 Hello everyone, oops, alright. Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Ryan and I use she, her pronouns and I'm a current senior here at UC Berkeley and I'm studying molecular and cell biology. Before we get started, I would like to begin this event by taking a moment to recognize that UC Berkeley sits on the territory of Huchun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chuchunia Oloni, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Oloni people. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in 1868. Consistent with our values and community and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible to the university's relationship to native peoples. By offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and indigenous peoples. I also would like to thank our donors. We all benefit from the support of generations of donors. We appreciate your contribution. And now I would like to introduce our Chancellor, Christ. Carol T. Christ began her term as Berkeley's 11th Chancellor in 2017, a celebrated scholar of Victorian literature. She is also known as an advocate for high caliber, accessible public higher education and a champion of women's issues and diversity on college campuses. Christ spent more than three decades as a professor and administrator at Berkeley before serving as president of Smith College. At Cal, she works to foster community, improve the campus climate for people of all backgrounds, celebrate the institution's longstanding commitment to free speech, strengthen Berkeley's financial position, address a housing shortage and develop a 10 year strategic plan for the campus. She's also one of my personal idols as an advocate for students in particular women on campus. Thank you all for joining us and please join me in welcoming Chancellor Carol T. Christ. Thank you and welcome everyone to reunion and parents weekend at homecoming. It's a pleasure to have you join us for this special event, a conversation with some of the people who are leading the way in shaping the future of innovation and entrepreneurship at Cal. Before introducing our panelists, I'd like to share a couple of updates from campus. First, it's very exciting to have students back on campus. This fall was the first time on campus for about half of our undergraduates, not just our first year students, but also our sophomores and new transfer students. As such, this fall is a period of connection and reconnection with the Berkeley campus, a building and rebuilding community and of working toward a new normal, a Berkeley that's better than it was before the pandemic. In that vein, it was gratifying to see Forbes magazine shake up the college rankings last month when it named UC Berkeley the number one university in the United States, outranking several private universities, including Yale, Princeton and Harvard. Forbes evaluated universities on broader standards of access and economic mobility, criteria which truly distinguished Berkeley in the landscape of higher education. This is a quote from Forbes. It isn't enough to ask which schools give the best return on investment. It's also important to evaluate what kind of students they educate and whether they make themselves accessible to those who can't afford high sticker prices. The number one ranking called out Berkeley for its affordability, excellence, and rich tradition of leading technological and social change. This is a good segue to talk about how Berkeley can maintain its leadership position and address the pressing issues of society. Our campaign, Light the Way, is seeking to raise $6 billion by the end of 2023 to invest in our extraordinary faculty and students, research for the public good, and learning, living, and workspaces. I'm happy to report that we're 79% of the way toward our goal with $4.7 billion raised to date. One of the areas, thank you. One of the areas we're focusing on in this campaign is innovation and entrepreneurship, which focuses on our ability to translate research discoveries into practical products, therapies, and other benefits. It may surprise some folks, but it really shouldn't that Berkeley is a powerhouse in spawning visionary and successful entrepreneurs. Prominent companies founded by our alumni and affiliates include Apple, Databricks, Gap, Intel, and Tesla. According to Pitchbook, in the past 15 years, Berkeley has cultivated more than 1,300 founders and 1,225 companies. About a third of our founders have signed the Founders Pledge to provide philanthropic support back to campus. More than 250 startups have been founded to commercialize intellectual property under license from UC Berkeley, with nearly half innovating in the life sciences. As of July, companies under Berkeley's IP licenses have created more than 730 products. As you'll hear about today, we've established a dynamic ecosystem of incubators, accelerators, and other startup support systems. And we're very excited about the imminent opening of the Baker Bioengineerity Hub. This will be our flagship facility for transforming ideas into world-changing impact at the nexus of the life sciences with the physical engineering and data sciences. The Baker Bioengineerity Hub will be a home for both established entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in the making. This really sets the stage for our conversation. With that, I'd like to introduce our panel. Amy Heer is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor in Bioengineering and Faculty Director of the Bioengineerity Hub. Rich Lyons is UC Berkeley's Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer and the former Dean of the High School of Business where he holds the William and Janet Cronk Chair in Innovative Leadership. Tara DeBoer is President and CEO of BioAMP Diagnostics and a Postdoc Alumni in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. Polina Lishko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and a Pew Biomedical Scholar, Sloan