From Fellow to Full-Fledged Employee: Amgen’s Dylan Riggs on How He Helped Make it Happen

Of the many LEADERs fellowships giving rise to full-fledged employment, one in particular stands out, dating back to 2023 when Amgen’s Dylan Riggs, process development principal scientist, was introduced to the LEADERs program from the industry side of the coin.

He went looking to the LEADERs program for a PhD student to help characterize potential cancer and rare disease drug proteins during preclinical testing. He wanted a rising star ready for a big challenge: To ensure these developing drugs were safe and effective. Right off the bat, it was imminently clear that Nicole Langlois PhD’23, chemistry, was the scientist for the job.

Then her fellowship was up, and when Riggs’ team didn’t have a full-time role for her, he did everything possible to keep her at Amgen, recommending Langlois to an adjacent group.

Riggs’ group has submitted proposals through Northeastern’s PhD Network for LEADERs fellows every year since—his third fellow starts this fall. We sat down with Riggs to learn about that formative experience working with Langlois and what he calls “really good synergy” between Amgen and LEADERs.

Anna Fiorentino: What makes a LEADERs fellow successful, specifically for Langlois at Amgen?

Dylan Riggs: She hit the ground running, asking all the right questions. Her ability to take direction, work independently, and meet key deliverables right away was phenomenal. Nicole blew us away from day one. Right off the bat, she was coming back to us—no exaggeration—with some of the most well-prepared presentations I’ve ever seen. She is an amazing scientist both in terms of her ability to communicate the data she’s collected and her results.

AF: What prompted you to hire a LEADERs fellow in the first place?

DR: Amgen has had strong partnerships with Northeastern over the years, so our group turned to LEADERs after seeing success between LEADERs PhD students and other Amgen groups. We knew our project was going to have a lot of liquid chromatography [separating liquid molecules], and a lot of mass spectrometry [measuring the mass-to-charge ratio of molecules], and we would have been happy if we got a student with expertise in one of these two areas. That’s exactly what happened. Nicole was working with nucleic acids and some associated liquid chromatography, and we knew right away she was going to pick mass spectrometry up. There’s not a lot of academic labs focused on these various rare impurities, so you have to learn in industry—and really be interested in solving that type of problem. Nicole stood out. She blew us away from day one, leaving a very strong impression.

AF: Why was she a clear candidate, post-graduation, to move into a full-time role as Amgen scientist?

DR: We saw the writing on the wall. Our time was coming to an end, she had successfully defended her PhD, and she was looking for a position. We knew that she was somebody who we wanted to continue working with and that she was going to be successful in any role. She was an extremely productive and phenomenal person to work with—a textbook example of the top level talent that we’re trying to attract at Amgen. So we did everything we could to keep her on board, looking for other opportunities to bring her into Amgen and, luckily, there was an open position in one of our adjacent product teams, so I reached out to the hiring manager and told her I’d be hiring Nicole if I could be. They brought her in for an interview and hired her right away. And it just strengthened the synergy at Amgen to have somebody that we know we can work closely with in another group. We have this inroad to one of our other teams.

AF: Why do you plan to continue working with LEADERs fellows in the future?

DR: I was fortunate enough to participate in an internship myself during my PhD, so I know going from academia into industry is a very big transition. It’s always nice to try it before you buy it; to understand if something is really right for you. It’s important to me that other students get that opportunity too, and it can be difficult. They need a support system in place. LEADERs does an excellent job of building that.

An academic advisor may be of the mindset that students should follow an academic career and there’s the reality that it means one of their top performing students will be out of their lab for some time. But LEADERs does a very good job of getting the advisors on board and making sure a student pursues an opportunity that is best for him or her.

The selection process within the LEADERs is a key part of the success. At this point, I’ve interviewed around a dozen students and I can honestly say that I would hire every single one that Terry Marroquin [director of LEADERs partnership programs] has recommended. She has such a phenomenal ability to match the right skill set and mindset with the right opportunity. These are people you want to work with and that means that we have the right balance in this collaboration between Amgen and LEADERs. It’s just really good synergy, why I’ve submitted a proposal for a new student every year since, and why we’ll be working with a third LEADERs student this fall.