Updated as of January 24, 2024
My people.
Seems like part of adulthood is experiencing the ebb and flow of life milestones and cheering your friends on in their biggest moments — whether it be graduating, getting a new job, or starting a family. The bittersweet part of is having them move away when those changes take them to new places, but also knowing they’re off to bigger and better things. Maintaining long distance friendships is something I’ve worked really hard on the past few years and I’m really lucky to have such an amazing group of friends around the world. It’s also fun to visit them in their new homes and explore new places.
For myself, I’ve lived in SF now for over a year and half! Given I’m quite a nomad (haven’t lived in the same apartment for longer than 2 years since leaving home for college), this is quite a feat. My partner and I love our neighborhood in SF and will probably never be as spoiled as we are now with proximity to incredible food. And of course, a good number of my close friends are still in the bay. We’re starting that exciting new stage of life where we aren’t in school anymore, so get to live in one of the most expensive areas in the country on more than a student’s salary. Most of that goes to eating good food…
Day job – running Interface Biosciences as co-founder and CEO.
2023 was quite the year for startups. And by that, I mean it was very, very hard (surviving a bank run was not on our startup bingo card). Investment volume and frequency is still down a significant amount since the pandemic and it’s resulted in a ton of layoffs, not just for biotechs, but every sector. We have been extremely lucky to raise another round in the midst of uncertain times and as always, I’m feeling endlessly grateful for the incredible people we hired who really make all of this stress (seriously, so much stress) worth it. Somehow, we are now 9 full time employees! We barely fit in the office space for lab meeting and are accelerating lab work at breakneck pace. 2023 was dedicated to setting our pipeline up and now that it’s up and running, it’s a race to collect as much data as possible to showcase that we can not only discover novel drug candidates, but also develop them into life changing therapeutics. All said, this process takes around 10 years and a billion dollars (low estimates), so it’s a daunting task but one I wouldn’t want to do with any other group of people.
Creative writing.
During the height of stress for the company, I wasn’t able to dedicate as much time to writing, but I am back. I’m still querying my first book, The Great Divide (YA, science fantasy), but will have some very, very exciting news to share soon!! I recently re-read the whole manuscript to reacquaint myself with the work and can confirm, I love this book with all my heart. So proud of the characters, world, and twisty, twisty plot that I put my whole heart into. With distance, I’ve also been able to more objectively critique the book and recognize the second and third act are much stronger than the first, both from a character development and technical writing perspective. I’m hoping to get the chance to edit the manuscript again with an agent (and publisher) to make the beginning set up stronger.
I’m also making good progress on my second book! This one is Adult Sci-fi with quite a tonal shift from my first. For starters, it’s first-person POV, making it much closer to the main character’s internal dialogue which is all important for the themes I’m looking to explore. I also know a lot more about storytelling and commercial publishing now, so for better or worse it’s a lot higher concept and marketable (fingers crossed about that one, hah).
My one sentence blurb:
A dark academia set in the beautiful hell that is Stanford, Miles is a fifth-year graduate student who must discover the truth behind his friend’s apparent suicide and the fraudulent research practices linked to her death.
As a former grad student from Stanford, this one gets hyper specific and I’m trying to capture the energy of not just Palo Alto, but academic research as a whole in ways I haven’t seen them depicted before. I love the way Yolk and My Year of Rest and Relaxation write NYC and have been big inspirations for me to capture Silicon Valley. The sci-fi element comes from taking creative liberties on what is possible with the human microbiome and immune system (yes, the topic of my PhD thesis and startup). Similar to my first book, it is character driven and delves into my favorite questions and themes – what is love and is it enough? How do we find light within the darkness? Does success equal value? If we redefine what we deem valuable and how we measure self-worth, what are we left with?
The inspiration for this now page is from Derek Sivers. The purpose of a now page is to show where your time and priorities lie. Check out the links posted and create one for your own website!