Fellow, MacArthur Fellow and a Baker Fellow. I'm gonna start with a few questions for all the panelists and then zero in on questions for all panelists. We plan to include time for questions from the audience as well. So first, for all the panelists, how do you know when an academic research project has commercial potential? How do you decide when it's ready to risk moving into the marketplace? Maybe I will jump in on that first but I know all of us have some thoughts on this. This is maybe the most fundamental question, right? I mean, when you're doing fundamental scientific research and coming up with the kind of intellectual creativity that helps us understand, for example, that the university is not just expanding but is expanding at an increasing rate, something that one of our faculty won a Nobel Prize for not long ago and then you think about the market, right? Somebody willing to pay for something. There's a large space between those and there are a lot of newer methods that we use at universities or really throughout the economy to try and try and span that space. So for example, you may have heard a little bit about lean entrepreneurship methods and part of the idea is, no, don't spend six months holed up in your office writing a business plan. Get out of the building. Go talk to a potential customer. Go talk to 20 potential customers. Come back, tell us what you learned. Adjust, pivot in the language. Go talk to 20 more potential customers. They might be totally different instead of talking to the insurance company for a medical diagnostic, you're talking to doctors or what have you. And anyway, they're just an awful lot of techniques that we use now to try and bring information sort of from the market to span the space between the science and the market and do that in a much more efficient way so that we can not waste our time in understanding which of these breakthroughs has the most potential in which maybe isn't quite ready for the market yet. I guess I'll jump in. As a researcher who thinks about development of technologies and as a student really. So I have a very traditional kind of upbringing in the academic realms of, I'm a chemist by training. And one of the ways I actually got my PhD at UC Santa Cruz and was making a decision about where to go next. And what I wanted to do next with my career. And Cal was one of the kind of obvious choices for me because I really wanted to be on the translational side of science. And when you think about the mindset of a chemist who's been trained as really as a basic researcher, you stick in the weeds all day long. That's what you're doing. You're just trying to dig in so deep on something that you become the specialist, this expert in this one space. Entrepreneurship is not that, right? Entrepreneurship is thinking about all of the dynamics and all of the different hurdles and constraints and the needs of whatever technology you're developing this technology for. Who the actual user is going to be and who's gonna be experiencing this technology. And so Cal, I think the bioengineering department has some beautiful programs on campus to really help, I guess, students shape the way that they're gonna look at technology and how they're going to approach the way that they're going to kind of translate what field of interest that they are really digging in on if it's molecular and cell biology, if it's chemistry. And then think about how does that translate into the world? What is the true need? And then how are you gonna ultimately get to that need to the user as all the business stuff, right? And that's exactly what Rich is talking about, all of the dynamics of learning every aspect of the market that you're looking to serve and serve with the development of the technology. So that's been the fun part. And it's the scary part and it's really where all of the complexity comes in. It's not the technology, it's the market space, building technologies for that, so. Okay, absolutely, I agree with this both point of view. Basically, the unmet needs, right? Neat on the market should be the first, one of the first indicators that the research one is working on, what the research one is doing is actually a good fit. And it's about time to step outside of the box and not be afraid and become entrepreneur, which absolutely, in my case, requires the entire rewiring of the whole brain. And I'm very simple to all the resources on campus, especially incubators like Citrus Foundry, which helps make this happen. Maybe I'll just, I'll just jump in and add something there, which is all of the points that have been raised are absolutely excellent. I am gonna take for a moment the perspective of the individual. So certainly Berkeley is a powerhouse, as we've mentioned, not just for the state, but also the nation and the world. I think we can agree on that with the numbers. Speaking as a faculty member from Berkeley, I would also say we can zoom in and look at the individual. So the students, the postdocs, the researchers that are working across the campus. As a faculty member, I think for me, it really is a focus on two things. How to equip those students and postdocs with agency and access so that they can make their dreams come true. And from the perspective of startups, I think a big element of that is really thinking about how can we broaden the pool of people who see themselves as having a positive impact on the world, this point about the positive impact from what we do every day, and how can we get them the resources and knowledge they need to both identify about that in that way and then also take the risk to push it forward. How can we support them in that and then how can we benefit from the success that they have out in the world and bring that to the next generation as well? Thank you. Can you describe a challenge that you had to overcome translating a discovery or innovation into a commercial product? We're currently leading a diagnostic company, so Bioant