The North Star for making decisions and how to build a great foundational team
Spotlight on
Prashant Mali, PhD
Who is Prashant Mali
Prashant Mali, Ph.D. credits an undergrad advisor with planting the seed that he could apply his knowledge of physics to biomolecules, a seed that would become an incredible career of research, discovery, and teaching. Prashant is a scientist and engineer with an impressive educational background that includes both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, a doctorate in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Genetics from Harvard Medical School. He states he was fortunate to get into the biomedical engineering program at Hopkins despite limited knowledge of biology, a fact that hit him immediately when it was time to curate his courses in that area. He opted to do the first year of medical school, a decision that completely changed his life and career. The experience allowed him to see biology in a completely new light, viewing the study of human anatomy as an absolute privilege, and it was there he discovered engineering was not so far away from biology.
Today Prashant is a bioengineering professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering where he leads the Mali Lab. He was instrumental in early RNA-guided human genome engineering via CRISPR- Cas9 and believes the beauty within the CRISPR field is the vast range of innovation. He continues to be motivated by clinical translation, a journey he is quick to say is not complete, but that will be his proudest career achievement when he sees his research in-clinic.
Here he shares what he considers the North Star for making decisions, how to build a great foundational team, and what competition in science means for patients.
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Let data, not emotions, drive your decisions
In the startup world you must set milestones and then focus on them, and there is very little pivoting you can do as you work toward those goals. In academia, you have much more flexibility to completely change the way you are doing something at any given point. Once you have started your company based on research or an idea, you typically would have already done some proof of concept in the lab. That is key because the more you can push that, the better foundation your startup will have. Try to pinpoint what your milestones will be early on and stay focused because if you pivot too much as a founder you won’t have any forward movement.
The key to setting milestones or goals is to let data guide the decision making process. One of the hardest things to do is let go of your emotional connection to your research, project, or idea - but it’s a must. Also recognize that it’s OK to fail. To be successful in the startup world you need resilience.
02
Know what you don’t know, hire accordingly, and then empower your people
Working in healthcare, especially in the biotech space, is incredibly complex and you need the right people, but finding that group will look different for everyone because we all have different skill sets. Focus on your core strength because that’s where you get deep expertise to solve problems. Don’t feel like you have to manage everything. If you find people whose core strengths are complementary to yours you will fill in the jigsaw puzzle with everyone who loves exactly what they are doing, which creates a great foundation.
From there, empower people to do what they were hired to do. Allow them the challenge of making decisions. You can be there to guide and coax, and to help them get their compass right, but so much of science is based on trust.
03
Competition in healthcare will only help patients
When asked about his views on CRISPR being in the hands of so many scientists, Prashant references a Zen Shin quote that says, “A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.” Do what you are doing because you enjoy it, and do it to the fullest extent. Focus on your creativity and your unique insight and don’t waste time looking over your shoulder. There is value in competition because distinct aspects and use cases emerge. In biology you can build many different drugs for the same indication and each one will bring a special element. All of this only leads to better help for patients. It’s OK to be mindful of what others are doing, but remember that we all only have 24 hours in a day - spend it doing something where you can make a unique contribution.
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