 So Mark May, I forget the date, the Octane Event is May 18th. May 18th. Is this the Innovation Showcase? It's the Innovation Showcase and VC in the OC, so May 18th. So I hope that you come to the incubator and you come to the Innovation Showcase and get that launched. So with that, we'll start the proceedings today. Ronnie Hanekek, Director of the Transfer Office and the Associate Vice Chancellor for Technology Transfer will do the interview today and she'll introduce Greg Weiss. Thank you. Please help him welcome them. The format of this is I'm going to be asking him some questions and he's going to be telling me about himself but we'll try to reach him in time at the end so that you all can ask questions that you might want to ask that I didn't ask. So good afternoon and welcome to today's Entrepreneurs Forum. Today's forum is sponsored by Octane at UCI Office of Technology Alliances, UCI Extension and of course Cal IT2, we're in their space. I'm Ronnie Hanekek. I'm from UC Irvine's Office of Technology Alliances. We manage intellectual property for the campus if you're not already familiar with us from the conception of an idea to an invention disclosure to marketing and licensing your technology for commercial development. We manage about more than 800 inventions for the campus. The office also assists faculty with startup companies. We license technology to the startup companies and we can also put you in touch with the business community that can help you with business plans and space needs and other needs that the company might have. Today's program will introduce you to one of UCI's innovators, Greg Weiss, his career path experiences with industry and also his perspective on technologies and how they fit into the future. It's my pleasure to introduce Greg Weiss. One clue as to his broad interest is that he is a professor of chemistry but also molecular biology and biochemistry. His approach to science interfaces with various, many different fields including engineering and he's received numerous scholarships and awards. I'm not going to go through them all here today. He's distinguished himself not only in research at UC Irvine but also in teaching which is very nice. We are a teaching university too. He is co-director of the chemical and structural biology program of the Child Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and he also serves on the scientific advisory boards of several companies. Professor Weiss is also co-chair of the Global Young Academy and we'll be talking a little bit about that later. Greg, you seem to have started out as a chemist and I don't know if you were born a chemist or if you could tell us how you... I think I was born a chemist. You might have been. When I was a little kid I was fascinated by the periodic table. My mom actually is the one who showed me a periodic table at the age of six. At the age of six? At the age of six. Did it happen to Amazon or was it the real thing? No, it was the real thing. She told me that everything in the universe is on this table and I was so blown away by that. I couldn't believe it. I kept asking her what about this book? Where is the book? No, the carbon in the paper, oxygen, all of that is on the periodic table and that left me in awe so I wanted to learn more and I've always wanted to learn more and I just kept wanting to learn more. So I think I was a chemist from the very beginning. Were your parents chemists? My father was actually a chemistry major and then became a physician. Oh, that was a physician. Right, which meant I had also a great chemistry side as a kid as well. This led to both fun adventures and misadventures and fortunately I have all my fingers still which amazes me to this day. So you did blow a few things up? Just small things, but... Not life. No, nothing like that. I made it through that period of my life and I wonder whether there's other scientists who are kids that are now labeled anarchistic pyro-mediacs that don't get a chance to do that stuff and I think it was a really important part of my childhood, just exploration of just trying different things. You weren't pressured to become a physician. Sometimes doctors want your sentence. I was definitely headed towards the course of wanting to become a physician when I was a kid and I spent a lot of time volunteering at hospitals and I developed this tremendous aversion to the way they smell. You know, you step into the hospital, they all smell the same and I don't know what it was but all of a sudden one day I just realized I can't go back anymore, this is just not my thing and I started thinking about other things and about that point I was entering college. Oh, okay. Yeah, you're right. My father definitely was enthusiastic about having me become a physician. I think we would joke about joining the practice or something. So you received your bachelor's degree in chemistry. And that was from UC Berkeley. Can you talk a little bit about how that experience might have influenced your career? Yeah, so, you know, at the point that I was thinking about having second thoughts about becoming a physician, I was taking this class called organic chemistry and it was 8 a.m. But the professor just loved the stuff. He would show up at 8 a.m. and he'd come bouncing across the stage and I was hooked. I thought, well, if this guy loves this stuff then he's the honest, famous professor and this must be worth learning. And then I started thinking about it more and I just became absolutely immersed and at that point I decided I wanted to be able to teach this class someday. And the amazing part is, I taught it this morning. From 8 o'clock to 10 o'clock. But I know you love it. Yeah, yeah. So as an undergraduate I had this tremendous love of chemistry and fortunately at University of California you're given all these great opportunities to pursue your dreams. And should we talk a little bit about the project? Okay, so as an undergraduate I wrote a computer program for discovery of drugs. And so the idea is, you know, if you have some pharmaceutical that is a pretty effective drug and you want to come up with the next generation drug one strategy that would work is if you have a similarly shaped molecule and so while I was an undergraduate at Paul Bartlett's laboratory at UC Berkeley I wrote this little program with him that would let us predict molecular shapes The amazing part was, it took off we sold it to something like 200 different pharmaceutical companies So you had a product earlier on? It was a product. Yeah, an actual product. And the great thing about University of California is they returned back to the mentors some portion of the proceeds actually a substantial portion and the other amazing part was that my professor shared it with me an undergraduate at the time and it was amazing, it was really nice and so the money started rolling in when I was a graduate student they're not talking like enough money to make me rich it certainly didn't make me rich, but still as a graduate student, living right on the edge this made a huge difference and this became really influential. I think the University of California tries to incentivize people with their inventions to disclose them and help them become commercialized and one of the ways it does that is by sharing income with the inventors. There is a region's policy and the inventors for