How can researchers who have developed innovative solutions begin to commercialize? What makes a great research-entrepreneur? And how are universities and organizations helping to bridge the research-to-commercialization gap? We will learn those answers and more in this episode with Laure Haak. A neuroscientist by training, Laure has a BS and MS in Biology and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University, and she did postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health. Her career includes diverse experiences: serving as founding Executive Director of ORCID; leadership roles at Thomson Reuters, The US National Academies, and Science Magazine. She is currently founder and CEO of Mighty Red Barn, a consultancy that supports impact-based organizations building digital infrastructure, and helping research innovators go from discovery to startup. Laure carries on this work as a Research Scholar at the Ronin Institute, and Board Chair of Phoenix Bioinformatics and the Green Bay Chapter of SCORE.

You can learn more about Laure and Mighty Red Barn here: https://www.mightyredbarn.com

Learn more about Oracle for Research: http://www.oracle.com/research 

 

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Episode Transcript

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;26;12

How can researchers who have developed innovative products begin to commercialize them? Why are digital persistent identifiers important to researchers? And who are some of the partners that can help researchers get their products to market? We'll get those answers and more on this episode of Research and Action. Hello again. Welcome back to Research in Action, brought to you by Oracle for Research.

 

00;00;26;12 - 00;00;47;27

I'm Mike Stiles. And our guest today is Laure Haak. Laure is a neuroscientist by training. She has a B.S. and M.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford. And she did her postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health. She's done a lot over the course of her career, including serving as founding executive director of ORCID leadership roles at Thomson Reuters,

 

00;00;48;00 - 00;01;14;09

the U.S. National Academies, and Science magazine. She's currently founder and CEO of Mighty Red Barn. That's a consultancy that supports impact-based organizations that are trying to build their digital infrastructure. And it also helps research innovators like many of our listeners, get from discovery to startup. Laure carries on this work as a research scholar at the Ronin Institute and Board chair of Phoenix Bioinformatics and the Green Bay chapter of SCORE.

 

00;01;14;09 - 00;01;38;01

Laure you're obviously a very busy person, so I'm really glad you're on the show. Well, thank you for the invitation. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Us as well. So we're going to talk about innovation to commercialization, because we do have listeners who are researchers and PhDs. They've got the research discovery part down. But starting and leading a startup, that's a whole different thing.

 

00;01;38;02 - 00;02;02;28

But before we do that, what did you want to be when you grew up and what motivated you at each step from Stanford, to ORCID, to Mighty Red Barn? Yeah. And so, I think whenever people ask about careers, it kind of depends on what you had for breakfast, how you answer the question. So, I think the best way to explain my career is that I never grew out of the childhood fascination with how things work.

 

00;02;02;28 - 00;02;24;19

I never stopped asking why, which has it's endearing and annoying qualities, depending again on what you had for breakfast. I was and still am fascinated with how the brain works. And after college I started graduate school in neuroscience during what was then the decade of the brain. It was a big deal. So I studied hibernation. I studied sleep wake cycles.

 

00;02;24;19 - 00;02;51;12

I studied how our bodies internal clock responds to light. I was also at the same time involved in the Association for Women in Science as well as Women in Neuroscience, where I managed a quarterly or a quarterly newsletter back in the day when you actually mailed things using stamps in the Postal Service. You know, we couldn't look at how many people opened, but we had a list of about a thousand people were sending out to.

 

00;02;51;15 - 00;03;21;14

So during my tenure as president of Women in Neuroscience, that particular group was folded into the Society of Neuroscience. And it is still an active initiative today, which is really awesome to see. So from my postdoc with that portfolio of three years of these newsletters, I joined the Next Wave team at Science Magazine and triple-A US, which is now called Science Careers, and I worked on post-doc policy and career development for science graduate students.

 

00;03;21;14 - 00;03;39;15

And there's so many really smart people that are so focused on their research, they couldn't see the vast opportunities for applying their passion and skills. I think this gets back to your question, Mike, about, look, there's folks that do research, but how can I be an entrepreneur and start something? And part of it is kind of looking up.

 

00;03;39;18 - 00;04;04;07

So when I was at the Next Wave team, I helped to support the founding of the National Postdoc Association and then went on to be a study director at the National Academies and working with esteemed scientists to research and produce reports on research workforce issues, including interdisciplinary research, international students. And on the last report I did when I was there was on women in academia.

 

00;04;04;10 - 00;04;28;15

So from the academies I again moved to something completely different and a tech startup where when I started there was no job description and no job title. It sounds like a tech startup. Yes, but you have to really you know, I came out of academics in that I went to two places where there is a lot of structure, right?

 

00;04;28;17 - 00;04;53;26

So the tech startup was like, okay. And I was also the only peer there. So I crafted my job and my job title and became the chief science officer. And I help the company build an analytics consultancy that brought the data that they were kind of collecting and munching together to these pressing research policy issues where, you know, you could kind of look at some amount of data.

 

00;04;53;26 - 00;05;15;07

We didn't have, you know, a lot of it that we needed to really answer these pressing issues. So this was this time was right as compute power was really starting to take off. So I have to admit, during graduate school, we had a computer that took up the size of a room. We had an old one of those things.

 

00;05;15;09 - 00;05;35;29

And so now a few years later, you can now crunch terabytes of data in hours rather than weeks. And I know these days you can do petabytes in microseconds. But, you know, we're getting there in the machine, sit on a desktop, Right. So this is like this wonderful period of time when people are like, oh, my gosh, what can we do?

 

00;05;36;01 - 00;05;55;01

And one of the wonderful things we did was work with the National Institutes of Health on a number of program evaluation projects. We had data on grants, we had data on papers, we data on people, we had data on patents. We brought all that together to help the NIH understand what is the impact of their funding in certain portfolio areas.

 

00;05;55;03 - 00;06;30;27

One of the projects we did was with the NIH leadership, and it was to examine what was thought to be potential bias in the awarding of research grants, a hot button topic and lots of anecdotes. So we were able to bring to bear the compute power and the data that we had to a study which led to a publication of a paper in Science magazine demonstrating a substantial gap in the likelihood of award for black NIH grant applicants, other measures being equal that spurred the NIH to examine their review process.

 

00;06;30;27 - 00;06;53;26

I'm really, really proud of this work, and I'm proud that the NIH took action, both partnered with us on the work and took action to try to remedy or at least further study and remedy the situation. So some of the stuff I've done, so at the same time all this was happening, startups, right, like to go through and sell and, you know, get money for the investment they've made.

 

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