16. Bioindustrial Manufacturing and How to Become an Expert w/ Doug Friedman

In this episode, we interview Dr. Doug Friedman, CEO of the BioIndustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE) and President of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC). We talk about how to build and grow community-driven organizations, what it takes to be an expert in DC, visions for the future of the bioeconomy, and more!

For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you are interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, fill out a membership application for graduate students and postdocs or for undergraduates and join today!

Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.

Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome back to EBRC in Translation. We're a group of graduate students and postdocs working to bring you conversations with members of the engineering biology community. I'm Catherine Brink, a postdoc in Megan Palmer's group at Stanford University. And I'm Andrew Hunt, a recent PhD graduate from the Juitt Lab at Northwestern University. Today we're joined by Doug Friedman, CEO of BioMADE, a Department of Defense-sponsored bioindustrial manufacturing innovation institute. Doug is also president and former executive director of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, and most importantly, the person who approved the creation of this podcast. Thanks so much for joining us today, Doug. Happy to be here. So getting started, you were originally trained as an organic chemist. How did you end up involved in engineering biology? Good question. A lot of it depends on how far back you want to go. But I've always been interested in how biology does chemistry. Since high school even, I sort of realized that biology and chemistry were very much interconnected. But then I learned in college that I'm actually not that good at biology. And so focused more and more on the chemistry side of things. And that pulled me even further into chemistry and physical organic chemistry in graduate school and a short postdoc. And I sort of stuck with chemistry until my first job out of graduate school at the National Academy of Sciences, where I was with the chemistry group. But because I was not a physical chemist, I was deemed to know the most about biology. Whether that was true or not is basically irrelevant. As an anecdote, most DC jobs, wherever you are, the person who knows the most about any topic is deemed the expert. And that often doesn't mean you have to know anything. You just have to know more than the people around you, which in this case was not so challenging. So I ended up collaborating a lot with the life sciences group. And that sort of sucked me into really sort of understanding what modern development tools. This was when synthetic biology was really sort of picking up within the scientific community. And so it was getting more exciting. And I was like, wow, this is really interesting. I still don't really understand biology, but I understand the chemistry that biology is doing. And that was really interesting to me. And then I really just came to own the fact that biology will be a better chemist than I will ever be, or than any of us will probably ever be. And so then the idea of harnessing it and using it and doing cool things with it, that sort of was the thing that kind of pushed the snowball down the hill. And now I'm doing something in manufacturing, another area I have no experience in. Well, great. You're still probably the expert in the room for that here, at least. Fair enough. And for what it's worth, many biologists don't really understand how biology works either, right? That's the point of the research. Fair. So after your National Sciences days, you helped found and build EBRC, which developed out of really the earlier NSF-sponsored research center called Sinberg. And so as the first president and executive director of EBRC, can you talk a little bit about what this transition was like and what things that you and the other folks at EBRC wanted to carry over from Sinberg and maybe things that got changed? Sure. That's a little bit of a complicated question, too, because the main answer at that time was, well, we're not really sure. There's sort of two aspects of it. So one of the things I did in sort of the early 2010s, I think it came out in 2013, I directed a study at the National Academies called Industrialization of Biology, a Roadmap Towards the Advanced Manufacturing of Chemicals. And it really was around this idea of how do you leverage synthetic biology and engineering biology toward chemical manufacturing? And at that time, that's when I actually started to really get to know the synthetic biology research community in any kind of meaningful way. That was also around the time when Sinberg was So Sinberg was an NSF-funded engineering research center. These NSF ERCs are on a so-called five plus five model. So you get an initial five-year award. You can be renewed one time for five years. After 10 years, you're done. And as part of that award, you are supposed to come up with a sustainability plan. So you build this community over 10 years. How do you keep it going and doing something meaningful in the absence of the formal ERC or Engineering Research Center structure? And so all of that was sort of floating around at this time. And this idea that we wanted to keep this roadmapping idea going. So this 2013 roadmap came out. It really focused on things, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, National Institutes of Standards and Technology, NIST. What could they all do around synthetic biology and engineering biology? But how do you keep all of that going? And at the same time, NSF ERCs are