Titus Talks

We are not betting individuals, but if we were, we bet that you have never met an intelligent, humble, creative, and curious individual with the voice of a Madam and whose slogan is “it’s okay to feel stupid, but don’t you dare stay that way.”  To conclude Season 2 of Titus Talks, we are delighted to share our conversation with researcher, blogger, podcaster, and author, Kendra Royston.    

Kendra completed her undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences at Stillman College and later received her Ph.D. from the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a dissertation focus in cancer epigenetics. She went on to continue her post-doc education at the University of Chicago before joining a major pharmaceutical company in their department of Global Scientific Communications. Recently she has assumed higher responsibilities within Clinical Development managing oncology clinical trials as an Associate Director. Kendra is also the founder of Stupid Science Inc., a nonprofit organization that aims to increase diverse representation in STEM fields and careers.  

In this episode, we talk about her path to finding meaningful bench to bedside translational research in industry, the ethos behind her ​​501(c)(3) Stupid Science Inc., the beauty of trial and error, and finding peace with imposter syndrome to focus on being on the cutting edge of discovery.   

Her advice for our listeners?  

You do not truly ever fail until you stop trying, every setback as a setup for triumph and boldness does not make you angry.     

(P.S. If any university is looking for its next president, we recommend giving Kendra a call. That is certainly the world we want to live in.) 

What do the hallmarks of competing in Wastewater Olympics, playing bass in an orchestra, contributing to a tactical military task force, and becoming an expert in China S&T Policy have in common? Anna has lived them all.

Anna Puglisi is the Director of Biotechnology Programs and Senior Fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).  Previously she served as the National Counterintelligence Officer for East Asia, advising senior U.S. and foreign government officials at the highest levels, academia, and the private sector on counterintelligence (CI) issues and in designing mitigation strategies for both the public and private sectors to protect technology. As a member of the Senior Analytic Service, she developed multidisciplinary efforts to understand global technology developments and their impact on U.S. competitiveness and national security. Anna also started a governm6ent-wide working group looking at developments in biological sciences and has worked on several bio-security issues. She has received numerous awards including the FBI Director’s Award for Excellence. Anna holds an MPA, an MS in environmental science, and a BA in Biology with honors, all from Indiana University. She studied at the Princeton in Beijing Chinese language school and was a visiting scholar in Nankai University’s Department of Economics, where she studied China’s S&T policies, infrastructure development, and university reforms. She has also conducted research and worked in technical infrastructure. She is a co-author of the 2013 study “Chinese Industrial Espionage”, a contributing author to “China’s Quest for Technology: Beyond Espionage” and countless other proprietary words.

In this episode,  we talk about going to work in a hard hat and steel-toe shoes, compiling expertise that resonates with you in advance of others seeing the value in it, music as a multidisciplinary communication tool for biotechnology, and the more about her vision for the work she is leading at the Center for Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET).

Her advice for our listeners?

Find what really matters to you and make it your guiding star. Take opportunities that will help you grow as a person, grow in your career, and really challenge you in different ways. People make the path and always be kind.

Driving substantive change socially, economically, and politically is grounded in a foundation of national security. Today, we are excited to introduce Schuyler Moore whose passion for women’s education led her to work at an all-girls school in Afghanistan and build a career circling the problem of national security from different perspectives (her website).

Schuyler works at the intersection of national security and emerging technology as a Senior Defense & Foreign Policy Advisor in the U.S. House of Representatives. She was also a member of the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 class. She previously served as the Director of Science & Technology (S&T) on the staff of the Defense Innovation Board (DIB) in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering. Schuyler was also a Senior Analyst at an aerospace & consulting firm, with a special focus on defense budget forecasting and emerging technologies. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Technology & Security from Georgetown University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Government from Harvard University. Most recently, she just received confirmation that she will be mobilizing with the Navy Reserve to Bahrain to support Task Force 59, which focuses on integrating unmanned systems and AI into the fleet.

