Jaime Castro-Mondragón began postdoctoral research at the Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway (NCMM) at the University of Oslo in 2017 and, working with NCMM Group Leader Anthony Mathelier, drove the development and maintenance of the JASPAR open access database of eukaryotic transcription factor binding profiles. He also utilized his expertise in bioinformatics to build user-friendly gene expression prediction tools and analyze transcription factor binding. In May 2022, he joined the team at Nykode Therapeutics in Oslo. I recently caught up with Jaime and learned about his career in academia and new adventure into the biotech industry. 

What took you from your PhD in Paris to a postdoc position in Oslo?

As a PhD student, you are encouraged to go to conferences. I met Anthony at one of those conferences because we were working in a similar field, and doing different, but complementary, things. Actually, we met at conferences two or three times, and he organized a workshop in Switzerland that I attended with my PhD supervisor. He then started his group in Norway and offered for me to contact him about a postdoc position, if I was interested. And that's how we connected. Having a well-known supervisor made it easy to make connections. I was really on a straight line career in academia from my Masters to PhD to postdoc, and I developed the network that I needed for that. 

What do you value as a key accomplishment during your time at NCMM?

At some point I became a senior postdoc, and I felt a responsibility to train new students. I'm particularly proud of their development. We started from scratch with many things, and then they took off. When I did this mentoring, I felt like I was replicating what my supervisor taught me and how he mentored me. Transferring knowledge became important. It was a really nice experience. Anthony was the head of the lab, and I was the person in the group with the second-most experience. It wasn’t that Anthony told me to be a mentor, but I just felt like I could help in this way. That was one of my best experiences.

What did you enjoy most about your time at NCMM?

I had a very good experience working at NCMM. One of the things that I enjoyed most was working in the JASPAR project in Anthony’s group. We had very good relationships in that group, even outside of the scientific bubble. We did nice activities together, for example skiing. Sometimes during winter, we just took the skis after lunch and went together. Anthony is investing in the group in this way to keep the cohesion. I felt like the group was another family. There was also flexibility to plan our own work, and I never felt competition. This is key for the success of a group.

How did your time at NCMM help to shape your career path? 

My time at NCMM showed me more than I knew before about careers in science. My previous career decisions were narrow - in academia only. I never considered anything else. When you're in a university setting, as was my case in France, you only see academic researchers. Here in the Oslo Science Park (Forskningsparken), where NCMM is located, there are also several small companies. This opened my eyes to other career paths. 

Many of the skills learned at NCMM and in a university research environment, generally, are transferable to industry, especially computational skills and an understanding of reproducibility. You have to be precise in your work and be able to reproduce your results. That's key. And that's something I really invested a lot of time in while in Anthony's group, I really pushed to learn this. For example, maybe you're running a software with specific parameters. Someone else should be able to reproduce the exact output. Anthony was good at transmitting this importance to the group. Sometimes with the JASPAR database, users find mistakes, and we have to go back in time and try to correct them. Ideally if the results are reproducible, it's very easy.

Tell me about Nykode Therapeutics and your role there. 

A colleague who went from academia to Nykode inspired me. And, one day he told me that there was an open position in the group, and that position looked like a good fit for me. I needed to think about it because I never saw more than the academic career in front of me. In the end, I applied and that's how I ended up at Nykode.

Nykode is a small company in Oslo, with about 150 employees, developing vaccines. I am a bioinformatician there. Whereas I worked with DNA sequences in Anthony’s group, I’m now working with protein sequences. There is a computational pipeline, and my work contributes to that. I just started a few months ago, so I’m still quite new.   

How do you find working in a biotech company? How is it like the academic research environment?

At Nykode, I’m in the bioinformatics department, a team of 15 people and part of my work is using more or less the same statistical methods for sequence analysis that I used during my postdoc. I generate reports and websites. I also read a lot because we find and implement methods to improve our predictions. This is all similar to academia. 

There are differences. One is meetings. There are more of them. We meet to align the work that's going on. Another difference is depth of the work. In academia you can really become an expert in something. In a company you move from one topic to another more quickly because the goal is to have a product. Project turnover is faster. You wrap up a project and send it for evaluation, which will say whether the project continues or is archived. And, projects can come out of archive, too. The attachment you have with your project is different in a company than in academia, where you often start from scratch and stay with it. Here it’s more collaborative, but projects can end because priorities change. You have to be flexible and expect to work on many projects, and some of them will not continue. You don't spend too much time trying to make it work. That's a big difference. 

What are you working on right now?

When you are developing a vaccine, you're trying to predict the protein fragments that will generate an immune reaction. My task is how we can improve that prediction and reduce error. For the prediction you use different layers of information to bring more confidence. I work on that a lot - running software to bring more confidence to predictions.

And that's something that I did also with Anthony, improve predictions, but of other types.

If I only knew then what I know now…If you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?

I would invest more time to improve my communication. As a scientist, There's pressure to be good at communicating in addition to being good at research. You have to be good at presenting your work, talking to the audience, maybe even at a basic level. And you are expected to be a good writer. So I think, personally, I would invest more in scientific communication. Having those skills also gives you more confidence when English is not your mother tongue. You feel more confident when you can clearly show what you are thinking and what you have found. Even if you're a good scientist, you have to be able to express yourself well.  

Brief career summary

Jaime Castro-Mondragón was initially trained in genomics, earning a Bachelor’s degree in 2013 at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Inspired by one of his professors, he then moved to Paris, France to study with Prof. Jacques van Helden and was awarded a Master’s degree in systems biology in 2014 at Ecole normale supérieure, in Paris, France and PhD in bioinformatics in 2017 at Aix-Marseille Universite, Paris, France. In 2017, he joined Dr. Anthony Mathelier’s group at the Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway (NCMM) at the University of Oslo. There, he was involved in the maintenance and improvement of the JASPAR database for eukaryotic transcription factor binding profiles and of user-friendly tools and methods for gene expression prediction. Since May 2022, he has been a bioinformatician at the biotech company Nykode Therapeutics in Oslo, working on bringing confidence to prediction models. 

The “Where Are They Now? Nordic EMBL Partnership Alumni Careers” profiles introduce readers to alumni of the Nordic EMBL Partnership and the careers that they have embarked on.