Hello everyone! My name is Eva Alderman and my career thus far began in the lab developing some of the first ever CAR-T therapies, and has since woven through various “techbio” companies working on both wet & dry lab products. I got bitten by the startup bug early and have loved working on projects with the potential to turn the ‘previously impossible’ into the ‘suddenly possible’. This interest has motivated me to join the TRG!

AI systems are incredibly exciting, yet many advances have lacked tangible, real-world impacts. The life sciences has seen exciting glimmers of success with ML-guided library optimization, de novo protein design, and more. However, I believe the full potential of the Bio X AI crossover is yet to be realized, if more people are willing to become cross-disciplinary. If so, the best is yet to come!

What am I doing today?

Discovering the secrets of life, and using them to make the world a better place.

My current focus is upskilling in the computational sciences, as a complement to my lab and product background. In particular, I’d love to discover how computers are smarter than us! And maybe nature, too.

In the background, I actively consult in the startup and venture capital space, both on product strategy and specific investment opportunities.

What I was up to in the past?

I like to say that I got an “industry education” with a major in immuno-oncology, a minor in gene editing, and a minor in computational biology.

This started back in 2016, when I joined Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center to work on CAR-T therapies, just as they started to show major clinical success in treating B cell malignancies. Subsequently, I joined the research team at Juno Therapeutics to help drive these therapies to the clinic. It was an inspiring time, and cemented my belief in biotech as the best industry on the planet!

From there, I had an unusual opportunity to join a Google [x] graduate company called Verily in their R&D department, where I worked on adapting their multi-omic platform towards research and clinical questions related to CAR-T therapies. Here, I got to work with a highly interdisciplinary team leveraging AI/ML across multiple domains, and cut my teeth on computational biology for the first time.

Surprised by the lack of tooling in this area, I then became interested in who was working on bioinformatics products and eventually joined the early team at Latch Bio to do product and business development work. At Latch, I worked with more than a dozen biotech groups on productionizing their large-scale AI/ML applications for a range of life sciences research objectives. It was here that I decided working on the sidelines wouldn’t cut it, and I needed to be able to build such systems myself!

How about a little fun?

My primary hobbies allow me to explore the world both near and far: snowboarding, surfing, hiking, and recently scuba diving. Between the above commitments, I’ve purposefully taken two full years of time off to pursue a love of traveling. Before hitting 30, I clocked 36 countries and 4 world wonders 🙂 Next on my list is the Everest base camp trek and the tobogan down the Great Wall of China (yes, that’s a thing!)

While traveling to Ancient Egypt back in 2017, I developed an interest in history and anthropology, which comprises most of my “fun” reading - along with the occasional science paper.

Another thing I am determined to do over the next couple of years is become fluent in Spanish. I’ve picked up a dozen words in a dozen languages - just enough to be confusing, but not enough to develop real connections!