sort of an inherently size-limited group. At the end of the day, ERCs are focused on providing financial support to fund some research. And that only goes so far. There's only so much money to hand out. There's only so many universities that can participate. And one of the things that was clear to me coming from the National Academies going to try to transition SINBURG into EBRC was how do you really expand the network? How do you go from something that was sort of inherently self-limiting based on funding to, well, the research funding goes away. So one, how do you keep people involved with that? And not only that, how do you get people to come and work together and think about how you drive the field forward in a broad strategic way around sort of this academic industrial government collaborative model? I have no idea if that actually answered the question, but those were sort of all of the things that were ultimately floating around. And then it was this open question of, okay, well, how is that going to work? Let's figure out how to take the best elements of SINBURG. How do we take the best elements of other organizations, what they were doing, and drive this thing forward and hope it goes well. So how does EBRC differ in its funding model and its structure than the SINBURG model, which was this NSF-funded grant? So SINBURG was funded under a very specific program called Engineering Research Centers, ERCs. And there have been hundreds of these things. And it's a very structured and sort of rigid model for how you develop an engineering discipline. One of the things that was interesting though is it was the first, I think this is right, it was the first bio-focused engineering research center at all. Everything before that had been much more, I'll call them traditional engineering disciplines, like how do you make a better metal extruder or something? Not my thing, but other people do that, and that's cool for them. So there was all of these sort of open questions. So EBRC is funded by NSF. EBRC has financial support from NSF. It's had financial support from the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, from NIST, from all different sources. It's also had financial support from companies, something SINBURG also had. But what it does with that, well, so one, the amount, and then what it does with that are really different. So SINBURG was about funding, building a community and funding research around this technology area. And that included research in the ELSI disciplines, right? Ethical, legal, social, societal implications. It wasn't just research in the lab, but it was primarily research in the lab, right? That's what it was for. That's what these ERCs are for. That's not what EBRC was for, right? EBRC only needed enough money to support a small staff that could bring this community together and focus their time and energy on that coordination function and on driving forward some broader strategic initiatives, but not putting the money behind it. And that's an important difference, but there are some advantages that come with not having the money to put behind it, right? You can worry much more about sort of what is the right thing to do for the field, knowing that there's not enough money to do it all. And then it's the federal funding agencies and the philanthropies problem to figure out what the priorities are, right? We can say what we think the priorities are, right, in a very community-driven way. And I think we did that pretty well, and I think EBRC continues to do that pretty well. But at the end of the day, someone else is deciding where the money goes, and that disconnect can often be helpful in generating ideas, in ultimately moving the field forward in that more strategic way, without having to be the one to say no all the time. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So if I'm doing the math right, EBRC has been around for five or six years now, and you talked about many of the things that EBRC has done in that time. How have the goals of the organization evolved since you first set out, and what do you think the greatest achievements of EBRC are so far? So I'll take those in turn. I think the goals have changed from really a is this going to work kind of question, right? Sounds like a lame goal when you say it out loud, but when you're going in, you often don't know what's really going to resonate with people and what's not. So the earliest day's goals were figure out what the community cares about and try to do something useful around that in a very, very resource constrained environment. Now, EBRC is much more of an established organization. It's not all that much bigger than it was in year two or three, but I'd like to think it kind of knows what it's doing. And it's now about, okay, well, what does the steady state look like in trying to understand what does the engineering biology research landscape look like in fundamental research at the intersection of academia and industry? And what is that going to look like, say, for the next decade? And how does EBRC then perpetuate a movement around those areas? And at the same time, when EBRC was started in 2016, which in some ways wasn't that long ago, and in other ways feels like a millennium ago, pretty much no one outside the field cared or knew what it was. That is fundamentally different today at this academic industrial government cross-section. In each of those three areas, there are people who in 2016 couldn't spell synthetic biology who now think they're the world's experts on it. And it's fascinating in a lot of ways because now EBRC is working in an environment where there are people coming from all different avenues saying, okay, well, what do we care about? We know we care about this, so