the most part receive 35% of the income that their inventions bring back to the campus. And this includes the graduate students undergraduates and professors? There was an inventors split between the inventors. And also the inventors department so 15% also goes to the inventors department and you can get access to that for your lab so it's kind of, it's to stimulate more interesting innovation and bringing your technologies from the bench to practical application. So at some point you started to play your interest in chemistry in the field of biology. Can you talk a little bit about how that universe came about? Right, so we were applying this ring structure, this thing that would predict ring structures of pharmaceuticals to a compound called FK506. This was, this is early 90s and this drug had just been its use as an immunosuppressant for a suppressing immune system allowing liver transplants had just taken off. So this was sort of a golden age of the dawn of liver transplantation. So this drug was incredibly influential and so I was applying my program to understand how this drug works. And while I was doing this I was reading all these great papers from biologists such as the guy I ended up working for as a graduate student and I was just, I was you know, the more I learned about this the more fascinated I became that this idea that you can have a pharmaceutical that gets into the body and then specifically inhibits one and only one target and then suppresses the immune system which then allows transplantation of livers, that really impresses me. So that's sort of what got me interested in biology. And was your, this was your during your PhD? Yes, that was when I was an undergraduate and then I went and did a PhD with the professor who was publishing all this stuff about immunosuppressants. His name is Stuart Treiber and he's actually going to be here on campus next week, highly recommended. He's very famous. He's a great scientist. He's going to give a great seminar. For your postdoctoral studies you decided to go to industry rather than continue with an academic institution postdoc. Can you talk about what it was like making that decision and I know you're a lot younger than I am but at the time that I was looking at these things there was a lot of pressure not to go to industry for a postdoc to get experience in academic. I don't know if you felt that at your time but you were working for some high end scientists. Yeah, well I did have friends who told me your career is over once you go to industry. Oh dear. So I definitely heard that but I proved them wrong. Anyway, so as a graduate student working in Stuart Treiber's laboratory I was trying to make large collections of different molecules and then we'd sift through these collections to identify new drugs new immunosuppressants. I was specifically focused on how the immune system figures out whether a cell has been infected with the virus and I wanted to control this for autoimmune disease and it was a lot of work. I think my students have looked at my publication record from my graduate time and they know I have a lot more failures than successives as a graduate student and I started realizing there's gotta be a better way to make combinatorial libraries and this technique called phage display had just been described in sort of the late 80's. So this is a technique where you get the cells to make the molecules for you rather than you doing all the synthetic chemistry of mixing the molecules. Instead you get bacteria and viruses to do all the hard work and I started looking around for one of the best labs that are doing phage display and I got one of the best labs happened to be in industry. So my advisor guy named Jim Wells at Genentech happened to be at Genentech and if he was at University of Alaska have you ever gone there? I would have followed him to Alaska and just got a warmer coat. So that's what sort of got me towards industry. I think I was really lucky though. Genentech was an amazing place to do a postdoc and had this tremendous freedom to be innovative and to come up with new things and the postdocs actually are given the tremendously privileged job of doing something that no one else in industry gets to do which is not worry about baking products. So the scientists have to be focused on, you know, let's get a product. Let's get a new antibody, a new drug, a new therapeutic, we're going to get out into the clinic and then along the way the scientists are turning up all this interesting science, right? So they would hand it off to the postdocs to track down. So I don't know anyone who tells you that doing a postdoc in industry is a disaster for your career. It's totally crazy. Because I think you can really do great stuff. You probably have to pick the right company and you chose a company that emphasized publications and research. That's right, that's true. So you weren't going to be a cog in the wheel of a product. That's true. And you know, something else I also tell students who are considering doing a postdoc in industry is to pick the right projects as well. You have to choose, you have to be sort of your own agent in choosing projects that are publishable because the scientists are constantly sort of farming out these projects and some of them are really important from a standpoint of therapeutics. But if you get involved in one of those you'll never get published because the lawyers will tie it up and you won't be able to talk about it on your job talks when you leave there. And so you kind of have to choose the things that are just intellectually interesting and not necessarily going to lead to a therapeutic. And you know what, that's a good strategy for the company as well. Can you speak a little bit to the pluses and minuses of working with any company? I know you were a postdoc there and there's mainly research but you have to observe some of the things. Right, well the huge plus was as a postdoc I didn't have to worry about raising my own money. It was fantastic. Money was no issue. Well practically, I figured out that if I stayed below about 300K per year no one noticed. This was an amazing thing. I figured out that in a large company like Genentech I could be really innovative, do new things and as long as I was doing that then they were happy. So as long as I kept them as long as I was generating science they were happy about that. The downside is I really started to miss students. I miss seeing students showing up every fall. There's an energy that we get on campus in the fall when the undergraduates, the new crop of undergraduates show up and they sort of show up all pushy-eyed and pushy-tailed and they're ready to learn and I just love that. They take all the parking places. They do take the parking places and it gets more crowded on campus but I love that. I just love the energy and I also love teaching and I miss that as well. I miss that component as well. So the pluses are enormous and the minuses are there as well. Did you find a collaborative spirit there? Yes. Ronnie, I think I told you this but let me just digress for a moment for the audience. About 6 months into my postdoctoral at Genentech, my advisor took me to breakfast and I knew something was up because my advisor Jim Wells wasn't in the practice of taking us to breakfast so he takes me to breakfast and says, Greg, there's