Wesley W. Koo, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Today, Alicia Zhou, PhD delivered an insightful and inspirational guest lecture in my tech strategy class at The Johns Hopkins University – Carey Business School. It was apparent from minute 1 that she, an accomplished molecular biologist-turned-entrepreneur and executive, was irrevocably competent.
She talked about her time at Color, where she leveraged their expertise in test kits to pivot to COVID testing, resulting in a tremendous revenue boost but also operational and strategic complications as the market changed. Then she shared her thesis and vision for her current role as CEO of the Cancer Research Institute (CRI). Two highlights on that part:
As cancer researchers in the U.S. are facing a funding shortage at the federal level, nonprofits like CRI are suddenly in a uniquely important position to fund research. CRI is focusing on building the ‘foundational layer‘ of immunotherapy discovery, check out their Discovery Engine, an open, AI-ready database with both positive (what works) and negative (what doesn’t work) models.
This is an important step toward enabling better, more efficient drug discovery with the latest LLMs, without expert-fine-tuned data in specialized topics like immunotherapy, output is likely GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
Finally, Alicia and I reminisced about our days practicing taekwondo at MIT. She remarked that she gained most of her leadership skills from martial arts, e.g., the ability to break down complex problems into steps (think moving from white belt to black belt) and treating each ‘black belt’ moment as a new beginning rather than an end.
Thank you, Alicia – Please come back often to the Hopkins community!”
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