A coder who's using data to fight cancer shares the skills that helped her make the difficult switch from programmer to manager
- Emily Silgard is one of Business Insider's 30 people under 40 transforming of healthcare.
- In the last year she got the opportunity to lead her own data science team, Hutch Data Commonwealth.
- Silgard told Business Insider the challenges of transitioning from a programmer to leading her own team and how she can best facilitate and improve the performance of her team.
- Click here to see the full list of the 30 people under 40 who are transforming healthcare.
- Click here for more BI Prime stories.
Emily Silgard, 36, began working at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle as a programmer seven years ago. This year, she got the opportunity to lead her own data science team, Hutch Data Commonwealth, overseeing three other researchers.
Silgard's team spends half its time developing a natural language processing pipeline (how computers deal with human language) to advance oncology research by accessing clinical data from medical records more quickly.
The other half of the time the team members work with faculty at the University of Washington to develop predictive models, such as one that predicts the risk of emergency department visits over time for patients undergoing chemotherapy.
For her work, Business Insider named Silgard to our list of the 30 leaders under 40 who are working to transform US healthcare.
Click here to see the full list of the young leaders who are transforming US healthcare.
The challenges of becoming a manager
The transition to team lead felt natural, Silgard said, because she'd already worked alongside many of the same colleagues. Still, for Silgard there were some challenges she had to navigate.
As the data science manager, Silgard said she spends her time figuring out what researchers are interested in studying and how best to facilitate their needs. She also focuses on designing tools, creating better applications and services for researchers to use.
One difficult aspect of the job for Silgard is maintaining the cultural norms of the office environment, such as clear communication and sustaining a high performance culture to reach certain research goals and criteria.
"I spend a lot more time now on how to facilitate a productive work environment," Silgard said. "You really have to figure out what people are good at, what they're passionate about and how you can help them excel."
The hardest adjustment for Silgard has been redefining what work means for herself. Being a programmer for a long time made the idea of work seem easily defined.
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"I had years where my work was sitting down writing code and I was able to measure the performance of my work," Silgard said.
'It's a different type of work'
Now, Silgard spends a significant part of her time having conversations and meetings with colleagues, discussing how to improve the research and performance of her team.
"It's a different type of work," Silgard said. "It's figuring out, how can we build mutually beneficial partnerships to get bigger things accomplished?"
As team lead she realized the importance of these conversations and now sees the value in this new aspect of her work.
But for Silgard, figuring out how to be a leader and manage a team of people is a skill she's acquiring naturally over time, she said.
It helps, Silgard said, that her team is good at communicating clearly and often voice their needs and expectations. That takes some of the burden of managing off Silgard's shoulders.
"I'm surrounded with a group of naturally open, accepting, and thoughtful listeners and coders," Silgard said. "They also really lead that charge, it's not just me."