When he’s not studying embryonic development at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Dr. Michael Kosicki works hard to ensure the activities of the Berkeley Postdoctoral Association (BPA) run smoothly.
Originally from Poland, he is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley and the president of the BPA. In this role, he spearheads critical meetings with the Vice Chancellor for Research, liaises with the university on behalf of the postdoctoral community, and tries to bring scholars together for social events and professional development opportunities.
“Throughout my career, there has been a temptation to be hands-on with everything. The best thing I can bring to running the association is institutional knowledge and the ability to make people work together,” he said.
“I was very positively welcomed by the BPA community and I wanted to pay back for the wonderful community feeling I got here,” Dr. Kosicki added.
Acting as president of the BPA sounds like a full-time job, doesn’t it? But apart from all of this, Dr. Kosicki’s main research work involves studying how human beings’ organs develop in the womb using mice as models in order to understand, among other things, congenital diseases. He is examining how the activity of regulatory DNA influences embryonic development.
Earlier, during his doctoral research, Dr. Kosicki noticed unexpected genetic outcomes when using regular genome engineering tools. At that time, nobody had paid much attention to these mutations and now several people are researching them.
“I think that has been my biggest achievement thus far. I believe genetic therapies can help a lot of people. Knowing their potential dangers makes us stronger because we can develop ways to get around them. And that’s what we want, right? We want safe genetic therapies,” he explained.
Going forward, Dr. Kosicki hopes to publish his research, go to conferences and find the right scientific challenge to tackle when he is a faculty member. Describing himself as a ‘scientific nomad’, he said he is fascinated by many different things, and refining his interests is his main plan for the future.