Life Science Product Development Intern

Role: Life Science Product Development Intern 

Duration: 4 Weeks (Fixed-term), 10 hrs/week 

Compensation: Unpaid 

Location: Remote / Flexible Primary Deliverable: Co-authored, publication-ready industry white paper About 

Adept Scientific

Adept is a early-stage startup building an AI co-pilot for bench scientists. Our app reads protocol steps aloud hands-free, scales master mix and dilution volumes to sample count, answers questions in the moment, and generates a timestamped run record. It is free for researchers and paid for by the kit manufacturers who ship it alongside their products. Our CEO is an exited founder with a PhD from Harvard and a postdoc at MIT.

About this role

We are building the evidence base underneath our own claims. Several things we tell customers are, at the moment, reasonable assumptions rather than measured findings: how often protocols fail for first-time users, what a failed run actually costs, how much of a scientist's day goes to routine questions, and how much of that ever reaches the company that sold the kit.

Over four weeks you will take one of these questions and produce the first honest measurement of it, working directly with the founder. The specific study is confirmed in week one from a shortlist we will share with you, and is chosen to fit the time available and the access you have.

Depending on the study, the work may involve structured interviews and surveys of bench scientists, observation of people running a protocol, scoring execution against an agreed error list, or a structured review of published protocol documentation.

What you will do

Week 1: design. Choose the study with the founder. Build the instrument, whether that is a survey, an interview guide, or a scoring rubric. Write down the endpoint and the analysis plan before any data is collected.

Weeks 2 and 3: collect. Recruit participants, run the sessions, and keep clean structured records as you go.

Week 4: write. Draft and finalize the white paper, with the instrument, the recruitment record, and the raw analysis as appendices.

Throughout: a weekly mentoring session with the founder.

Target Candidate Qualifications

Background: Current undergraduate/graduate student or recent graduate in Molecular Biology, Bioengineering, Bioinformatics, or a related Life Science field.

Skills: Active or recent bench experience with multi-step protocols such as library prep, single-cell workflows, or nucleic acid extraction. You need to recognize a real failure mode when you see one or hear one described.

Network: Access to a network of bench scientists or a teaching lab you can credibly recruit from

Writing: Excellent written communication skills with the ability to summarize technical concepts cleanly.

Academic Alignment: Candidates who can align this 4-week independent project with university credit or independent study requirements would be nice to have.

What You Will Gain

Named co-authorship on the white paper, on the standard condition that applies to any paper: authorship reflects contribution.

Weekly one-to-one time with the founder on product development, career coaching and mentoring.

Portfolio Building: A citable, public artifact in a field where most student research never leaves the lab, plus a reference from a founder who has taken a company through acquisition.