Fostering Biotech’s Next Generation

A childhood in his grandmother’s lab

Dr. C’s grandmother was a cancer researcher at the National Cancer Institute, and at Walter Reed before that. Born during segregation in the 1930s, she couldn’t pursue a PhD, though he says she trained people who went on to lead major organizations. He compares her to the women of Hidden Figures. When he was seven, she started bringing him to her small cell lung cancer lab at a Navy medical research hospital across the street from NIH in Bethesda. That was his summer camp. He learned PCR there and practiced pipetting food coloring onto parafilm, from one microliter up to a milliliter. He still teaches students the same way.

He credits three women for the rest. His grandmother gave him the hard science. His mother, a fine arts graduate of Howard University, gave him a corner of her studio to make things, and he says that creative habit still helps him think outside the box. His great-grandmother took in neighborhood children who needed care and taught him that it isn’t just about you. You have to help the people around you.

Curiosity, representation, and Black pioneers in science

Biology came easily, but a science career didn’t feel obvious. Dr. C says he didn’t meet a Black male PhD until he was 17, in a summer research program at Morehouse School of Medicine named for the biologist Ernest Everett Just. Working on prostate cancer there with a Black scientist as his mentor made the career feel real. It also shaped his choice of Princeton, where he studied molecular biology and worked with Arnold Levine, whose lab discovered p53 in 1979.

He found heroes in history, too. Charles Drew developed ways to store blood that made large-scale blood banking possible. E. E. Just studied fertilization in marine eggs but was shut out of positions his white peers could get. Science appealed to Dr. C because a good idea can carry past prejudice. Nearly a century after Just, he earned his own PhD at Rockefeller University.

Choosing the lab over the clinic

Dr. C finished Princeton as a pre-med student with options, but he still didn’t understand the difference between an MD career and a PhD career. Shadowing Cato T. Laurencin, an MD-PhD orthopaedic surgeon who also ran bone regeneration research, settled it. He liked the lab and the questions, not the operating room.

Instead of going straight to graduate school, he sent about a hundred resumes to drug companies, got three interviews and two offers, and joined Bristol Myers Squibb as an associate research scientist in drug discovery. He calls those nearly four years almost a PhD in industry. When he started his doctorate at Rockefeller, he knew what he wanted to work on and finished in five years.

How an idea becomes a medicine

Modern drug discovery starts with mechanism. Researchers work out how a disease happens and which molecules drive it, then choose a target to change. Statins, which lower cholesterol, are his example. Chemists design molecules that bind the target with the intended effect and, ideally, few side effects. That is hard, he says, because one molecule is supposed to do one thing in a body full of other targets.

At Bristol Myers Squibb his work sat in the middle of that process. He read academic papers for promising pathways, built screening assays to find compounds that bind a target, and tested the hits in cells and then in small animals. Candidates that hold up move to larger animals and eventually people. He describes it as a funnel: thousands of opportunities narrow to one or two candidates in human studies, and about half of those fail.

Academia, government, and industry

At Rockefeller, Dr. C’s mentors included Charles M. Rice, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of hepatitis C virus, and David Ho, whose lab led early work on combination antiretroviral therapy for HIV. Academia was seductive, he says, but after postdocs at NIH and the Pasteur Institute he felt pulled elsewhere. A Myers-Briggs assessment (ENTP, or in his words an extroverted nerd) pointed him toward science program management. He took a program management job in government and enjoyed using both his science and his people skills.

Having worked in all three sectors, he argues that each one needs the others. Basic research builds the understanding of mechanism that drug development depends on, so he would add funding rather than cut it. He points to the decades of work behind today’s hepatitis C cures, says science should stay apolitical, and cites Rockefeller University’s motto: science for the benefit of humanity.

From federal service to Polaris Genomics

Dr. C served in the federal government across the Bush, Obama, and early Trump administrations. When he left, he spent a year as director of scientific collaboration at the Drug Information Association to learn regulatory affairs, a gap in his experience. He came away convinced that regulation matters as much as discovery. If approval is too slow or too onerous, he says, companies stop trying.

He then advised and co-founded Polaris Genomics. Mental health diagnosis relies mostly on self-reported surveys, and many conditions share symptoms, so he asks what major depression or PTSD looks like at the molecular level. Starting from licensed biomarkers, he built a panel of about a thousand markers as a discovery space. The team found and patented new markers and built an algorithm that, he says, is now in a pivotal clinical study as the company works toward the FDA. He had to learn neuroscience along the way, and he hopes the panel will be useful beyond PTSD. He is also Chief Scientific Officer at Athari BioSciences, which he describes as closer to his roots in cancer and infectious disease.

Building Virginia’s biotech workforce

Dr. C wants every student to get some version of the exposure he had. That work started with Future Kings, a Northern Virginia nonprofit that trains young men from underserved communities in STEM. As a board member he created its biomedical program and began training sixth graders about ten years ago. Some of them are now finishing college.

LIFT-VA opens that model to students across Virginia. Dr. C says the state has a science talent gap just as companies such as AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, and Merck invest there. The program brings together Future Kings, GEMS (Genomic Education Mentors & Scientists), and Athari BioSciences, whose BSL-2, CLIA-certified lab in Sterling hosts training. Students also train in Prince William County. The program is funded by GO Virginia, and he says its first summer cohort trained 53 students.

There is a second track for instructors: people with master’s degrees or PhDs who teach while getting ready for industry jobs. In his experience, the best people on his teams are the ones who can explain things to their peers, and they often become the best managers. Kevin, whose own path ran from pre-med through academia, government, and industry, wants early-career scientists to see options they may not know about, including management, policy, and entrepreneurship.

Teamwork, capstones, and communicating science

Each eight-week program ends with a capstone. Teams of three to five get a condition, such as antimicrobial resistance or heart disease, and must propose a solution, present it, and defend it. Dr. C modeled the exercise on his companies, where young scientists pitch ideas and leaders decide whether to invest. It also teaches students to work with people who aren’t like them.

Kevin calls communication an undervalued skill that he didn’t build until he started giving conference talks and posters. Dr. C agrees that being able to communicate an idea matters as much as knowing how to do the work.

Staying above the AI layer

Dr. C calls AI a tool, and he is developing a three-credit course on applications of generative AI to biomedical drug discovery that he hopes to offer next year. He also puts AI in the same class as nuclear and genetic technology: powerful enough to make things better or to do great harm, and in need of careful regulation and guardrails.

With students he starts by asking what AI is, and then what intelligence is. In his view, AI tries to do what the brain does, only faster. It can’t supply creativity or what he calls a person’s is-ness, an idea he borrows from the comedy You, Me and Dupree: the mix of lived experience, everything other people have poured into you, and how you interpret the world. He uses all kinds of AI tools and enjoys the efficiency, but he doesn’t use AI to generate his ideas.

Looking five to ten years out, he expects AI to streamline drug discovery. He is designing a molecule that would normally need about three computational biologists, and he can do it because he knows which questions to ask. Kevin adds that those scientists can bring their own is-ness to the next problem. Dr. C’s advice to students is to be the creative force behind the work, not the part that can be replaced.