this black diamond run that I've always wanted to take and Jim always speaks spoken ski terms, big skier and so I'm thinking wow okay we've been headed to Tahoe and now what he really meant was he was headed to start his own company so he started Cinesis Pharmaceuticals and left Genentech about 6 months into my postdoc so I was basically left without an advisor and I was really fortunate that I was able to work with another postdoc who was left behind and the two of us networked like crazy because we had to basically find a niche for ourselves, we had to justify our existence of the company without you know, yeah exactly so we had no advisor, we had this terrific well equipped lab, I already said we had amazing funding and we basically our strategy that this term has really successful is basically other postdocs, other scientists to work for us and so we did sort of grassroots networking to set up collaboration after collaboration we found people to do the DNA sequencing I found other people to do the bioinformatics we found other people to help us with the cloning and someone else made all the buffers you actually built your own project team it was great, exactly it's a good experience and it's one of the great things about an innovative company that they really encourage that the last thing you want to do if you're at a company like that is to be off as an appendage all by yourself you know, because then it's easy just to lop it off and get rid of it so you always want to be in or at internet work with lots of different people and I found that really easy to do with genetic techniques all kinds of activities to encourage that sort of thing or all kinds of research offsites and retreats and things that would just encourage you to think about how you can get your stuff involved with other people so it was really really really fun this is a little bit of a digression but you did experience that environment and I wonder if there are things that management things or the way that industry was organized or the way things were done that you applied to your own research programs here well, I could tell you about an experiment of conducting this quarter management experiment of conducting this quarter I'm a strong believer in constantly reinventing yourself and constantly trying to get better so a crazy management experiment that we're trying this quarter that I adopted from Genentech is one of the things I really liked about being a scientist in industry is you get feedback on an annual basis and they tell you exactly where you stand and what you're doing well and what you're doing wrong and so this quarter, as my students know we actually conducted annual reviews where I sat down with every student in the laboratory and told them okay, here's what I like about you and this is where I think your career is going and here's the stuff that you absolutely need to change if you want to get to that next stage of your career and then I handed them now the valuation forms and anonymously had them hand me back some very interesting advice on what I need to change so you got feedback yeah, and this was actually I think this was a successful experiment in the sense that I really learned a lot I really learned I found out, for example that all the bad habits that my own advisor used when I was a graduate I adopted everything that I would complain about from the bosses I've had in the past I actually do and it's really useful to get that kind of feedback you can't get that honest feedback though unless you're willing to put yourself out there and the truth is, you also have to have a little bit of thick skin my wife is sitting in the back knows that when I first got the reviews I brought them home and I was like I'm in trouble that was hugely informative it was a really really useful experience so that's one of the things I liked about it what's the advice consistent with the feedback you get from your wife or was it funny you should imagine that it wasn't totally consistent actually but you know it's something that I saw when I was in industry I really really thought it was very effective and getting honest feedback that's not great inflated that's where they're telling you here's where you rank in the company I thought that was a tough experience but I thought it was a really good experience as well and it's something I'm trying to adopt in my own laboratory and so far so good from what I've seen in the last couple of weeks we've only done this, this has now been week two so far I think there's really positive energy from it it's good so you were at Chan & Tech and then you were talking about your advisor leaving, starting a company and you didn't go with him so you must have been thinking I actually was almost totally confident that I was going to go and start City since Pharmacy it was a great opportunity and actually as a graduate student I took all these classes at Harvard Business School from people like Clay Christensen who's like a professor of entrepreneurship so you were primed I was totally primed I mean in fact my friend and I as a graduate since wrote a business plan we were totally sold on starting a company together we had recruited a bunch of HBS students to do this but at the moment that I had the opportunity, I have to confess I pulled back from the break so I could have gone with Jim we went to Redwood City we opened up this empty warehouse just no benches it was right next door to a junkyard Jim said welcome to City since Pharmaceuticals and at that moment I had the toughest call of my career employee number two employee number four it would have been good they actually ended up doing okay don't even look back I know but it was a tough call so I remember this is probably the most stressful part of my career so my wife Kim and I spent a lot of time walking around our neighborhood and just talking about what our dreams are what is our future what do we see ourselves doing where do we want to be in 10 years and at the end of it I really wanted to be teaching students I really wanted to be in front of a classroom talking to students training them on how to be scientists and I was much more passionate about that than I was about working at a company even a starter company I would have loved to have done it but it was a tough call and I'm glad we did when you probably made a good choice weren't you the teacher of the year for the graduating class or one of the departments or one of the schools here so the undergraduates voted me outstanding professor so you must vote me thanks it's really fun it's amazing to have the mixture of passion for teaching and passion for research I think it's nice to have that and I'm a professor here so it's one of the great things about the job yeah and so then you applied for university positions academic positions and you chose U of Irvine hopefully you're happy every day I'm really happy so when I go visit some other university I think jeez I can't believe what great colleagues I have that's some other place and you're eating dinner and they don't like talking to their other colleagues so they think that not they're going to come back here this place is amazing people get along really well our students are outstanding I can't say enough good things about UCI so I feel really lucky but I did a full search we sent out like 45 applications I went on