MassBioEd News
By Hannah Green – Reporter, Boston Business Journal
August 20, 2025
Eleanor Nkera grew up in Medford, a stone’s throw away from the life sciences clusters in Somerville, Boston and Cambridge.
But as a daughter of immigrant parents from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nkera said she was encouraged to become a doctor or lawyer.
“I wanted to be a doctor at first, but throughout high school I kind of realized that my interest wasn’t as much in treating patients, it was more on being able to use the analytical side of my mind and my problem-solving skills to work on the things that come before that,” Nkera said.
Despite her interest in science and proximity to the global epicenter of the biotech industry, Nkera said she didn’t know this field was an option for her. She didn’t know anyone who worked in life sciences. It was a program run by a Cambridge biotech that first introduced Nkera to an industry she now sees a future in.
During the summer before her junior year of high school, Nkera participated in a program at Biogen’s CoLab in Cambridge.
Biogen founded the Community Lab in 2002, making it an early mover in the push to bring more people into the life sciences industry. Now called the CoLab, Biogen says it is the longest-running program of its kind and has reached more than 65,000 students across 40 countries.
The CoLab has locations in Cambridge and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. The community lab space is free for local nonprofits and teachers to use for life sciences programming. Biogen employees also teach life science programs for the local community.
Despite widespread layoffs in the current life sciences ecosystem, MassBioEd predicts the Massachusetts life sciences workforce will continue to grow, and more work is needed to meet those job demands.
Nkera said she learned a bunch of basic assays and biotech procedures during her time at the CoLab that summer, which she described as an experience that is hard to come by as a high school student. At the end of the roughly two-week program, she also produced a final project on multiple sclerosis.
Participating in the CoLab also helped Nkera see “people in positions that I wanted to be in that looked like me.” She said the two leaders of the CoLab were also people of color.
“Before this program, I actually wasn’t super sure about a career in biomedicine because, again, I didn’t know that it was a career I could have,” Nkera said. “So it shifted my future goals to pursue a career in biomedicine.”
Nkera and her identical twin sister Oprah made headlines last year when they graduated from Medford High School as salutatorian and valedictorian, respectively. Both went on to attend Harvard University.
Nkera is a rising sophomore and plans to declare a major in bioengineering on the cellular pathway. This summer, she returned to Biogen as an intern in the research department, working in emerging neuroscience research. Nkera said she’s very interested in studying the brain and is spending this summer helping her group look for a target that can treat a bunch of rare neurodegenerative diseases.
“I feel like I’ve already learned so much, even just during the first week, I was already running my own assays and my own experiments,” Nkera said. “I hope to join a lab this fall at Harvard. I think that I’ll have a lot of experience that I can share with the lab.”