Industry
Biology, AI, Discovery
For the last 12 years I have been at the forefront of the genomics, high throughput biology, and engineering fields building products and services for the clinical and biopharma research markets.
Most recently I was the Chief Strategy Officer at Synthego, a company leading the introduction of CRISPR technologies into both research and clinical markets. I was the first commercial hire and saw the development of the CRISPR field first hand from a technical, commercial, clinical, and IP perspective.
Prior to Synthego I was a Director at Natera, a company that led the introduction of liquid biopsy technologies into routine clinical practice. This represented the first population based application of Next Generation Sequencing and ushered in the genomic era in a transformative way. At Natera, I led efforts in sales, business development, and medical education in women’s health and molecular diagnostics and at the early product development stages of liquid biospy applications in oncology.
These industries have collided with the developments in AI, deep learning, and computing which has been my area of focus for the last several years.
Leadership
“Reading is a voluntary form of active listening”
I have seen leadership and organizational demands hyper scale through the entire continuum from 20 -1000 employees and pre-revenue Series A companies through public companies with several hundred million in sales.
Leadership is a process and one that involves empathy for others and oneself. Great leaders read. A tremendous amount of information has been collected over time that is condensed in a few words. It is common today to get sound bytes and platitudes about leadership but there is little new under the sun.
One of the skills of leaders is to know enough to know where they don’t know enough. In particular, the condensed collections of various articles are excellent references for building and understanding frameworks.
Frameworks are only as good as their implementation and great leaders understand and appreciate the nuances of the diversity of skills required to build an organization.
In my experiences, I have personally done, built, hired, or advised functions from sales, sales management, marketing, product, business development, legal, finance, research, engineering and strategy teams.
Education
I am a deep generalist
My technical education is from the University of California at San Diego
I have a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering for work at the Moores Cancer Center in drug delivery.
My Masters and B.S. degrees are in Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, respectively
I was a member of the first graduating class of Jacobs Scholars — a full four year scholarship offered by invitation only to the top 10 applicants to the Jacobs School of Engineering, funded personally by Irwin and Joan Jacobs, the founder of Qualcomm. I also had 3 other scholarships including Regents, National Merit, and Phi Beta Kappa awards and graduated Summa Cum Laude.
Apart from formal degree programs, I had course work in quantum physics, neural networks and machine learning, electrical engineering, and systems biology.
Out of personal curiosity, I have learned and built applications on AWS including RAG applications for scientific literature, scoured hundreds of scientific databases, learned the principles of high performance computing, hardware and software design, and the mathematics of deep learning.
I have deep on the job training in intellectual property, finance, and organizational design.
Education is something that never ends.