some ridiculous number of interviews and we almost ended up in Iowa I can tell you in Iowa we came really close I'm really happy to be here four and a half miles from the ocean with this great group of colleagues in this innovative atmosphere so I think it worked out really well a lot of your work is your collaborations you're still bringing in other expertise into the various projects and problems that you study that's been my philosophy for the longest time I guess going back to my genetic days when I was a graduate student I was off by myself and I would tell you that was really unsatisfying because when a problem happened there's only one person in the spot to solve the problem and that's really really frustrating so after that I wanted to basically set up problems where you constantly working with other people and by doing that I feel like we can go further with those problems if I bring in say Ed Robinson an expert on HIV to collaborate with us on HIV drug discovery this is great because that means then I don't have to worry about growing the HIV virus myself I'm turning to the world's expert who happens to be here at UCI and handing him our compounds doing our own synthesis and handing him stuff to test and it's just so much more satisfying because then he said we don't have to do every aspect of the project so I would say almost every project in our laboratory involves a collaboration of some sort can you give an example of one in particular that interfaces with multiple disciplines yeah I'm really excited about the interface between electronics like this and the biotechnology world so these are two technologies that have reached this very advanced state of development yet never the twain shall be in biotechnology proteins and molecules communicate by touch the small molecule vines to the protein or doesn't so it's sort of like a real communication and then in electronics the communication is entirely electrical so I don't need to hybridize those two universes so to do that I don't know anything about electronics at least I did until we started this project so I turned to collaborators people like Rich Penner who's the world's expert of electrochemists people like Phil Collins who's a physicist who's been building single molecule circuits and so we provide the biology side of things they provide the electrochemistry the physics side and then it's just really exciting because you put creative students together in these rooms together in a room and all kinds of neat ideas come out it's nice to get the students together from different labs to work on projects and actually one of the things that we do for all of our collaborations is have weekly joint meetings between the laboratories that are involved and that's actually really important for any sort of 50-50 type collaboration it also keeps things on track because sometimes there's a tendency to drop those collaborations if you're not in your collaborative space and sometimes they forget about you or it gets less lower priority so if you meet every week with your collaborators you're going to be a lot more successful because then they're everyone's accountable right and people like to know that other people are showing interest in their project and I'm sure they depend on each other in some ways because sometimes you can't do this till that's done can you talk a little bit about the features that you see in a collaborator? because you probably do collaborations outside of the campus too yes, yes we do so for collaborations I like to find collaborators who make a commitment from the outset so this is really important that the collaborator has to tell me and I in fact will ask them how important is this project to you and if they can't tell me that it's going to be when we get the material that they're going to treat it as their highest priority then I drop them because we can't collaborate with anyone who's not going to make this stuff really high priority because if it's just a low priority item we'll do all this work we'll get to the handoff point and then it will die so that's one thing the second thing is I also tell all collaborators in advance that our collaboration has to generate either papers or proposals going out the door one of those two we have to have deliverables at the end of this we have to either be discovering new things or we have to be we definitely have to be discovering new things supporting them or sending them as proposals and again if I don't have the commitment from the collaborators then we can't continue and some of those projects end up dying by the wayside so we definitely need that from the outset has your success rate been pretty good with picking the collaborators? How many projects have been left out? we've been amazingly successful I think over the last five years so once I figured out those just being very upfront at the beginning here's the expectation we're going to do this the papers are going to be jointly co-authored the proposals are going to be shared in this way working out all those details is really critical people don't go in with the same expectations it's a recipe for disaster it's true in business too you really need to get everything on a table or it just goes round and round and a lot of people have different expectations and there's a lot of friction so the business of science is the same and I like just being really upfront telling people we're going to send out a grant your laboratory will get 50% my laboratory will get 50% when we write a paper we're going to share co-authorship in this way so even before the paper is written that we know exactly what's going to happen because those issues become really tricky and that's where collaborations fall apart in business I imagine you've disclosed several inventions to the office one of the inventions Office of Technology Alliance is licensed to a company a company in Southern California and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that technology and how you hooked up with the company because actually the company I didn't find the company you found the company and brought the company to us and we licensed the technology to the company and that's very typical usually our inventors our entrepreneurs are connected in some way with someone someone's called them someone's seen an article published in a journal and people will usually call a company or an investor will call the PI first and then the PI is what would bring them to us so we do get a lot of context that way oh I didn't know that, that's interesting well that's exactly what happened in this case so in this case the invention is to develop sensors for disease markers and it goes back to that whole business about hybridizing biotech and electronics is we're we're wiring viruses directly into electronic circuits and so the idea here is you can engineer the viruses to recognize arbitrary molecules cancer markers cholera toxin if you want to detect cholera and then we wire them directly into the circuit and then watch send electricity through the viruses and then watch in real time as the cancer marker disease marker binds so we licensed the first generation of this technology to molecular express a company that's headquartered in Dominguez Hills, California just up the freeway and in that case it's a really random event that actually brought us together so in