Diagnostics is developing kind of simple chemistry-based technologies that are going to yield a pipeline of diagnostics that could be used at home, in a clinic, or around the world. And so healthcare is very complicated. That is one of the biggest challenges we face in the US. We're trying to launch our first product here in the US. There is a lot of heterogeneity across the way that the healthcare system works here, and it's been one of the biggest hurdles that we've faced as a company and as an organization. And so we really lean on our network of amazing people that have had success launching either therapeutics or diagnostics to the market. But yes, that's one of the big hurdles is the technology as I said is easy. It's all the other things that are there a lot of hurdles, yeah. Have you ever faced a particular challenge? Okay, for me, the first challenge, and of course, there are many challenges, were to understand how best communicate in a very succinct and layback manner what are the essence of our research. Because in science, we always use scientific jargon. We always try to go very deep in details to explain how exciting our science is. But when we want to actually turn this scientific research into product, we want to be able to explain to all people around us why it's important. You know, it's an elevator speech. Within one minute, you have to be able to channel your research and it will be understandable to everyone. Yeah, I'll just bounce off of that for a moment. I think maybe what you're noticing in the short conversation so far is that a lot of our inventors and entrepreneurs are tackling really hard problems. And in some cases, you might even say existential problems. So I'll be the first person to say that I benefit from a more efficient app to order pizza. There's nothing wrong with that, absolutely. But some of the problems that we're working on require access to world-class facilities, the capability to do precision measurements, fabrication, and maybe use instruments that cost millions of dollars to be able to get that data that's gonna allow that startup to launch. And if I could circle back to the point that was raised in Chancellor Chris's opening remarks, it is resources like the Baker Bioengineuity Hub and the faculty and students around the campus that bring those, what we call tough tech infrastructure so that our students, our alumni, hopefully our advisors and parents who want to be engaged as well, can really tackle those problems and mitigate the risk a little because they know they have the intellectual backing and also the resources available for them so they can jump on climate change. They can look at these healthcare problems and some of the other big issues that face, not just us, but also our future. So now that you've all had startup experience, what will you do differently when you launch your next company? Okay, so I can start like the first, most important decision when we launched our company was to join incubator Citrus Foundry and became a Baker Fellow too, as I mentioned already, to revire our brain because initially the company was started with just two people, my former post-doctoral fellow and myself and we were kind of fully bred academics without any knowledge how to be an entrepreneur. So this whole experience in incubators and programs like Baker helped us to basically become ones and right now when we already acquired this experience, I think next time might be not joining incubator but actually helping incubators to share our experience and to help new entrepreneurs to acquire the same knowledge. Gonna follow up the same thing. I think that a startup company is one of the most rewarding things that I've delved into and I really was not expecting to had it not been likely that I came here to Cal. So I wouldn't do it again. So to be honest, I wouldn't. It is a grind. It is something that is extremely rewarding in many ways but it is exhausting and I would love to give back and be able to share all of my, the hardships and the lessons learned. There's been a lot. We're still iterating right now. We're a startup company, we're early stage. We've only closed a seed round of financing which means that we only have, we haven't gotten really big yet, right? We're four people still. And so that's the exciting time but it's also the nerve-wracking time because you're really kind of flying by the seed of your pants. So we're gonna make this one count and then I would love to be able to give back to the ecosystem and to the community. Yes, that's kind of the same boat. So this is how funder graduates? Yes, I will say absolutely. As a faculty member who's teaching undergrads right now, well not this moment but this week for example, having the proximity of world-class researchers, people who are not just working on problems in fields but defining fields, creating the future, sitting right next door to the undergraduate students who are learning some of the foundational techniques and approaches, being able to interact as your teaching assistants, your GSIs or wandering into a lab and helping with research in that way is just, I think, really empowering these two things, agency and access, being able to grow your community and your knowledge with people who are doing that hard science, that innovation and entrepreneurship is all the way from the role model and advising all the way down to, hey, we're looking for an internship student or a co-op student, do you wanna join the small company? So absolutely. And as a faculty member, it also pushes me to stay on the cutting edge and to understand kind of where that edge is and then of course communicate that and challenge my students as well. Yeah, if I could just jump in on this one real quickly. We have one of the main accelerators, there's several of these startup accelerators on campus. One is called Skydeck. Skydeck just launched a program called Accelerating Careers and Entrepreneurship and it's really aimed at