JULY 9, 2023

BRAID’S TEAM

<aside> 💡 Welcome to the fifth article in our series of Tech Team Profiles! Here, we’ll introduce you to the team building Braid’s automated engineering design technology. Elizabeth Oda is a Researcher at Braid with a diverse background in molecular biology, agriculture, and artificial intelligence.

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Describe your career thus far.

I grew up on a small organic farm in central Minnesota. Because I was always surrounded by agriculture, I ended up studying International Agriculture and Rural Development at Cornell University. Originally, I started in Mechanical Engineering, but for a number of reasons, I ended up changing my major. One of the reasons I chose International Agriculture and Rural Development is because you're required to work abroad to graduate. My international work experience was in Havana, Cuba. I worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization, which is a branch of the United Nations, on a project related to sustainable rice production in Cuba.

While I was still a university student, I also interned at a large agrochemical company called Syngenta. I worked as an agronomist in commercial maize seed production in Nebraska. I was fortunate to receive an offer to join them after graduation as part of their Production and Supply Development Program, which is similar to the new graduate management training program commonly seen at large corporations. My first rotation was in Hawaiʻi on the island of Kauaʻi.

Elizabeth while on a scenic hike in Hawaii.

I became very interested in science communication while living and working in Hawaiʻi. At that time, there was a lot of hostility about genetically modified crops (GMOs). It was difficult for many of my colleagues to safely discuss their work in the community. Scientists with an anti-GMO agenda frequently came to our small island to give misleading, fear-mongering talks about the work we and other seed companies were doing. We even occasionally had a guy dressed as the Grim Reaper stand outside the gate to our facilities. Because I understood the science behind our work, I felt compelled to do something about it. I had a mentor within the company who gave me a platform to develop an internal course to empower its employees to talk confidently and correctly about our work.

I eventually decided to return to academia to better understand the mechanisms of plant’s response to stress. I earned my master’s degree in Molecular Biosciences and Bioengineering from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. My research focused on protein folding in pollen. Specifically, there is a biochemical pathway called the Unfolded Protein Response that is induced under stress. Essentially, when plants get too hot, it’s hard for them to manage both reproductive development and stress alleviation, which can negatively affect pollination, among other things. Under heat stress, pollen without the protein I was studying (protein disulfide isomerase 9) is severely deformed relative to normal pollen. We had a hunch that this protein was important, but I feel very fortunate to have stumbled upon such a striking phenotype with the support of my labmates.

After graduating with my master’s degree, I moved to Tokyo and was initially working as a science tutor. I worked with kids as young as seven years old through senior year of high school. I also led a high school research program to help students learn the basics of academic research. While I enjoyed the interdisciplinary aspects of leading the research program, I knew that I did not want to remain in teaching forever.

I attended Le Wagon Tokyo’s full-time Data Science boot camp to transition from teaching into software engineering with a focus on AI. From there, I joined Arithmer, which is an AI consulting firm focused on addressing major societal challenges. I contributed to projects in the domains of disaster prevention tech and agriculture. I met the Braid founders at a tech event in 2022 and was intrigued by their vision. I joined the team in January of this year as a Researcher.

In the past few years, you’ve pivoted within the big umbrella of science to study AI and data science. What was your motivation for doing so, and how does your research apply to what you’re doing now?

A few months before I left my tutoring position, I had a number of conversations with mentors and friends about how I could expand my skills in order to do meaningful, cutting-edge work in Japan. I was already supporting several AI-based student projects and realized that I had hit a wall in terms of my technical capabilities. I wanted to be able to answer more complex questions in their realms of biology and agriculture myself. Learning data science seemed like a great bridge between the skills I already had and how I wanted my career to evolve in Japan.

Elizabeth and her husband enjoy the view of Fuji-san in the fall.

Briefly describe your role at Braid.

I am a Researcher. I think I have the most fun job at Braid: I get to build prototypes that, if successful and valuable, are integrated into our core tech. These prototypes improve our ability to automate the engineering design process or address previously-unsolved technical problems or both. Of course, I can’t say much more than that, but the opportunity to discover and develop such prototypes is interesting and rewarding.

Do you have any side projects?

In terms of coding projects, I created some silly side projects after completing my coding boot camp to explore different fields within machine learning, such as computer vision and natural language processing. More recently, I have been learning Rust. I gave a presentation at the Tokyo Rust Meetup of my experience learning Rust by building a simple command line tool.

I am the president and co-founder of Women in Science Japan. Since 2019, we have been providing skill-building opportunities and a community for women pursuing careers in STEM in Japan. We host professional development events, casual meetups, and offer a mentorship program. Having timely and relevant support from a mentor can make a huge difference in one’s career. Not everyone can access mentorship in their home institutions, so I am happy that we can offer another channel for women in STEM to get the support that they need.

Do you have any interesting hobbies?

I am part of Tokyo Repertory Singers, which is a bilingual choir. Since joining in November 2021, I have been singing and playing piano with the group. We sing a pretty diverse repertoire, not just Japanese music. We meet once a week and typically perform three to four times per year. We are having our first concert as a group in December.