this case actually the Dean of Biosci, Sue Bryant she was then Dean of Biosci she was meeting with the CEO of molecular express and Gary Fuji and Gary is one of our distinguished alums I think for a while Gary was on the CEO round table and that might have been where they interact we have a group of CEOs that meets with the deans and the vice chancellor he may have been on that group but that's how they connected well somehow Gary started talking to Sue about a problem that required a phage display that's the engineering of the viruses technology that I alluded to earlier that I learned at Genentech and it brought to UC Irvine and Sue said oh you're in luck we have someone here who does phage display Sue is thinking sponsored research that's right because Sue put me in touch with Gary Fuji and we sat down it turned out that we actually had really different ideas Gary wanted us to develop drug delivery systems for targeting cancer I wanted to develop diagnostics for cancer and what we ended up doing was sort of meeting in the middle so that we'd discover binders to cancer markers it would be useful for drug delivery applications and at the same time useful for a diagnostic so by meeting in the middle we ended up both getting our goals accomplished and we did this by raising SBIR money to do that okay so you wrote SBIR grants and you helped with a scientific plan yes so these are R43 Small Business Innovation Research Rewards for STTRs and other series something technology transfer research anyway so we ended up writing a whole bunch of these and the format that we use that's actually been really successful it's something that we've done quite a number of times is I write all the science so it's either me or students in my laboratory working with me who write the science portions and on the academic PI Gary writes all the business plan stuff so you always have to show some commercial applicability and a plan to get the stuff out the door eventually so Gary takes care of that the phage display aspects of science aspects sometimes we even bring in another collaborator we brought in other biologists to test things that are coming out of the laboratory to test them in various animals so we have all the collaborators together and the ward itself that goes to Molecule Express the ones we've gotten awarded comes to the business SBIR comes back to the business so the money goes to the business contract, back to UCI back to our own laboratory and that's worked really well it's been a great way for us to support research that is sort of applied it would be a really tough sell for this research in a basic study section of the National Institutes of Health that would be a really tough thing but to an SBIR study section where they're looking for research it's going to get out the door eventually and go to the clinic they're really much more interested in this that's right and it also has an engineering component too for those engineering components we even collaborate with people here in engineering people like GP Lee we've collaborated with Mark Bachman so we're necessary for whatever expertise we need I wonder if you could since you're working at the interface would it be possible for you to speak a little bit to how you see chemistry and engineering interfacing in products and addressing problems, societal problems or technology problems that we have I'm glad you're asked, Ronnie because I like to call myself a chemist and the reason is chemists solve problems we're not just studying the universe our goal is to synthesize molecules that are going to go out and solve molecules or solve problems we're going to make new molecules that then have some new virtues that solve problems so one of the areas I'm really excited about are technologies that are hybrids of organic chemistry and biology so for example, polymers that have proteins directly incorporated in them and these proteins could be for example, enzymes that are catalyzing some reaction and the polymers could be things like electrically conductive materials so you basically then have wires that have proteins directly incorporated in them and I'm really excited we have some work coming out of laboratory now that's reporting that sort of thing and I think the applications for biosensing are going to be really exciting but I also think the applications for directly sending electrons into these catalysts could also be really exciting for things like hydrogen generation hydrogen gas generation for clean energy where you might have electricity being generated by solar and then enzymes are amazingly good at doing efficient catalysis in some way then of feeding the electrons from the solar energy directly into the enzymes materials like that I'm really excited about so I think chemistry at this interface of biology organic synthesis and engineering is a really exciting place right now so there are some really neat clean tech biotechnologies medicine and organic synthesis as well because enzymes are also really effective at controlling the stereochemistry of the products at controlling regiochemistry and they do this using very low energy these are reactions that are taking place in water at room temperature without organic solvents without harsh acids this is the ultimate organic synthesis and I think that that future is going to be led by new sets of materials that are just coming out right now and I think it's going to be really exciting you're obviously excited about it I can't wait you're also co-chair of a recently formed global organization to bring together young scientists I think this is a pretty young group right? yes I'm the old guy do you want to talk a little bit about the origin of the organization and the niche that you think it's going to fill sure so about a year ago I was invited by the National Academy of Sciences to represent young U.S. scientists at the World Economics Forum meeting over the summer the summer Davos meeting in China and this was an amazing opportunity so we had about 40 scientists from 35 different countries and you never get to see scientists from Africa or Latin America at least I don't and it's just amazing to meet scientists like this so we're in this room and the motto of the World Economics Forum meetings is making the world a better place and so the head of this meeting and also the editor-in-chief of Science Magazine comes in and says hey we brought you here for a reason for your expensive trip to China because we want you guys to do something about making the world a better place so we go to the bar so we head to the bar and we start brainstorming like crazy and after two days we've generated enough ideas to fill this room no joke in fact we got a room about this big I had everyone write their ideas on papers and we paste them on the walls and we have a room that's just filled with ideas about how to make science more effective in the developing world how to reconnect the developed and the developing world together how to improve science education how to improve science communication to society so you have all these ideas all over the world it's global brainstorming and then I hand everyone some sticky pads and everyone gets three votes so we go through and if you want to vote then you put your sticky, your post-it note on the thing the amazing part is at the end of this our idea was we need some