undergraduates. The idea is, how do we get undergraduates even more engaged in some of this stuff than they might otherwise have the opportunity to do? Another quick point is that, if we're gonna be honest with ourselves, words like entrepreneurship and innovation and venture capital, these are not very inclusive words. They're an awful lot of people that don't come to Berkeley or come to any university at that age and they don't see themselves in those concepts. One of the cognitive adjustments we're trying to achieve is I like to think of it as from they do that, right? Other people do that, other people do that, to I do that, right? And if we can affect that cognitive transformation where young people are saying, that's available to me, this includes me, and so coming up with ways to make sure that undergraduates can see themselves in this world, they don't have to choose it, but we want them to have the option and that's part of the agency. We have a new curriculum called Berkeley Changemaker that is all about giving them a sense of agency and the tools to be able to do that kind of thing and of course, aiming at entrepreneurship is a natural use of that whole toolkit. Are there other things that we can do to make sure that Berkeley is inclusive and inspiring of beginning entrepreneurs? Yeah, I think so. I think just building on Rich's excellent point about the amazing resources that we have on the campus, many of which are not represented here today, but we're happy to give you information about those for sure. Is this idea of, again, that agency, do you identify as an entrepreneur or is that something that's not been in your sphere of even possibility? I'll just come out and say, as a faculty member here, not as an undergraduate, but as a grown woman in my professional career, I did not see myself as a founder of a startup and it was my students who came to me and said, Amy, we need to take this technology out into the world and make it available to the people that need to use it. And of course, trying to be a good advisor, I was like, excellent, excellent, what can I do to support you? And they said, you can join us. So just kind of flipping that and realizing that, maybe we're not sitting around waiting to find our passion, but instead maybe we are actively creating our own purpose and part of that is to accelerate our knowledge and discoveries out into the world to solve big problems. That's right, so does becoming an entrepreneur make you a better teacher or a better researcher? I'll start with this by saying, I've had some amazing undergraduate researchers who I've had the opportunity to work with at any given time. I mean, because we're an academic powerhouse in terms of science and technology development, we're doing science, but we are very much rooted in teaching and in training the next generation. So while I was working as a postdoc in Professor Niren Murthy's group, I had at least four undergraduates at any given time. We hold many subgroup meetings. They're learning the ins and outs. They started as researchers, but then I became an entrepreneur, right? And that was, it was very interesting. They just kind of learned and some of them came along and they got their first jobs as a research associate. First job out of college was with Bioamp. So now you're seeing these young women and people of diverse backgrounds. The community here at Berkeley is diverse. And so you get to see yourself and everybody around you. And I think it's that energy that we're doing a good job of, we do a good job of not just with programs but just the community as a whole of being inviting and inclusive and saying let's do this together. I think is the more we can do that, the better it's gonna be for everybody. And if I could offer a comment on this, I think becoming an entrepreneur conjures certain things in our minds. Becoming more entrepreneurial is something every single one of our undergraduates needs to do in my judgment. The gig economy, the idea that we manage our careers in different ways, that we're not at the same company for long periods of time. Some in fact, when we have postdocs and graduate students that are coming to campus and their goal is to get the best academic job in the world and we're trying to introduce them to some of the tools and resources in this world. And part of it is because the best of our scholars on the Berkeley campus are remarkably entrepreneurial. When you look at how they win grants and they attract people into their labs and they're very entrepreneurial people. So let's not code entrepreneurship just as founding a company. Part of this is a mindset. Yeah, I think that element of impatience as well, wanting to accelerate that knowledge, those discoveries, those inventions out into the world because as we know, there are so many problems that need to be addressed. That impatience I think also helps with opening that change maker perspective which is so wonderful. So this is homecoming, obviously. Do campus alumni ever have anything to do with bringing ideas from the research laboratory to the startup world? Yes, so let me just tout another statistic about UC Berkeley which is we are considered to be number two among universities for serial entrepreneurs. So these are our alumni who are going out into the world building things, succeeding sometimes not always which is the ethos of the startup culture and taking risk for sure. And then coming back and trying again or succeeding again. And if I could use this stage just for a moment to bounce off the two very, very generous comments that were made. If you see yourself as someone who has experience, who has some knowledge, who has some interest even in being able to support the next generation, places like Skydeck, Citrus Foundry, others that are too many to name and also the Baker Bioengineuity Hub, please join us. We can definitely use that energy and knowledge as well. So yes, thank you. That's really great. So Rich, I