Nina is one of the up-and-coming superstars in biotech. Having just earned her PhD in bioengineering at Stanford in the Sunwoo Lab this summer, she has the scientific horsepower and storytelling ability to make a large impact on drug development, business, and the lives of patients. At the age of 8, Nina was diagnosed with an ovarian teratoma. In some ways, that shifted Nina towards a career in science and a mission to cure cancer. But while she was always interested in science, growing up in...

Hannes is a graduate student at MIT working towards a PhD in computer science. Within the span of a few months, he has been able to publish two ICML papers: one focused on molecular property prediction and the other developing a model, called EquiBind, for drug binding prediction. Hannes, advised by both Regina Barzilay and Tommi Jaakkola, is doing exciting research at the intersection of graph machine learning and biology. In this conversation, we discuss his career so far starting at Munich...

We talk with Justin Farlow, Co-Founder and CTO of Serotiny about his journey from UCSF to founding a company with his brother, Colin. In this conversation, Justin discusses his initial discovery of engineer-able biology from a physics lens to earning his PhD at UCSF under Zev Gartner while being in the epicenter of both synthetic biology and software startups. Then he goes into his journey as a founder, starting Serotiny initially as a SaaS company then pivoting toward building a wet-lab...

King is currently a graduate student in the Howard Chang Lab at Stanford. In this conversation, we discuss everything from the beginning of his scientific career to extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) and cancer drug development. King went to college at the University of Washington where he became passionate about developmental biology. The beauty of a FISH experiment hooked King to lab work and set him on a path to become a world-class biologist. He chose to go to graduate school at Stanford and...

Really excited to put out this conversation with Kadi Saar, an outstanding inventor and world-class computational chemist, where we discuss her career spanning childhood interests to graduate research to her work now around high-throughput structural biology and condensates. Kadi is a rising star in life sciences building out new experimental and computational tools to probe biology and advance human health. Early on in her life, it was pretty obvious that Kadi was very unique. She won...

We discuss Bruce's career from being pre-med and getting into research while at Washington University in St. Louis to working at Intrexon and going to grad school at Caltech afterwards. While at Intrexon, he saw the need for better tools to scale biology and decided to go to Caltech to pursue his ideas. At Caltech, he was advised by Prof. Frances Arnold, who pioneered the protein engineering technique "directed evolution" that eventually led to her winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in...

We discuss Nader's career from learning structural biology in the Marqusee and Alber Labs at UC Berkeley to his pioneering graduate work at MIT with Forest White and Li-Huei Tsai and now at Stevens at Harvard Medical School. The conversation is centered around the 2 groundbreaking papers he published while earning his PhD: 1. Phosphoproteomics identifies microglial Siglec-F inflammatory response during neurodegeneration 2. Quantitative phosphoproteomics uncovers dysregulated kinase networks...

We discuss Diego's career from building GeneWeave (acquired by Roche) to Endpoint Health now. Endpoint is pioneering a new business model merging diagnostics, data, and drug development to start with patient data and back into a therapy. The company is using their platform to develop first-line medicines for indications in infectious diseases with no approved therapies and beyond. Truly, Endpoint is leading a new wave of progress within critical and chronic illnesses. A favorite quote of mine...

We discuss James' and Deniz's careers from how they first met to founding Seven Bridges and Totient and now building AbSci after Totient was recently acquired. With experience leading teams in the 100s spanning genomics and SaaS to drug development and even paint from James' childhood entrepreneurial pursuits, both have an incredible amount of wisdom on scaling technology companies. We touch on AbSci's unique model of accelerating and lowering the barriers for biologics development and talk...

We discuss Jacob's career going from physics to biology and making the transition from academia to industry. Building and leading data science teams at GNS Healthcare, Indigo, and now EQRx, Jacob is one of the best data scientists in biotech. In our conversation, we talk about ways to generate standardized data for machine learning models, building interdisciplinary teams, and implementing relevant models for drug development.  Then we touch on EQRx's fast follower drug development model and...

We discuss Brian's career starting at Trinity in Dublin to Stanford, 23andMe, and Hexagon. In our conversation, we talk about the interplay between computation and biology, business models in biotech, and what it takes to build world-class teams. Brian really has the superpower of building and being part of talent hubs. If he ever wants to, I know he would build the best talent agency in biotech.

We discuss the founding story of Emerald Cloud Lab, their mission to help scientists to get access to any instrument they want, the company's platform and applications, long-term vision and more. A favorite quote of mine from talking to DJ was: "understand the stories of the advice you get."

We discuss Basem's recent preprint, Borgs are giant extrachromosomal elements with the potential to augment methane oxidation. In our conversation, we discuss Basem's scientific career, the story of Borgs, how they were named, and their impact on our environment. A favorite quote of mine from talking to Basem was: "the next great discovery could be right in your backyard."

Cameron Pye and Joshua Schwochert are the founders of Unnatural Products. For the first podcast, we discuss their founding story coming out of academia, the history of macrocycle natural products, and how Unnatural Products is using synthetic macrocycles to usher in the the future of drug development.