Biography
Tyler Beck is a scientific program manager, working in the NCATS Biomedical Data Translator program. In this capacity, he assists the director of that program with both scientific and administrative tasks and serves as a liaison to several groups within the Translator consortium.
Beck earned his bachelor’s degree in bioinformatics and computational biology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, as well as a master’s degree in applied molecular biology. He earned his doctorate in molecular and human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in the laboratory of Daryl A. Scott, M.D., Ph.D., studying both mouse models and patients who exhibited congenital diaphragmatic hernia, a common developmental disorder.
After graduate school, Beck served in a two-year, postdoctoral fellowship at the National Human Genome Research Institute in the laboratory of Leslie G. Biesecker, M.D., working on several projects involving mosaic disorders, such as Proteus syndrome. He also conducted a broad study of the necessity for Sanger validation of next-generation sequencing, the results of which suggested that in a clinical setting, Sanger validation is unnecessary and may cause more erroneous diagnoses than simply taking the next-generation sequencing at face value.
It was while working on the Sanger validation project that Beck became interested in program management work, and he left the National Institutes of Health to become a scientific program officer for the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). During his time there, he was able to help improve the quality of scientific research being presented at the ASTRO Annual Meeting and helped establish several new funding opportunities for radiation oncologists through collaborations with other organizations.
Research Topics
Although Beck has left the realm of “bench science,” his work in the Biomedical Data Translator program is very much a research effort, with the goal of building a tool that can answer complex biomedical questions for researchers and lead to new treatments for human disease. Professionally, Beck focuses on enhancing his program-management skills and enjoys traveling to espouse the merits of the Biomedical Data Translator program to scientists around the country and the world.