In this episode, we talk about the universality of the sassiness of 13-year-olds, abandoning the linear path to crafting a career based on collecting diverse perspectives, combining a willingness to learn with deep humility and the importance of getting comfortable with saying ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I’m not sure’.

Her advice for our listeners?  Chase skills, not titles, set yourself up to maximize good luck and mitigate bad luck; and protect your small kernel of idealism which will give you the motivation to keep fighting to effect change, while also staying pragmatic, practical, and happy in the longterm.

We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!

Our favorite people are existential conversationalists that make the minutes fly by, that love data-driven insights, and who are mission-driven to make the world a better place. Today, we get to introduce you to John Younger, a  physician-scientist by training, whose experiential stories about Sherlock Holmes, the meaning of medicine, and having more than one career in a lifetime, certainly affirm why Kathryn wanted to stay in contact after meeting him as an intern almost three years ago. Over the course of this episode, we have a great conversation with him about the hope that times of transition bring, napkin IOUs, and wrestling with the decision-making process around the timeless question: what should I do with my life?

When he’s not writing dynamic pieces for Bioeconomy.XYZ, John is the Managing Director at ArgoPond, LLC, a life science advisory and investment company that provides analytics and diligence services to companies and funds engaging the life science space. He represents ArgoPond as a member of the Life Science Committee of New York Angels, one of the most active angel investment groups in the world. John also sits on the Board of Directors of New View Surgical, a Boston-based start-up creating new visualization tools for minimally invasive surgery.

His advice for our listeners?

There is more than one way to think about hard problems, so don’t change your leadership style and the way you approach problems to fit a mold. And when it comes to opportunities that come your way, take your shot with the hardest swing you can.

We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did!

If you want to talk about crafting a career that emulates a drunken walk through science and explore the potential of backing up your biology like we back up computers for a reboot in the future,  it’s time to meet  Andrew.  On this episode of Titus Talks, we are super excited to sit down again with Andrew Hessel.  Andrew is the co-founder and past-president of Humane Genomics - which engineers synthetic viruses to target cancer cells- and co-executive director of the Genome Project-write (GPW), an international research and development effort that lays the technical and societal foundations for responsible applications of synthetic biology. He was also an Autodesk Distinguished Researcher, where he was part of a multidisciplinary team exploring computer-aided design and manufacturing for biotechnology and nanotechnology R&D.

Today Andrew shares about his newly-released book: The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology. We also discuss our shared passion for the operating system for life, the impending Cambrian explosion of biology, and the importance of looking at life as a non-zero-sum game.

His advice for our listeners?

If you are looking for mission-driven work, pay attention to the programming of life that makes synthetic biology really ignite at the intersection of biology, computation, and automation robotics. And it’s time for humanity to be victorious over viruses.

We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did!

Very few of us can say that our careers span continents, species, and millennia but Brandi Cantarel, Associate Director of Bioinformatics at Colossal Biosciences, can. For over 15 years, Brandi has been involved in projects that utilize sequence technology to understand human health, often at the forefront of an emerging field or technology.  She leads bioinformatics development of next-generation sequence (NGS) data, including genomics, transcriptomics, and metagenomics in rare/complex genetic diseases, immunology, infectious disease, and cancer.  She has applied precision medicine research in a CAP/CLIA setting, with the development of tools for tumor mutational profiling. Prior, Brandi was a faculty member at the UT Southwestern Medical Center, Department of Bioinformatics, and at the University of Maryland, Institute for Genome Sciences. In 2020, Brandi was named a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science.    

In today’s episode, we talk about academia from a non-tenure-track perspective, working towards creating a mammoth-elephant hybrid animal, and the nontraditional and awesome ways that biotech startups tackle critical problems with global impact like fighting climate change. (Hint: We say screw it, let’s bring back the mammoth and see what works.)  Her advice for our listeners? Focus on the science, raise your voice when you feel like it’s being done incorrectly, and hire people that are better than you and let them shine. And always be kind to people.    

