Meet Solmaz. She's a Scientific Intelligence Director.

Let me tell you what a bioinformatician can do…

“I am calling you because we don’t quite understand why a bioinformatician wants to work for us.”

As I recall, that’s how the conversation began when I was called for an interview at Novo Nordisk. I didn’t know much about Novo Nordisk at the time, I was generally just interested in working in healthcare and somehow contributing to improving lives for others. I had just graduated from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) as a Bioinformatician and decided I wanted to pursue a role in the industry rather than working in academia.

During my Bioinformatics programme I had been introduced to text-mining, which I was very intrigued by, so when I saw the job ad at the Novo Nordisk corporate library doing just that, I thought it was a good match for me.

Well, back to the interview. I explained how I was intrigued by the text-mining part of the role and got called in. The interview process was very professional... and long. But I was quite excited. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was generally optimistic. Looking back, I should’ve gotten his first words as a cue (hah!)

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

❤ My husband and I have travelled all over Italy on a motorbike 

Work

Do you speak machine?

Today, I am a Director of Scientific Intelligence, a department in the Research & Early Development Digital Science & Innovation organisation. I lead a team of 15 data analysts, information specialists and Natural Language Processing (NLP) scientists that support the research organisation in Novo Nordisk to find insights and answers in externally published literature, patents, and news media.

As their team manager, my role is mostly to make sure their projects are living up to the expectations of our researchers – and that we are building for the future in a sustainable and visionary manner. These past months we’ve been running a research collaboration with a commercial partner exploring literature summarisation and chat with patents literature. We have been using large language models (LLM) to explore a concept where our researchers can ask questions to a search result rather than scrolling down a list.

I try to follow the advancements of language models and generative AI and keep myself updated daily. I have 2h+ daily commute to work which allows me to listen to long interviews with leaders within the space as well as historians and futurists.

Polylinguist

♦ I speak six languages, four on a daily basis 

Life science

Past, present, future

The biggest challenge is by far the unknown future! I have a vision of what information science might look like, and I feel privileged to be a part of a team where we can shape that future.

I have quite often thought that I can do what I do across so many industries... but I can honestly say nothing is as rewarding for me as to leave work every day, regardless of whether it’s been good fun or hard work and think that what I do contribute to changing lives of patients.

Milestones

✓ Moving to Sweden ✓ Studying at a Danish university (where I had no clue the courses were in Danish, so learning Danish is also a milestone I suppose) ✓ Learning to walk and run again after a major back surgery ❤ Meeting my husband – at Novo Nordisk! ✓ Becoming a mother ✓ Promotion to Director for a new department

Tech

Python, what about it?

I learned to code back at university. The language was mainly R, Perl and Bash. But when I joined Novo Nordisk, I was introduced to a lot of new tools, such as SolR and Elastic, but also a variety of commercial text-mining tools. I then stopped coding 6-7 years ago, so I never really got around to learn Python properly. This is both cool and embarrassing. :D

But a lot has happened in my field recently. With the digital transformation of data management systems traditional bibliographic search systems have been replaced with more modern search solutions. One example is how we can now offer our scientists full-text search, allowing them to search across an article and not just the abstract. Another change is how we’ve established a data lake for externally published literature; I am passionate about full-text literature, and the establishment of our data lake has been the foundation for us to be able to work with this type of data. As industry-leaders, we have been able to offer our scientists something they cannot get elsewhere. Using Generative AI, our users can ask question to literature and get answers directly in references.

24 carats

✵ I have worked in the high-end jewellery industry