Juli Klemm, who joined 3rd Millennium as senior project scientist, says custom-made is the way to go for informatics companies. “These companies have very specific needs. Off-the-shelf solutions aren’t cutting it,” says Klemm, who spent four years at Incyte Genomics, where she worked her way up to director of scientific project management.
Her position requires her to be a “jack of all trades,” Klemm, 34, says. She’s responsible for meeting with clients and determining what answers the company can provide to solve problems with life sciences software. “[We] can come in and bring experience to these things [and] design something that’s custom for these people,” she says.
Klemm, who headed to Incyte after a postdoc at Stanford, hopes her experience with a larger company will help the smaller, Boston-based firm, where she landed after her husband took a faculty position in Worcester, Mass. Hunting for a job turned out to be a good thing, she says. “In a funny way it was educational to be able to step back and do this sort of survey, having an opportunity to talk to a lot of companies.” In the end, she was lured to the consulting firm. “In this economy, I was really struck by how well this small company had done.”
So far, 3rd Millennium is certainly taking advantage of her project-management skills: she’s already working on a LIMS system for a major research institute, a knowledge management project for another client, and an internal project to build a pathways system.
Klemm cringes when asked where she’s originally from. “My dad was in the Army.” So she’s heard her share of Army brat jokes: “I should have a compendium of them,” she laughs.
— Meredith Salisbury