We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!    

*Disclaimer (27:15): The oldest sequencable DNA is 1M year old, not 10K years old. This is not as far back at the mass extinction of dinosaurs (~66 million years).

If you don’t have anyone in your life challenging you to critically think about what real trust and real transparency look like when dealing with biotechnology that is so intimate and so integral to what makes us human, then it’s time to meet our favorite art entrepreneurs, Gen and Marco.   

On this episode of Titus Talks, we are delighted to sit down with Genefer Baxter and Marco Locatelli. Genefer and Marco are Berlin-based artists, designers, and facilitators at Aula Future, a project-based research and STEAM program. Before founding Aula Future alongside Marco Locatelli, Gen worked with new media, curating immersive art experiences in Berlin, Germany where participants could interact with technology-driven installations. Marco received his training in product design, material engineering, and nanotechnology at the Polytechnic University of Milan. Since then, he has gained years of experience in various 3D platforms and has honed skills in designing immersive experiences both digitally and physically. In 2019, Genefer and Marco were selected as artists-in-residence at the Science Center in Philadelphia.  

Today they get to share about the creative explosion waiting to happen at the intersection of art, tech, science, and education. We also have a good laugh about stick bugs and the crazy things skydiving instructors say as you jump out of planes.   

Their advice for our listeners?   

Get a little lost—but not too lost—while never losing your center and the impact that you want to have on the world; to introduce a little art into your thinking to fully embrace your personal philosophical journey.  

We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did!   

If you ever need to find the visceral and authentic soul in something, look no further than Julian Borra, Founder of Thin Air Factory. Julian is a creative writer working in the commercial communications industry, with a particular passion for using creativity to make complex things simple, most particularly in the sustainability, tech, and science spaces. He has built a career using creative strategy and storytelling to help people and brands find their voice. He’s also the Lead Creative Strategist on Socialising the Genome, a Wellcome Connecting Science & Genomics England Initiative. He even co-authored Liferider, a NYT Bestseller, with Laird Hamilton, a legendary big-wave surfer.   

In today’s episode, we have the chance to sit down with one of our favorite individuals to learn from, have a laugh with, and collaboratively dream really big science communications dreams alongside. We’ll discuss his love of uncomfortable places, his journey to helping scientists connect more deeply with the heart of their discovery with campaigns like the Gene Deck Shuffle, and having the humility to accept feedback.   

His advice for our listeners? Go back to the old in your lifeline to remind ourselves why we love something instead of always looking to something new for inspiration and always go to the place of most discomfort to find what is revelatory.   

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!   

The best careers are ones that include twists, turns, barriers, and breakthroughs. And today we get to chat with Michelle Holko, a strategic innovator working at the intersection of biology, technology, and security. She has built a career integrating security into biotechnology and health to promote innovations in biomedical research. In our conversation, we chat about the incredible work she has been able to contribute to over the course of her career.    

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Michelle is currently a Principal Architect and Scientist at Google working as the technical lead with the Google Cloud healthcare and life sciences team. Before Google, she served in government as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIF), where she worked with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of Defense (DoD) Chemical and Biological Defense Program (CBDP), the NIH’s All of Us Research Program, HHS BARDA, OSTP, and NSC. Whew, that was all at one job!   

Prior to joining the PIF program, she worked with DARPA and HHS BARDA, and was a fellow in the 2018 cohort of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security’s Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative where I first met Michelle. Michelle was trained in genomics and bioinformatics, and she has worked on pandemic prevention and preparedness, infectious diseases, cancer, biosurveillance, biosecurity, data science, emerging technologies, health technologies, precision medicine, cybersecurity, and machine learning/artificial intelligence. Basically, if it's been a hot topic, she’s worked on it!   

Her advice for our listeners? Lean into experiences that scare you, pay attention to what you don’t like just as much as what you do like, let your good work speak for you, and try to be like water.    

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!