have now some questions for individual panel. Rich, how is the Baker Bioengineuity Hub, how is it gonna improve or accelerate Berkeley's entrepreneurial ecosystem? Thanks for the question. And the woman sitting next to me is the head of the Baker Bioengineuity Hub. So here I am speaking about something that she is leading but I will do my best here. For those of you that know the campus at all, you know, along Bankcroft Avenue and near Cafe Strata there in College Ave is a wonderful structure, a scalloped structure that used to be our art museum and film archive that is now an incubator for some 80 startups that are going to be involved in, well I think of it as a convergence incubator. What does that mean? It's sort of how life sciences are converging with engineering. Life science is converging with computer sciences, with the hard sciences, with material sciences. And so whether we call that hard tech or tough tech or what have you, this is a space unlike any other and another thing that's really needed, it's opening in November. So this has been in the works for some five years and we're on the threshold of opening it. Part of what's exciting about it is that the labs that are, this is lab space, this isn't, we work office space, not to take away from we work, but this is science that's going on in there and the IP that's created by the startups that are going to be tenants in the Baker Bioengineuity Hub incubator will own all the IP from that science, which is not generally true of labs on the Berkeley campus. So it's got a lot of features. Here's a, I'll summarize it this way. You know, it used to be pretty clear where the edge of the university lies as an organization, but that boundaries becoming fuzzier, blurrier, and for really productive reasons. So is this part of UC Berkeley? It is. Is it different than a lot of other stuff that goes on at UC Berkeley? It is. Is this good for Berkeley and good for society? It absolutely is. Thank you. Tara, the Citrus Foundry, another place on campus, played a role in launching your company Biowamp Diagnostics. Can you tell us about this, the role it played? Yes. So the Citrus Foundry, when we went through the program back in 2017, it really was the hub for deep technology companies that were very academically focused teams, typically that were, is like a holding place for us to learn how to be entrepreneurs is what it was. It was a year long program at that point, and it was absolutely influential in getting us to the place we are today. There are three key things that I think were the takeaways from that program for me that were, that really have helped it stand apart from others. The first one is that it gave us direction. They understood that we were an academic-minded company, and we're having to kind of train us to think as business individuals, making decisions based not only on science, but also on many other factors that have to come into play when you're building a company. The second thing is capital. Capital can be money sometimes, but really capital for us was an investment in us and our mission and our vision that gave us kind of the extra oomph to be able to really start pushing things forward. And the third thing was network and community. As scientists, we have these really wonderful groups of networks of people that you know you're a specialist in in some specific area, and you know who to go to if you need assistance in some other specialized field of science. I didn't have that in my co-founders, I didn't have that either in the business realm, and Citrus Foundry really did kind of open up their network of more entrepreneurial business-minded people that are some of them still advisors with the company today. Thank you. So Polina, you were a startup, you were a choice therapeutics, focused us on developing hormone-free contraceptives. How did your research lead to that startup? Yes, excellent question. So for years, we have been working in the reproductive biology field and our goal was not to develop contraceptives or any translational science. Our goal was just to share a curiosity, we were curious what makes the egg and sperm cell tick, how the sperm cell finds the egg, how fertilization takes place. And we were just applying different techniques and might be grounded in biophysics and neuroscience, and we were curious basically to understand molecular mechanisms of sperm movement and it's turned out the cell required by electricity as probably any other cell in our body. And we were able to apply again our knowledge of the ground in physics to understand the small electrical currents which drives cell motility. And after we developed this technique and transformed field a little bit because it was not available at the time, we understood that we can try different compounds and our first curiosity was, well, there are some plans which have been used for generations, for centuries by many folks, medicines by many tribes or our cultures which people regulate their fertility somehow, could those plans contain compounds that actually would affect sperm cell? And so now they do and that's how this first spark happened of all that actually could be a product because at the time we also learned about potential side effects associated with the classical hormonal contraception which was a great invention in our civilization. One of the 50 greatest invention of our civilization is the hormonal pill. But it also comes with certain side effects so we try to maybe we can develop something better. So Amy, through your Baker Fellowship, Zephyrus, your startup, obtained its first seed funding. What distinguishes the Baker Fellows from other faculty awards with research funding? Yes, thank you for the question. So at Berkeley we have a program, the Baker Fellows Program which is really focused on supporting people, so faculty for sure, but also the amazing teams that they bring together in projects that fall into this, what I mentioned earlier, this