When Betelihem Alemayehu moved with her parents from the countryside of Ethiopia to Boston nearly a decade ago, she didn’t know how to ride the T, she couldn’t speak English, and she could never have guessed that one day she’d be employed in one of the city’s cutting-edge industries.
Alemayehu, now 22, works in lab operations at Vedanta Biosciences, a Cambridge biotech startup that’s unraveling the mysteries of the human microbiome to create drugs from helpful bacteria to combat disease. And she credits a college student internship program for helping to kickstart her unanticipated career.
That program, Project Onramp, was launched in 2019 by the Boston nonprofit Life Science Cares to infuse diversity into the region’s largely white biotech sector. It has already helped nearly 300 college students land summer internships across 90 Massachusetts life science companies. The students identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of color, are from low-income backgrounds, or are first-generation students. And Project Onramp is just getting started.
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