way to connect young scientists to empower young scientists with a voice in influencing science policy in science education and also the policies that affect young scientists because you see it coming out of the national academies of science the old guys the old guys did take tasks the policies that affect our tenure that affect things like maternity leave there has to be some way of empowering young scientists who are currently disenfranchised and giving them a voice at the table and I'm hoping that by doing this we'll also be more effective at communicating science results to society and also be more effective at improving science education at inspiring young future scientists in this way so out of this we set up a new organization that we call the Global Young Academy which is composed of it's capped at a membership of 200 of the best young scientists around the world to be a member you have to be nominated by your national academy you have to be around the age of 35 so I would no longer qualify and then you're nominated by the national academies of the home countries and then we'll have a peer review process to select the very best scientists and the idea is basically to then empower these young scientists to go out and do stuff we're setting up working groups that are going to focus on science education standards that are going to focus on how do we more effectively interface with the media as scientists and different issues like that basically it's our chance it's our chance to speak and be heard for once I'm really excited about it I'm sure they are too because they haven't really had a seat at the table and you know the amazing part is they're from the national academies the national academies are really interested in bringing in young scientists the people I see in this room and giving them a chance and hearing from them and empowering them and so our funding for example is coming from the national academies of the world so there's actually an organization an umbrella organization of all the national academies called the inner academy panel and they're funding us to get this started so that was my first venture capital raising experience it was a lot of work so yeah in fact actually the cell was I showed up at this meeting in London and they had the presence of about 100 national academies around the world including the U.S. national academy so they're all in this room and we have 10 minutes to make the pitch and they must have liked us because at the end they gave us our venture capital seed money that's getting us started it's nice to be able to make one stop for some money I thought of it if there are other meetings I'd show up at those we may be calling on you we're seeing you raise capital for our companies it's a deal so you're obviously very enthusiastic about your profession thanks but I just wonder if you had to choose another profession what would it be oh that's a tough call well I think my latest obsession is cooking and so if I had to do something else I wouldn't want to be a chef and I think this goes back to my intense desire to mix chemicals and unfortunately I think kicked out of my own laboratory I did have a bench for a while and the students kind of kind of cycled up to me and told me to get lost not in so many words but I could tell they weren't exactly happy to have me hanging out with them all day so I don't have this outlet of mixing chemicals which I really miss and so at the end of the day I like going home I have this scan mixer throwing a bunch of things and great stuff comes back out that has lots of calories and that's what I would do so are you just cooking desserts or oh no are you cooking different things I like both baking and regular cooking the kind where you're at the stove and mixing stuff it's just really fun but I have to tell you Ronnie this is my dream job this is what I've always wanted to do I've always wanted to teach I've always wanted to have this lab of creative people that I can go back to with my crazy ideas and the amazing part is watch them come to fruition that has been my absolute dream and I feel so so lucky to be able to do this I would do it I shouldn't say this too loud but I would do it for free I really love getting a captive audience of students to talk about science with in my classrooms I think that is just an amazing privilege and it's an amazing honor I've also always wanted to be part of the University of California I think what we do is remarkable that their students are given a terrific opportunity to learn from world-class people and to do it at an affordable level it's really an amazing thing I've dreamt about being part of the University of California and it makes me run to work every day so absolutely true but I think it also comes with a lot of pressures and you have to find jobs for these people places for them to go exactly I actually feel like we've turned a corner on that about a year ago when the economy was truly in the jolterms I had former students who were having a lot of trouble getting job interviews and I have to tell you over the last couple of months I've seen things turn around one guy just put a CD out and within literally two weeks he had three hits and I thought that was awesome in fact every place he's mailed a CD was an interview and that's really cool so there's actually some pent-up demand for talented people that I'm starting to see and I wasn't seeing this a year ago so I really feel like the economy is turning the corner at least in my own anecdotal indicators of just one professor and his former students so don't get too bogged down on what you hear based on what's happening there are some jobs out there there really are, there are jobs that are being created that I wasn't seeing a year ago and I think that's a cause for great optimism sounds makes me optimistic so I think at this point I'd like to open it up for questions from the audience if you'd like to ask Greg anything pretty much anything he can decide if he wants to answer especially questions I didn't ask any thoughts from anyone? maybe in the middle when you were conducting your academic job search how was your industrial postdoc perceived and did you have to explain it to interview in the interview process? well yeah that's a great question and that goes back to the fact that I thought I was going to kill the career so I didn't mention this but I had an amazingly productive postdoc so I published ten first author papers as a postdoc and so when I was conducting the search although my letterhead said Genentech on it could prominently display the other the papers and I think that was the currency that got me the job the other thing is I was working my advisor Jim Wells the guy who went to start Cinesis was elected to the National Academy when I was a postdoc and so he had this really prominent position about that point so he was a known quantity so having a letter from him made a huge difference as well so you know it could have gone the other way with credentials that were supporting me and really pushing hard for me so but it's definitely true I heard from other faculty who were on job searches that you know industrial postdocs people who were not very productive as postdocs definitely were not getting the hits and I was really nervous about that as well so your previous point too was published even if you're