Entrepreneur turned scientist
I’m excited to share that as of this month I have joined the lab of Professor Barbara Meyer at UC Berkeley as a Research Assistant, where I will be focusing my entrepreneurial energy on basic science research in the field of molecular biology and genetics. This may come as a surprise after over 10 years as a founder with SwipeSense and helping lead our company to a successful acquisition by SC Johnson.
Our mission at SwipeSense initially focused on preventing hospital-acquired infections, and quickly broadened to improving patient safety. In my decade as a leader, our team made major strides towards achieving this mission: We launched several products to improve infection control, equipment management and nursing operations. By the time I left, our products were deployed over a hundred facilities across the United States.
Throughout my tenure at SwipeSense, I was acutely aware of the constraints the venture capital model placed on our product development. In particular, the need to demonstrate measurable commercial progress in a matter of months or quarters. Being responsible for understanding our customer’s problems, and creating appropriate solutions, I struggled firsthand with how these capital constraints limited the concepts we considered. At the end of the day, we could only pursue what we could test in weeks or months at the most. Whole swathes of potential solutions would require fundamental research and development that simply could not be pursued due to the associated time, cost and risk. Our startup, like most, simply wasn’t resourced to build products with a multi-year release horizon.
I am proud of what we accomplished despite these constraints. The applications we created continue to make patients and healthcare workers safer every day, preventing infections, unnecessary harm, and death. Through our work, we expanded what was possible for our hospital clients. At the same time, I felt frustrated by our company’s short-term bias which limited our impact. Contrary to startups, in basic science the time scale for impact is significantly longer.
During the earliest days of the company’s founding, I began learning about researchers and scientists who had made the discoveries, and enabled technologies that shaped our solution space decades or even centuries later. The obvious ones were Ignaz Semmelweis, who helped identify the need for handwashing even before Louis Pasteur established the foundations of modern germ theory, or Guglielmo Marconi who discovered the principles behind wireless communication that became the backbone of our platform at SwipeSense.
Just like any other startup, we hit many roadblocks and hard times at SwipeSense. Whenever I felt down, reading scientists’ memoirs and scientific literature became a source of hope and energy. In the moments when failure felt all but certain, their stories of discovery were a reminder that no matter how long the journey, progress is possible.
My reading expanded beyond those connected directly to our mission at SwipeSense to other scientists whose research, after years or decades of persistence, had outsize impact. I read about scientists like Stanley Prusiner whose work on prions was dismissed for over 20 years until their existence became accepted as the source of many neurodegenerative diseases. I read of Sydney Brenner, whose mid-career decision to study the then little-known nematode C. Elegans was initially viewed with skepticism only to become a model research organism used in dozens of scientific fields decades later.
While reading these accounts, I was struck by the exceptional determination of their authors, and their ability to pursue questions for long periods of time with apparently little to show for it along the way. There is a high failure rate in startups, just like basic research. Most researchers fail to spawn much of anything after decades of trying. However, just like in startups, in the rarest of cases their discoveries can spark entirely new fields, avenues for technological development or both. Basic science can shape the contours of what’s possible for businesses like SwipeSense, industry, and humanity on the longest of time scales.
Part of this gravitation towards research was not just intellectual, but personal, as science has been a part of my life since I can remember. My grandfather, Frank Malina, was one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Lab and made foundational contributions to the science of rocketry. My father, Roger Malina, also had a long career in science studying astrophysics. At the ripe age of 2 I watched his satellite, the Extreme-Ultraviolet Explorer, launch into space from Cape Canaveral. Growing up, the big bang and stellar supernovae were common topics of conversation. In December 2021 I married my love and kindred spirit, Ramya Parameswaran, who is also an incredible scientist and physician, with whom spending a weekend afternoon digesting a new scientific publication is our idea of a good time. Hearing and seeing their stories of persistence and discovery firsthand, has been a continuous source of inspiration.
Since fully transitioning out of my role post-acquisition, I’ve had the privilege of time and space to reflect on my experiences; if there’s anything that has stuck with me from my entrepreneurial journey, it’s a deep desire to continue expanding the contours of what is possible. At SwipeSense, we were expanding what was possible for hospitals through technology. For the next phase of my career, I have set my sights on joining the ranks of those who brought me energy and hope, by expanding the contours of what’s possible through basic science research. While the joy of discovery remains the same, my time horizon expands greatly.
I am excited to take a tangible step in this direction, by joining the lab of Professor Barbara Meyer at UC Berkeley as a Research Assistant, where I will be studying the mechanisms underlying gene expression in the model organism C. Elegans. In this role I will have a chance to work across many fields including molecular biology, genetics, genomics, microfluidics, and microscopy. My goal is to expand our understanding of fundamental biological processes, and I’m grateful to Dr. Meyer for accepting me as a member of her team.
If you’ve recently made a similar shift into the world of basic science research I would love to hear from you, or If you’ve read any other scientist memoirs that I have yet to come across, please leave a comment on my compilation post here. Finally, if you are in the bay area and have experience in molecular biology the Meyer Lab is hiring!
You can stay updated on my journey by following me on twitter or medium.