high risk kind of large impact deep science space. So again, nothing bad about the app to order pizza but these are things that really require patience and substantial resources, intellectual as well as that laboratory infrastructure to move forward. And the Baker Fellows Program, thanks to the vision of our community and supporters of our campus was born to be able to not only support those projects but the groups that are leading them when they're at a stage that the federal government says, this is maybe too mature for us to support or too risky or at the stages from the other end where it's not quite ready for prime time in terms of moving it out into the world either through a startup or a nonprofit or collaboration with industry. And that's where we fill the gap and we've supported over 50 faculty and their teams in order to be able to move those projects forward. Again, all around this concept of impatience, wanting to move these solutions, inventions and discoveries out into the world. And if I could just add a quick point on that because I think there is the effect that Amy described. There's also the effect of shifting faculty culture. The idea that the mission, the reason this university exists is impact and that these are very much consistent with what this university should be doing. And so faculty culture is a amorphous thing but more and more faculty on the Berkeley campus are saying, this is the right thing for Berkeley and that's a good thing in my view. Can I quickly add on this? Totally, absolutely agree. And 10 years before, 10 years ago, the world translational science was almost inappropriate. You have to be a basic science. You have to stick to basic science and it was like one way road. You leave the academia, go to industry, that's it. You can come back. It's so great, it's not the case anymore and people are more open and acceptable and understanding how important translation science is. Thank you. So now it's time for your questions. I'm gonna ask you, since we're all wearing masks that muffle your voice a little bit to really shout them out and we really delighted to answer them. So questions from you. Yes, you and the blue shirt. Can I check? That's a really interesting question. Let me repeat the question for the audience. The question was about the reproducibility problem and the gentleman asking the question says three out of four scientific papers that can't be reproduced and how does that affect entrepreneurship and how does the problem of reproducibility translate itself into the entrepreneurial space? Thank you so much for that question. If you don't mind, I'll jump in. I actually had a chance to sit on the NIH working group around reproducibility and science. So I'll keep my comments short but it's a very important point that you're raising. There's a lot of nuances here. So I will go off and say some of the understanding that we have about this reproducibility problem are not as straightforward as you might think and I'm sure you appreciate that as well. But I would say from our standpoint, a big element of this is that early stage collaboration with industry to make sure that not just the written protocols and materials are understood on paper but there's actually a handoff much like a runner that's in a relay race. So making sure that baton is firmly held in the people that are gonna take it forward. And that I think is really important in terms of where our alumni and our graduate students as they graduate come in. This is something that, for example, having a 90,000 square foot incubator with QB3 on this campus will allow us to have more continuity and making sure that baton is firmly gripped by the company that will pull it forward. Excellent question. Thank you. I'm just gonna add one little point to that. As a scientist too, this is my number one. This is the things I like stay up thinking about is oh, we're gonna pass off the assade out of the other team. Is it gonna work the exact same way? And science is, there's lots of nuances here. I will say that this comes from an entire community of elevating and making sure that the standards are very high. And one of the things that we've done within our group, I can only speak about the bio-insuring department specifically in my group is that the professors really are very much encouraging of handing off assays to undergraduate researcher to post-doctorate whoever you have access to make sure you can reproduce your process. That's what we do. So there is a lot of checks and balances that way. That is very much encouraged in our labs here. That I've experienced. Great question. I have a question. Hi, my name's Michelle. The mom of a math major who's a junior here. And I actually have two questions. So the first is I'd love to hear about how you make a contraceptive without hormones. That sounds absolutely fascinating. The second question is I always wanted to visit SkyDoc and I never got over there because I was always doing tours or something. Could you tell me about what's going on at SkyDoc? Are you doing anything in artificial intelligence, data analytics? And also what are the stages? Like are these all early stage? Are they all, you know, and are there undergrads? I'm fascinated with the SkyDoc. So those are my two questions. That's really great. So Holi, why don't you talk about the hormone-free contraceptives and I'll ask Rich to talk about SkyDoc. Why don't I take the contraceptives question? And they can. That would be fun. Okay, sure. So classical hormone contraceptives, the pill which was invented in 1951, transforms the world. And the way it works, basically, the pill, it inhibits ovulation, one of the main mechanisms. So the egg cannot be produced by the ovary. However, there is another way to tackle to prevent the meeting of these two gametes, the sperm and the egg. And our goal was to understand how we can inhibit sperm cells so they would never ever get to the egg in the first place. So, and