in an industry you had lots and lots of papers to show for it that certainly helped and you know the music part was when I was at Genentech the parking lot was spilled on the weekends the scientists were publishing like crazy there and that's the currency either they're publishing or they're patenting and I think if you're coming out of industry to come back to academics we're looking for patents because we know you can't publish a lot but patents are a currency well they should be and we definitely need the university to recognize those more than they do that's right I think we're turning a corner here so I was on a job search committee last year in our department and our attitude was if we saw applications coming from industry we were looking for presentations we were looking for patents we were looking for a different currency then just straight up publications which is what you look for if you're hiring new faculty coming straight out of academics and we gave them a shot opportunity so there and so how different is the work it takes when you go to like from academics to industry that's a great question well I just said that the parking lot was full on weekends these are scientists who are making a ton of money a year and are working just like graduate students they're working as hard as graduate students it blew me away I didn't expect that they're working 60-80 hours a week I was really impressed by that the work ethic at a place like Genentech where the employees feel highly highly motivated extremely well rewarded they were really impressive and what I found in my own laboratory here at UC Irvine is our students are equally hard driving I know if I show up on a Saturday evening that I'll find someone in my laboratory working that I can come in at 7 a.m. on Sunday and there'll be someone here I mean it's amazing you know at 6 p.m. I see people just starting to set up experiments because they're going to be here for a few hours and so I guess at the companies that you would want to work for sort of though you'll find the work ethic is pretty similar it's not like a paradise where everyone just kind of kicks back that those companies are great because their scientists are charging hard and are working really hard and pushing stuff out the door and that's what you would want you'd want to be at a place where you can publish like crazy and to do that as you know you have to work really really hard in a small company you can't really get lost very well, people know where you are and there's a lot needed from you and you have to wear a lot of hats as well at a smaller company they don't have an expert in biophysics or whatever you have to be the expert in biophysics and the expert in protein synthesis or protein expressions you have to be very proactive in your project forward even if the expertise is not at the company you need to take charge of your project that's right, that's right in one minute and very quickly find some way to find equipment or whatever and I saw a question in the back I was almost asking a similar question but then I changed my mind I was trying to ask you how many hours a day you work as a graduate student and I posted on the wall but then I changed the piece and I asked you my question is right now how you arrange your time as a faculty and also your life for your kids work-life balance work-life balance is a huge issue plus the cooking that's the vice president of Nicaragua yesterday it's a huge challenge that's actually one of the issues that our global young academy wants to discuss because I'll be honest it's out of joint I think in this job you have to work amazingly, amazingly hard so I get up at 5 in the morning every day I work out for an hour read the newspaper really fast and then I start answering emails and the downside of being a co-chair of this global thing is that all the emails from Asia have accumulated in the middle of the night and you wake up in the morning and there's like 50 emails that you have to dash off for supplies to so I do that for like an hour and then I come to work I teach 8 to 10 and then I stop by the lab that's the fun part of my day it's actually the fun part is just walking around the lab and saying hello to people seeing what they're up to and then I try to make it home by a reasonable hour I go home to dinner with her every night and that's sort of our balance and so I'm always home by 7 o'clock because I have no complaints and yeah if I'm not too tired I cook and then I go back to work by about 7.45 to 8 or so and then I work for another hour and then I have 10 minutes of fun I found I have to set aside some time to read read novels or something otherwise I'm up all night you have to keep a 5 again so there's a little bit of time but it's very regimented it's what I'm trying to say and it's imperfect but the great thing I did I started doing when I was a graduate student and I've always encouraged my own students to do this is to take one day a week off and I don't care what that day a week is it could be Monday if you like to take Mondays off or it could be Sunday but during that Sunday I really don't do very much work at all sometimes I do a little bit but I really try very hard to keep that one day in reserve off and I feel like for me that's enough to get me reset otherwise if I try to work 7 days a week I start to feel overwhelmed I start to feel depressed so the one day a week really makes a huge difference but I think then it's been a constant experiment as a graduate student I didn't take the day a week off and I almost went crazy probably no one else did either but the great thing that happened was my friend who had the bench next to me took me fishing one day so this guy takes me out fishing and I was able to realize that this fishing actually made me more productive when I got back to lab I wanted to work hard I was working too hard at that point where my productivity was going back the other way and so you didn't catch anything? is that what it was? you don't have to catch anything I'm just happy to be standing around and standing in nature not thinking about anything but the flies that are landing on the lake see that's why you're a good researcher you don't have to catch anything we just studied message to the students it's true I think that's one of the biggest challenges for doing something that you love and it's all consuming is that you do want to do it almost too much to the point where you become less effective at it and it's a huge challenge and it's something you're constantly tinkering with and I haven't quite figured it out to be honest I think if I had kids I don't have kids if I had kids it would take a different formula that I really haven't figured out yet and I'm in awe actually of my colleagues who are not tenured who are pushing really hard for tenure and are having children and I think kudos to them it's really challenging it's really impressive thanks for asking I think it's a tough question I was wondering if you went through some last times during graduate studies did you talk or as a professor and how you come and be focused back into research thanks for asking the question was what about the rough times and I would be totally lying to you if I said that we didn't have rough times we're constantly having rough times as far as science and Sharon Rowland my colleague who won