Welcome back to Team Insights, where we offer you a chance to get to know a Microbiome Insights team member on a deeper level. For our newest issue of Team Insights, we bring in a new member of our Sales Team: Lianna Marini. We're excited to welcome Lianna into the MBI team and looking forward to her growth in sales.

You can connect with Lianna on LinkedIn here.

Hello Lianna, it's a pleasure having you on the team - and also getting to talk to you a bit more here. Let's get right into it:

What do you do at Microbiome Insights? Describe your role?

I’m an international sales account manager at Microbiome Insights. My role is to engage with new and returning clients, learn about their studies and see how Microbiome Insights’ services can help to answer their research questions. I’m the liaison between customers and the MBI team!

What were you doing before your time at Microbiome Insights?

Prior to Microbiome Insights, I worked for a similar microbiome services company, where I was a project coordinator and later transitioned into sales/account management. Prior to that, I was a licensed medical lab technologist working in a diagnostic, hospital lab in upstate New York.
 
What interests you most about the area of the microbiome? What do you think will be an important development in the field of microbiome research?

The amount of microbiome information that one can discover from such a small sample never ceases to amaze me. In the future, I think microbiome research will become even more important for antimicrobial resistance prevention on the medical side, and for microbial carbon sequestration on the environmental side.
 
What do you enjoy most about Microbiome Insights?

The people! Both my coworkers and our customers. Here, everyone is extremely friendly and helpful and our customers are so collaborative and are doing such important research in the microbiome realm. I love learning about their work!
 
What’s the best advice you can give to someone who just got out of university and is looking to start their career on the right foot?

Try new things and be open to new possibilities and career paths, even ones that you never considered in the past. While in school, I swore up and down that I would never work in the medical field – I wanted to save the world from climate change! Flashforward a few years and I found myself in a hospital lab, working with patients, nurses and doctors daily…and absolutely loved it.

What are your passions outside of work?

I love to swim and play water polo and have coached kids of all ages in both sports. I also like to downhill ski, watch trashy, reality TV and travel whenever possible.

What’s a skill that not many people know you have?

I’m good at remembering dates – if you tell me your birthday, I’ll never forget it!
  
If you could get a new skill in 10 minutes, what would it be? 

Become fluent in another language – Spanish or Mandarin would be top of my list.
   
What’s your favorite music genre?

I’d say alternative rock is my favourite, but I like nearly all music genres…what I listen to definitely depends on the occasion.
 
What is a book you think everyone should read if they can?

“Dancing Naked in the Mind Field” - Kary Mullis’ autobiography. He’s an eccentric Nobel-Prize winner and the inventor of PCR! It’s pretty cool to get a glimpse into his mind.