2022
BNS Program Newsletter
“Your life is your story, and the adventure ahead of you is the journey to fulfill your own purpose and potential.”
Kerry Washington
Kyra Stensgaard Alumni Feature
Kyra graduated from the Behavioral Neuroscience program in June 2020. During her time at Western she was an active member of the NeRDS club including Journal Club officer and an undergraduate researcher in Dr. Grimm’s lab. Additionally, she was a regular uTA for Biology 101 and taught one lab section in a Graduate Teaching Assistant capacity in Fall 2019. These opportunities fostered learning of numerous transferable skills such as problem-solving, priority management, and networking just to name a few.
While Kyra’s original plans post-graduation was to move across the country and pursue a graduate degree after taking a gap year, the pandemic presented unprecedented roadblocks. It was this involuntary plan detour that presented Kyra with an opportunity to dabble in pursuits unrelated to academia. A few recruiter phone calls and some odd-ball jobs later she had landed herself at a company with a mission and product she believed in. Adaptive Biotechnologies provided a powerful diagnostic test to measure Minimal Residual Disease in certain cancers and Kyra’s original role in the company was to reach out to pathology labs to acquire the initial sample for testing and she found a great deal of fulfillment having a role in patient care. Now Kyra has been promoted to Clinical Accessioning Supervisor overseeing the day-to-day operations of the “sample librarians”.
In her new role, Kyra is learning what makes a good leader through classes and on the job experience. The skills she learned in planning experiments in Dr. Grimm’s lab translated into a strength in her project management responsibilities. Additionally, her efforts to make the NeRDS journal club more interactive and accessible to individuals fostered her collaborative leadership style. Perhaps the most notable thing she learned from her degree that is relevant to every job she has had is the unwavering drive to find the best solution to a problem just as one would in an experiment. In pursuit of this newfound passion for leadership, she hopes to use the research skills she learned in the BNS program to build a knowledge base of different leadership practices to start a consulting business to provide holistic solutions to facilitate growth of businesses.
Kyra would encourage the future students of the BNS program to think outside the box and not be afraid to take an unconventional route to using their degree. Find what parts they love about learning behavioral neuroscience- planning and orchestrating an experiment, teaching and tutoring the wonders of scientific phenomena, or the thought exercises of interpreting research- and make it work for you. And on the same note, pursue seemingly unrelated clubs, classes, and experience during your time at Western because you will never know what you’ll learn or who you’ll meet that will make an impact later in your life.
Kyra Stensgaard
The Behavioral Neuroscience Program would like to feature your alumni story! Please contact bns@wwu.edu to participate. The purpose is to feature alumni and highlight your accomplishments and share your journey since being at WWU with prospective students, other alumni, and community members. The alumni features can be posted on our social media pages, Instagram and Facebook. You provide final approval before anything is published online.