the idea was not to create just spermicide, not something which kills sperm, but one of the compounds would basically drain sperm cell of an energy. So it's kind of wiggles, but wiggles very poorly. And the compound, which we were working on, it's actually quite funny. So this compound has been approved by FDA already, but for different means, it was actually an infection to, sorry, it was medicine to treat a tapeworm infection. And the idea that has very low bioavailability, so people would take a large amount of this, nothing would happen, but it would kill the worms because it won't be absorbed by the gut. So sperm cells are not exactly worms, but they're also foreign organisms, kind of in someone else's body. So the idea was to develop a compound based on this to prevent those cells from reaching their goal. And that's one of the mechanism. And then the Skydeck question, thanks for that. It's been operating for about 10 years, Skydeck, and there's several different tracks. So you ask, there's a bio track and there's sort of an information science and software track, and they do have AI companies that come through there. They're essentially ecumenical. They'll take great companies from lots of different directions. The main accelerator, just to give you some sense for how competitive it is, the main accelerator gets about 3,000 applications per year for about 40 slots. So it's 20 companies for six months, and then 20 companies the next six months, and over that year, they get about 3,000 applications. So the companies that are going through the accelerator, the sort of hardcore part of Skydeck, are absolutely world-class, and they're coming from around the world. There is also a sort of incubator, which is a little less services, a little bit less involvement, and that's some 80 to 100 companies at any given time. But certainly data science, lots of bio science stuff that's going on in there. I think if you go to the website, you'll see a lot of what they do. You could also reach out to me, lions at berkeley.edu, L-Y-O-N-S, and I'm happy to point you to some of those resources. And then undergraduates, I mentioned that ACE program, it's brand new, this Accelerating Careers and Entrepreneurship. That is a Skydeck program, and it's aimed at undergraduates, and so Skydeck is involving undergraduates in more and more ways. So I would encourage your student to reach out to Skydeck, and again, if I can help make that connection, I'd be happy to. Thanks. And I apologize, but I have to leave a little early because I have something that's just starting elsewhere on campus, but it's been a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah. Other questions? Yes. Yes. In the front. How much can, I didn't quite hear. How much? AI. How much can AI help the biotech field? Anybody wanna speak to that? I can start with this. So I think there's lots of wonderful opportunities across drug development, big data surveillance in terms of, I think about antibiotic resistance, this is my area of expertise. So I think more about tracking resistance in infectious disease. AI is everywhere, and I think it's really booming right now in many ways. And so in terms of, I think it's exponential in terms of the potential in biotech specifically, is my perspective. Yeah, and I'll just add to that. So lots of potential, already lots of impact that's just been mentioned, that of course is gonna be increasing, it's just amazing. To the question that was raised earlier about the reproducibility, there is a lot of room here, I think, for people who are thinking about standards and rigor in terms of what are the training sets look like? How can you make sure that you're exploring the world as broad and diverse as it is, as opposed to locking yourself in one area? So if you have a student who's interested in working in data science and AI, I would encourage them to definitely do that, but also to take courses in other disciplines as well. I should say too that Berkeley has a program that's about to create a new PhD program joint with UCSF in computational precision medicine, which is exactly that now. Other questions? Yes, in the spotted church. Amazing supporters, and like long, you know, kind of coming. A lot of us, we have freshmen here who is very excited and like him, I'm sure there are many students who has a lot of choices where to go and they've chosen Berkeley. So seeing you being number one has been really, really wonderful. So we are grateful for all the hard work you're putting into, you know, for that great achievement now going forward. We would like to see Berkeley being number one the following year and the following year and the following year. So do you really have some strategies and thoughts and ideas, how can you keep, you know, being quite somewhere on the top and really keeping doing this wonderful work that you've been doing for that day? Yeah, thank you for that question. The question is not, you know, this parent was delighted that Berkeley is number one right now and wants to make sure that Berkeley stays number one. The first thing we do is we recruit our faculty very, very carefully. And that we have a philosophy of growing our own. So we try to recruit at the junior level and then give faculty all the resources that they need to succeed. You heard a little bit from Rich Lyons and from our faculty here about the efforts that we're making to create an even more robust climate for innovation and entrepreneurship. And we are our campaign in which we're raising money for the heart of Berkeley in order to make sure that Berkeley stays as excellent next year and the year after, the year after that 10 years from now as it is today. So it's our, it's our mission. Thank you. Other questions? Okay. So a question around agency with regards to research experience from a sophomore, I believe? A sophomore, yes, excellent question. Maybe I'll just take a stab at that first. Being a faculty member in bioengineering, a