Caryn McCowan

Caryn McCowan ’11 vividly remembers watching “Cracking the Code of Life” on VHS in her eighth-grade biology class.

The prior year, in 2000, the first draft of the Human Genome Project was released, and the two-hour PBS special detailed the scientific race to decode the sequence of human DNA. From that point, McCowan was hooked on genomics, the study of an organism’s complete set of DNA.

“That was the first time I put much thought into genetics,” she says. “I knew I wanted to do something in the genomics space when I got older.”

McCowan grew up in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and chose to study biology at UMass Lowell due to the university’s affordable in-state tuition. She appreciated the biology program’s rigorous course load, but sought experience outside of the classroom.

“I wanted to get my foot in the door,” she says.

McCowan learned that Jessica Garb was joining the biology faculty in 2009, two years before McCowan was slated to graduate. She looked into Garb’s research and found that Garb did a lot of work with gene sequencing. This aligned with McCowan’s interest, so she emailed Garb about joining her lab and was brought aboard her junior year.

McCowan started with bioinformatics work while getting course credit for the research. During the summer before her senior year, she got paid to work in Garb’s lab, thanks to a grant the professor received.

As a member of the Honors College, McCowan completed a research project in Garb’s lab in which she sequenced a specific venom molecule from a brown widow spider to better understand the spider’s molecular evolution.

“Being from New England, I had never seen a widow spider until I joined her lab,” says McCowan, who has returned to UMass Lowell to talk with Garb’s genomics class. “I learned a lot about widow spiders through this project, and I’m not nearly as afraid of them as I used to be.”

McCowan’s research experience and courses, including molecular biology with Biological Sciences Associate Professor Michael Graves, enabled her to build skills in genomics technology and biology. This helped her land a job out of college at the Broad Institute, a biomedical and genomics research center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Broad Institute evolved from the Whitehead Institute, which had generated sequence data for the Human Genome Project.

“My first job after graduating, I worked in the same building where parts of the human genome were sequenced,” McCowan says.

McCowan was promoted several times during her seven-plus years at the Broad Institute. She started with prepping samples for sequencing and was eventually running the institute’s Pacific Biosciences sequencing service, which was a specialized system that could sequence lengthy sequences of DNA. 

McCowan left the Broad Institute in 2018 to work for Cellarity, a pharmaceutical startup in Somerville, Massachusetts. She started as a senior research associate before transitioning into an associate software engineer role, where she developed data models for wet lab-generated information using computer software tools like Python, PostgreSQL and Linux.

After nearly three years, McCowan decided it was time for a change, so she set her LinkedIn profile to “Open to Work.” A recruiter reached out to McCowan about an opportunity at Embark, a Boston-based consumer genetics company that genotypes dog DNA. Her CV was handed to the science leadership team at the company, who saw value in McCowan’s past experiences.

“I have experience with different genomics technologies, starting from all the way back when I worked in Jessica Garb’s lab,” she says. “The company needed somebody who could work on data quality control, so they hired me.”

Embark’s DNA testing gives dog owners insight into their pet’s breed and health conditions. Using her genomics background, McCowan ensured that the data was accurate while looking for cost-effective ways to upgrade the product.

“Everything that I’ve worked on has turned out to be steppingstones for the role I’m in now,” she says.