When the lights turn on in a genomics lab, the day is already in motion. Boxes of samples wait to be logged, barcodes are scanned, concentrations get double-checked and QC re-runs are queued after a first pass didn’t quite make the cut. Library prep timelines are weighed against instrument availability, run plans shift in real time, and questions start to surface. Questions about the data, the results, and what they’ll mean once everything finishes running.
The way researchers move through a day rarely looks the same, but the routines that keep labs and research running are shaped by the people carrying them out. And that connection, between how a lab runs and the lives of the researchers behind the science is at the heart of Beyond the Bench: a PacBio original video series focused on the people behind the science. The series opens a window into the daily routines and rhythms that help three scientists stay grounded as they take on big biological questions.
We’ll follow Dr. Santosha Vardhana, Assistant Attending Physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, whose morning crossword and coffee ritual sets the stage for how he approaches complex questions in cancer biology. We’ll meet Dr. Andor Kiss, Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics (CBFG) at Miami University, whose love of building custom turntables translates into the detailed curiosity he brings to work. And finally, Dr. Birgitt Schüle of Stanford University, whose time hiking helps her think through the challenges of studying neurodegenerative disease and her work on SCA10 in Peru and Brazil. Together, these episodes feature the everyday motivation driving scientific breakthroughs.
See the trailer and sign up to watch the full series when it’s released in January.
How crossword puzzles help Santosha solve cancer’s greatest mysteries
For Santosha, mornings in New York begin with coffee and a crossword. The ritual provides a calm pause before the lab fills with activity and ideas. It encourages the patience and pattern recognition that guide his research at MSK, where his team studies how metabolites regulate immune cell behavior within tumors.
In Santosha’s Beyond the Bench episode, his daily puzzle becomes a metaphor for breaking down complex biological questions. Each solved clue reflects the careful reasoning needed to integrate immunology, synthetic biology, and HiFi genomics.
That same deliberate process shapes how his lab investigates T-cell exhaustion, using Kinnex single-cell long-read technology to uncover how RNA splicing changes as immune cells run out of energy inside tumors. These shifts may explain why T cells lose their ability to eliminate cancer, offering new clues for improving immunotherapy. It is work strengthened by the scientific community he has found in New York, where collaboration and shared expertise help him approach cancer’s most difficult puzzles one piece at a time.
How building a custom turntable helps Andor uncover the hidden layers of biology
Andor has his own ritual that sharpens his focus, a custom turntable that he builds and tunes by hand. A study in precision in itself, each adjustment reveals how technology influences what you can discover in music. The better the apparatus, the more information you can extract. This is the same principle that guides his work as the CBFG Core Director, where he empowers PIs and undergrads alike to run HiFi sequencing on their Vega system.
The episode pairs Andor’s tinkering with his scientific curiosity. Whether he is fine tuning a tonearm or exploring epigenomic signatures in species that thrive in extreme environments, he focuses on uncovering signals that lie hidden beneath the surface. He has been using HiFi sequencing in his own research to examine lens crystallin proteins in cold adapted species, searching for subtle sequence differences that help Antarctic fishes maintain clear vision at subzero temperatures and that may have implications for cataract therapies.
This is a project that benefits from the same attention to detail he brings to adjusting a turntable, where small changes can reveal entire layers of information. The craftsmanship of building something by hand mirrors the attention to detail required to understand complex biological systems and train the next generation of scientists.
How hiking helps Birgitt find clarity in the search for answers
For Birgitt, hiking offers a reset that helps her concentrate on the questions that matter most. At Stanford, she studies the genetic roots of neurodegenerative diseases and develops stem cell models to understand them. The mental space created on the trail supports the focus needed for work that is as emotionally demanding as it is complex.
Her episode unfolds in the mountains near her home, where she shares stories from her research in Peru and Brazil studying SCA10, a rare repeat expansion ataxia disease found only in Central and South America. When her team sequenced the unusually long repeats in the ATXN10 gene with PureTarget in a family with an ultra-rare presentation of alleles, they found that siblings without symptoms carried pure, uninterrupted repeats, offering an early clue for why the disease affects some carriers but not others. Tracing these patterns across families continues to reveal unexpected differences in how this mutation appears and progresses, deepening the scientific understanding of this rare condition.
Her time spent hiking in California and South America helps clear her mind enough to think through the complexities of her research, allowing new ideas to surface while connecting her with the communities affected by the disease.
The story continues with the full series
Beyond the Bench invites us to connect with science through the lives that shape it. These episodes highlight the community, rituals, and motivation that drive the people behind the science. They show that discovery grows from more than data. It grows from the people who bring their whole selves to the work.
Visit the Beyond the Bench page to watch the trailer now and sign up to watch the full series when it drops.