The career story so far...
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The chapter of trying stuff out (2012-2015)
I tried lab research in experimental medicine, my purple gloves and white lab coat gesticulating to EDM while pipetting. I declined the PhD position to experience more breadth. I wrote value dossiers for therapeutic assets, assessed commercial opportunities for biofuel technology, provided techno-strategic consulting to startups, tried launching a medtech start-up product, the board and CEO had a falling out and the start-up imploded. I collected unemployment benefits for 6 months, the government staff checking my job hunting efforts were nice to me.
The chapter of professionalising (2015-2019)
I joined the headquarter of the world´s eldest science and technology company, was trained to consult for senior leadership, helped to set-up an innovation centre, got recruited into their first think tank (synthetic biology), a pretty prominent synthetic biologist laughed in my face, I founded their first internal start-up (enzymatic DNA synthesis) and secured several million EUR in budget. I co-authored 4 patents and raced the competition for several years while the organisation around me was restructured thrice. I brought in a pretty critical M&A deal. Shit happened and the project died.
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The chapter of what happened in parallel to the last chapter (2015-2019)
Internally I continued to advise on the synbio agenda in various capacities. Externally I joined a committee to roadmap the semiconductor/synbio technology interface, saw a guy inject CRISPR reagents into his arm while taking shots of whisky, joined a biohacker facebook group, presented at a conference with five nobel laureate attendees and ran after another prominent synthetic biologist like a fanboy. I joined another committee to develop the technology and infrastructure needs of genome writing, gave a lecture in Eritrea on biotechnology careers, gave a lecture in Cambridge on corporate biotechnology innovation. I sent my mum a photo and she said I look like a professor. That´s not a good thing at my age.
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The chapter of what is happening now (2019+)
Now I´ll be doing business development for our life science research portfolio. Since our portfolio is over 300 thousand products, this feels like an opportunity to hypothesize what the overall future of biotechnology research needs to be, and then make that happen through deal making. Cool...
Rambling paragraphs to be continued...
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