Like many entrepreneurs, he was born with the itch. Jason Lehmbeck grew up around his father and grandfather, both entrepreneurs in their own areas of expertise– dad was a geologist who worked with the mining industry and grandpa had a [See the full post…]

Shamiram “Shami” Feinglass, MD, MPH, should have been a born again flower child.  She spent her childhood among the San Francisco royalty that defined the 60’s and 70’s rock and roll culture here in the City by the Bay.  [See the full post…]

It is important for developers to build up their own empathy in order to design APIs with a UX mindset. That makes APIs easier for other engineers to use more effectively, according to Kollivakkam Raghavan, Director of Engineering for Prism [See the full post…]

Born and bred in Mill Valley, California, where we record our podcast, Sam Brasch saw himself as a modern-day Alex P. Keaton – he just wanted to be a business man. He was “that kid” who was reading the Lee [See the full post…]

Stanford professor Kari Nadeau lives the life, some would say the dream, of what Judah Folkman has called the inquisitive physician, integrating her deep knowledge of chemistry, her experience in biotech drug development, and her clinical acumen and deeply-felt [See the full post…]

“We’re reinventing how we do IT right now,” said Steve McDowell, senior tech analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. He reads signs from technology’s past and sees a future that is increasingly powered by software. What was once difficult, [See the full post…]

David Altshuler was living the academic dream as professor and human geneticist at Harvard and MIT, where he was co-founder and Deputy Director of the Broad Institute.  Yet in December 2014, he left this life to join Vertex, in continued [See the full post…]

Tanisha Carino’s family fled from the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Phillipines and settled in what she still believes to be the sweetest of homes: Alabama. As she travelled through young adulthood she had her first awareness that many [See the full post…]

Physician, scientist, patient, advocate: Glenn Pierce inhabits all four roles, and seems the physical embodiment of the translational impulse, driven by his own experiences coping with severe hemophilia to advance the science – and the policy – he hopes will [See the full post…]

When Megan Callahan was growing up, she was supposed to end up in healthcare – she didn’t even know there were alternatives. And she has spent her career and life in and around the field in more ways than she [See the full post…]

With confidence he attributes to his free-range childhood, Chris Gibson has followed his instincts and his heart, stepping away from the MD/PhD program in which he’s enrolled to co-found and lead Recursion Pharmaceuticals, one of the buzziest companies bringing AI [See the full post…]

Sumit Nagpal was born to a pair of healthcare entrepreneurs and raised in Kashmir, India.  When he was 13, he came to the United States where he saw diversity for the first time.  Sumit followed his parents into the Ivy [See the full post…]

A computational biologist by training, Imran Haque has managed to achieve the near-impossible: embracing the promise of data science in medicine while retaining his critical faculties.  He may well be just the sort of innovator required at the intersection of [See the full post…]

When Zoe Barry was a kid, she had two things she wanted to be when she grew up, either a veterinarian or “someone who writes checks.” She gave the first a shot and ended up settling on the second.  Today [See the full post…]

In graduate school, Karen Hong’s dream of becoming a biologist crashed into the inconvenient reality that she couldn’t stand working in the lab. Undaunted, Karen, pivoted into venture capital, and hasn’t looked back.

As befits a future geneticist, Karen chose [See the full post…]

Rebecca Kaul had planned to be a doctor.  But life and the HMO era got in the way.  As a result she went down an entirely different and windy path through chemical engineering, public policy, consulting on information systems and [See the full post…]

A brilliant cardiologist and geneticist, Dr. Calum McRae rose to the top of academic medicine – then decided to reinvent it, from the inside.  He just may be the person to do it.

Born on the Isle of Skye off [See the full post…]

Dr. James Dromey was supposed to be a farmer in County Cork, Ireland and has the milking experience to prove it. But apparently cows were not his destiny, even though he was a farm family’s only son. Instead, James left [See the full post…]

Andy Coravos left a promising career at a top private equity firm to follow her passion and pursue intensive training as a software developer; she now works on the frontier of engineering and medicine as CEO and co-founder of Elektra [See the full post…]

Carolyn Magill had planned a life in foreign service or international relations.  But it wasn’t until she found herself at the nexus of healthcare and public policy that she realized she found her home.  She has now traveled through the [See the full post…]

When she was a kid, Toyin Ajayi’s career goal was to “be the boss of something.” Drawn to power suits and authority, she aspired to become an unspecified boss lady. She may be a boss now, but her authority is [See the full post…]

Allison Kurian never had a chance.  The daughter of two prominent academics, Diana Chapman Walsh the former President of Wellesley College and Chris Walsh, a renowned Harvard biochemist – Allison was destined by genetics and environment, it seems, to become [See the full post…]

An unlikely pair, Brian Smith and Jerry Harrison came together over their shared passion for music and science and helping entrepreneurs succeed. Together they are helping healthcare startups find their rhythm and chart a path to success through a new [See the full post…]

Her illustrious career has taken her from clinician to biotech executive to university chancellor to CEO of the world’s largest foundation, yet throughout this exceptional journey, Susan Desmond-Hellmann has remained empathetic, inquisitive, and emphatically true to herself.

Growing up in [See the full post…]

Axel Heitmueller, Ph.D. grew up in Germany, the son of an engineer. Yet, despite the often discrete intellectual structure engineering can impose, Axel’s personal experiences have taught him how important it is to find comfort with a state of gray. [See the full post…]