couple of things that I will say, this campus is absolutely committed to discovery experiences for our undergraduates. And that as an engineer also includes creation and innovation as well for sure. I would encourage your student to take advantage of every resource that is available to them until they find a research lab that fits for them. We have an amazing array of organized programs that the departments in the colleges offer at set times of the year. So they need to be organized. They need to have their resume together and take part in the application process that match undergraduate students with research labs. In addition to that, we have a whole array of summer research experiences that are especially important for a new undergraduate student so that they can focus 40 hours a week over six or eight weeks in the summer to really get the experience so that when they come back for the semester, they're ready to go. They have those foundations and those fundamentals. Maybe the other thing I'll say is one of the most untapped resources that I have seen in my 14 years on this campus are faculty office hours. I cannot tell you, which are publicly posted and available for all of our students to take advantage of. I cannot tell you how many, and it could be just me, how many hours I've sat alone in office hours just waiting for that undergraduate to come in. So I would encourage them to take the initiative and find these routes and they can also email, I think many of us as well. Yeah, I think what Amy has said is really important. I know there are a lot of parents in the audience. This is a big and complex place. And I've seen that the undergraduates who really thrive here get very good at knocking on doors, including the doors of their professors and office hours and networking because this isn't a place like a place. I spent a number of years at Smith College where opportunities come to you. You really need to seek them out, but this place has so many opportunities. It really rewards that kind of initiative. And I'll also add just persistence is important. I had an undergraduate who really wanted to work in my group and didn't make it in the freshman year, didn't make it in the sophomore year, but in junior year we had space. It just so happened she just kept hitting times where I was already at capacity. And we do have capacity just to make sure that we're giving everybody one-on-one attention. So persistence is also something that's key. And I would add on this, this is very important, for example, once a student finds a lab or a list of lab they want to join, it's important to email those faculty, maybe not just once, but a couple of times because often emails get lost and the student may get the impression that email was just ignored, but often it's easy to just somehow oversee the email, so be persistent. We always have in our lab, we always have five or six undergrad and they're amazing. We have a question in the third row and maybe that's our final one. Okay, one last question. Thank you very much for this amazing discussion here. So one of the things that I was curious about is I'm listening to all these amazing changes and the new facilities that are being built. One of the things that we know to be true is in STEM the representation of black scientists is very dismal. And in addition, representation of black entrepreneurs is also very dismal. So with that said, what are some of the things that Berkeley as an institution should be and can be doing to make sure that we not only see the first in these spaces, but also make sure that we see a growing pie for all the future generations to come. Thank you. So there are a couple of organizations on campus that are really, I was a part of the Women in Science and Engineering residential STEM program here. So there are so many wonderful programs to that every student can find somebody that or a group that they kind of identify with. And a lot of those groups have a lot of organization in the sense of they have connections into labs and they will help if you want resources in either professional development and resume building and things like that. There usually is that there's groups and organizations on the campus that are gonna help, they have infrastructure to help with those things depending upon what it is. It might not be specialized in the exact field. But I would say that's one of the things that I've seen, many of my undergrad that have worked are part of like five or six different groups that they just feel that they are really drawn to for whatever reason. And so I think that's one thing that is fantastic about the Berkeley campus is the number of groups and programs that are available. And that's definitely one way that I've come across many of my undergraduate students. And we really do have great diversity across the undergraduates that have been in my lab that I've worked with previously. I think also we're definitely taking the opportunity to act, to do active outreach, to make sure that our brilliant, hardworking black colleagues and students understand the career path that this can open for them and the agency and the ability to impact the world. Programs with HBCU universities, for example, funded through the University of California system to make sure that people get here and understand the magic that is Berkeley and the fact that we need people in our program that have diverse perspectives to be able to tackle some of these hardest problems. And I'm happy to talk to you about an array of other active programs and funding that is either in place or under development as well. I'm so sorry that we've reached the end of our time. Thank you for taking part in this conversation. Thank you to our panelists. It's been inspiring to hear so many examples of entrepreneurship and Berkeley's rich ecosystem for innovation. We hope you've enjoyed this conversation. Please continue to enjoy homecoming weekend, fiat looks and go Bears. Thank you.