagnostic and we're going to embed them with that team and give them some real hands-on experience on a project that other people are actually trying to make happen. I'm on the Zordera team where we're working on an injectable implant for ocular delivery of therapeutics. I have noticed that there are different strengths that we all have that can be incorporated synergistically to accomplish our goals. One of our members is chemically oriented and knows a lot about how the drug products are acting differently and that's good for me because I'm geared towards how the flows and stuff are managed on a more macro scale. So it's interesting to see how our experiences and knowledge bases can kind of complement each other. I had this idea to stop brain death and brain damage and cardiac arrest and stroke patients and then I realized there was this program called the MTM in Berkeley and UCSF that could help you commercialize medical devices so it just seemed like the perfect sort of fit. Working with students has been amazing. One of the things that you underestimate when you're a student and I did was the value that you're actually adding to one of these startups and what I've realized now being on the other side of it is that our MTM team adds huge value to what we do in our startup every day. We tell them that their work will decide whether our startup makes it or doesn't. It's a really interesting way to approach a company is by treating it like a capstone project. You approach things from a student perspective where you're learning. There's no doubt in my mind that this was the right place to come to if you wanted to start a company to create a medical device to get to patients. The support in the Bay Area is unreal. For people who are looking to continue their education I would highly recommend this if you're interested in healthcare and business and learning how all those different things blend together.