Converting biologists, one step at a time.
A good entrepreneur has a canny intuition for their True North. I’ve heard this from many good investors.
Personally I’ve always believed it. One of the bases through which I judge my professional contacts is on their decision making ability. Some people seem to always make good choices. Others, faced only with good outcomes, somehow still manage to find a more painful outcome.
Continue reading “True North”I guess that I am not the only one who has found the grind of a second pandemic lockdown a drain also on mental health and productivity.
The first lockdown was almost fun. For the first time in years I was able to sit at home, work on what I wanted to work on, and go jogging regularly in clean air. There was even the bonus of a new wave of healthcare related information across every media outlet – a field with which I have been passionately involved for 20 years now.
This time is a bit different. First of all it is Winter, so jogging in the park is not so easy. It’s snowing and -10 celsius (-20 fahrenheit) today. Air pollution has not dropped this time, I guess it’s a combination of lignite burning and car emissions. And work is much more stressful this time around. That last point is what I want to write about today.
Continue reading “Mental Health Check”The past two end-of-years I have wanted to write a bilan de l’année. Both years were incredibly exciting and I had a lot to look back on. In both cases I wrote the notes for myself but never published them on the site. I guess that, while it is both useful and healthy to keep a monitor of how things have gone, I am not so keen on going public on these topics.
2020 has been a particularly unusual year. I am not excited about what I did this year. But I have to admit that this year, despite the obvious difficulties, brought a welcome return to modes of work which agree with me and, frankly, a blistering level of productivity.
Continue reading “2020 coming to an end”One year ago, I left the start-up where I had been working on an AI-driven companion to accompany patients through their cancer treatments.
When I left, I was deeply frustrated with the start-up environment surrounding AI in Healthcare. I was still convinced that AI could help in this space, but all I was seeing was teams going down what I considered to be the wrong paths.
Continue reading “Preprint Announcement – Guide to Regulating Medical AI”I wrote recently about my experiences of the Pulse leadership and entrepreneurship training program for the blog of the UK BioIndustry Association (BIA). The Pulse course is organised jointly by the BIA and the Francis Crick Institute. I joined the three-day course, in its first year of operation, in 2018.
I felt that I benefited enormously from the course. I had left my postdoc position 3 months previously and I was researching ideas for setting-up a company. I subsequently took my learnings from Pulse and elsewhere, and established my first company Simmunology. So when I was contacted earlier this year I was particularly keen to write something and say thanks.
Continue reading “New article: My experience of the BIA Pulse accelerator”This week I will be the host for the Berlin Institute of Health, Digital Health Forum. The format is somewhat different due to the ongoing Covid regulations.
The topic will be Digital Health – Incubation and Innovation. Yoni Goldwasser and Bartosz Kosmecki will be the guests.
Continue reading “Event: Charité Digital Health Forum”I really love dealing with people. I come from a culture which highly prizes human interaction and communication skills. But I also love technical work, and this tends to attract people who prefer to work alone. In this article I want to discuss my progression through different styles of management and leadership throughout my life.
Continue reading “Managing People”I wrote this article a year ago. Somehow it sat in my drafts despite being essentially finished. I publish it now as is. Any mention to what I am doing now refers to September 2019.
A short homage to Paul Graham who, among others, so nicely captured the issue of Making things vs Managing teams.
Continue reading “Maker vs Manager”I had the opportunity to interview for a senior position at a very big company recently. The entire process was fascinating for what it says about human nature and about large companies. The outcome of the process is unclear at the time of writing this but I am expecting the intrinsic misalignments in the process will lead it into the reeds from which it is unlikely to emerge. I am as close to the perfect candidate for the role that they will ever interview, but the internal parties are not all aligned around the very existence of the position.
Continue reading “There is no such thing as a manager”I had quite a nice spring season of talks planned for 2020. I was invited to deliver a keynote on AI in Healthcare at Biovaria. And, I was one of the invited speakers for the Dynamics of Immune Repertoires conference where I would also have given a workshop, in Dresden. Covid-19 struck and the rest is history.
Emergencies lead to quick changes of plans. Anthony Kelly from AI in Action reached out to me asking me to take part in a special on AI in Healthcare.
Continue reading “Talks cancelled – Talks online”