the Nobel Prize in 1995 in chemistry told me that the difference between winning the Nobel Prize and being in the dumps of a career feeling completely unsuccessful was about the width of a bicycle tire it was about that the difference is so minor between the highest of highs of total success and the lowest of lows and my strategy is I celebrate everything so when we send out a paper I celebrate that I don't like to celebrate with the students to give them false hopes but my wife and I usually have a candy bar or we'll go out to dinner with my wife I'll celebrate everything that's possible to be celebrated sending out a grant proposal not even getting the grant proposal funded just sending it out that deserves a celebration not even getting the paper published that deserves a celebration so any opportunity you have to declare success because there's plenty of other opportunities where you're going to feel walloped and kicked in the stomach for the things that get rejected or don't fly the experiments that you thought were going to work that don't get to work and as a graduate student I had a lot of opportunity to experience that as I'm sure everyone in this audience who does science has experienced it but my strategy has been one to just carry you through the lows because one of the things about being a scientist is it's so topsy turvy you feel this euphoria of ultimate high and then you feel like this incredible depression that sort of hits when so to try to moderate those out just by taking the highs and trying to use the highs to fill in the gaps between the lows and I will tell you we've had rough patches in every stage of my career so there's been no I'd say even month where we've gone and it's been complete success but there's been stuff that's failed that I didn't want to fail and rejection after rejection that I didn't want to see it's just part of the job and I think one of the things you have to learn pretty early on is develop kind of a tough skin a tough exoskeleton as I like to think of it stones hit you too hard you kind of have to like take them learn from them and then just move on yeah just move on because if you get too fixated on those things then you really don't go on to the next thing so you let the good things carry you you don't get too fixated on the bad things and another thing is surround yourself with positive people so if you're surrounded by people who love what they're doing then it also helps you because they're telling you about something that they did great in their day and that helps carry you through those things so try to cultivate a support group I found this especially important when I was a graduate student because you know as a graduate student kind of all fun your own I had an advisor who was amazingly hands off I talked to him maybe once every three months or something like that and so you're always kind of feeling like things are down in the pits and so surrounding you so all those are my advice so take the highs try to moderate out the lows surround yourself by positive people and above all don't get fixated on the negative so thanks you mentioned the importance of meetings especially in collaboration I was wondering could you give me your opinion especially from a student postdoc perspective on the balance between time and meetings and time working on the project in the lab so it's definitely I think you phrased the question exactly right which is the perspective of a graduate student slash postdoc is totally different than the perspective of the PI so from the PI's perspective you can't have enough meetings because the meetings are the only time I get to see the results there's only time I get to talk about oh did you heat it up to 37 degrees instead of 25 degrees did you try this other thing so for me that's the fun part of doing science and so for me I don't have enough meetings but having said that I know that it also is counterproductive after a while that if I'm meeting with people on a daily basis if I'm in their face constantly about did you do this experiment this way did you do it that way then the productivity starts to drop very very quickly and this is especially important for collaborations because if I start showing up over there and pester my collaborators in their laboratories it's going to create huge problems and it also is difficult many of our collaborations with scientists for example we have a collaboration with a group in Thailand and so we meet by Skype so we do video conferencing by Skype and it works surprisingly well but you can't set the kind of thing up more than once a month because people have schedules and it's a 14 hour time difference to Bangkok so it becomes really challenging to do so I guess you want the details to be an effective scientist you need to be obsessed about the small details but if you're getting the small details more than once a month or sorry more than once a week then that's too much that you're not then giving people a chance to figure out stuff for themselves and to develop as scientists as independent scientists themselves and I think I saw effective managers at Genentech also working at that level as well so even in an environment where you're not necessarily training people you know you're still informally training people and you still want that sort of level of contact you know enough contacts that you do get to see the details that you do, you're wired in, you're helping to the maximum efficient but not so much just slowing things down Exactly that's a tough thing and Miranda? The thing is we didn't after six months have an advisor at Genentech who tended to check up on you and how often that was an amazing thing so the lab was empty but there was one other postdoc there a guy named Deb Sidhu and Deb was senior to me so he was maybe a year or two ahead of me and Genentech said jeez we can't lose the stage, the slide technology so they immediately promoted Deb to scientist so Deb stayed on as scientist and I stayed on as postdoc and the two of us worked together basically I was the very first student trained postdoc trained in Deb's lab it was an amazing experience so Deb and I were a team and Deb has actually gone on to a great academic career at University of Toronto he recently moved from Genentech to University of Toronto which also illustrates that there is a directionality there is a bidirectionality to this between industry and academics but in addition Genentech assigned to me a senior scientist to kind of look out after me and give me my annual reviews the person who would tell me I think you're about a B plus scientist you know you haven't discovered any therapies for us and what you're doing is really interesting intellectual curiosity but not going to make us any money so they assigned a senior scientist to look out for things and sign off on the bills someone had to there was a controller involved and things like that so there was management that was kind of looking in on things but it was an amazingly hands off period I didn't have someone meeting with me once a week and Dev and I would meet daily for lunch it was just an amazing opportunity to expand as a scientist it was pretty unique though we should probably wrap this up thank you so much for giving us your time today very much for you I'm really honored to have you here it was very interesting my pleasure