how do we frame it in a functional kind of way? In terms of its greatest achievements, I'll put that in probably three buckets. The first bucket is around this idea of developing community-driven roadmaps. It has done that. In 2019, it released the first major roadmaps. It has subsequently released more focused roadmaps in different areas, one focused on materials, one focused on microbiome. We're almost ready to release one related to climate mitigation, one for defense needs. And these have been picked up. These have resonated with federal funders, they've resonated with graduate students and post-docs, they've resonated with PIs, they've resonated with industry, and we know that. And that means we've done our job in that area. So I'm quite proud of what EBRC, in an approach that involved ultimately hundreds of people, all came together to drive that kind of thing forward. The second area is in sustainability. In the first several years of EBRC, whether EBRC would exist six months from now kept me up at night. It just did. It was not a guarantee by any means, whether it was because of financial support, whether it was because everyone would just stop caring one day. All of those things really concerned me for several years because starting a new organization, transitioning organizations is just hard. Those things don't keep me up at night anymore. It doesn't mean I take them for granted, but EBRC has sort of established itself. I think it's listened to the community and is able to deliver something that is ultimately meaningful to people. And the third area is its student and postdoc association. You mentioned getting this podcast started. This is the EBRC student and postdoc association podcast. There is a board. There are a lot of people involved. And most importantly of all, it is self-sufficient. So I think we were able to catalyze something, not through a lot of work that we did, but through sort of trying to be there as an organization to help students and postdocs coalesce around this idea across the country and around the world, and ultimately have something that can sustain itself and can drive the field forward. Because ultimately, if there's not a good network of students and postdocs, then there's not going to be a good network of faculty and industry scientists 10 years from now. These things start really early. And I'll speak for myself. I came from a really large research group that had 50 people in it when I was in the lab. And it was around for like 30 something years before that happened. And so there were hundreds of people around the world that were automatically my network. And that really was meaningful to me as I was transitioning into different careers. And frankly, I think every student should have something like that. And you shouldn't have to be in a 50-person research lab, which is its own kind of crazy, to get it. And the Student and Postdoc Association is a way for people to come together, get that kind of camaraderie and environment outside of their university, outside of their lab, which ultimately will help the field move forward. Well, on behalf of the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, I think we've also really appreciated the support that EBRC has been able to give to us over the past few years. So speaking of starting new things, you also in 2020 spun out BioMADE through EBRC. And BioMADE is the bioindustrial manufacturing and design ecosystem for our listeners, which is again, what you lead now as the CEO. So you can just talk to us a little bit about what BioMADE is and why bioindustrial manufacturing is an important area for development right now and in the near future. Sure. So BioMADE is a manufacturing USA Institute. So what does that mean? I will admit before the idea of a bioindustrial manufacturing innovation Institute was starting to float around, I had no idea what this really was. Manufacturing USA Institutes are focused on developing manufacturing technology areas that are deemed by the federal government to have some kind of strategic importance. And it could come from the Defense Department, it could come from the Department of Energy, it could come from the Department of Commerce, it could come from other departments. Those are the three that just have them now. And BioMADE is the 16th one of these Institutes. And it focuses, as you said, on bioindustrial technologies, so using biology to make industrial products. And it ultimately is a public-private partnership focused on that manufacturing area. So we were just talking about EBRC, so it can actually be helpful to draw a contrast between the two. EBRC focuses on early R&D, fundamental research. It focuses on engineering biology in a fairly sector agnostic way. You develop a cool molecular biology tool that can be used for anything from an energy application to an industrial application to a biomedical application. And EBRC doesn't really care. It's a tool that can be used for lots of different things. BioMADE does care. BioMADE is really focused on that next step up. It's like, okay, we've got 20-plus years of investment, billions of dollars of investment in synthetic biology and modern molecular biology tools. And how do you take those tools and really get them to commercial focus to make a difference in industrial products? And that's what BioMADE focuses on. And so it's really this transitional area to say, how do you go from the lab through pilot and intermediate-scale manufacturing to ultimately have commercial products on the market? Now, the biomedical space historically has done this a lot better. Bluntly, I think the reason they've done it a lot better is because that's where the money is. It turns out if you can do a whole lot of R&D and then sell micrograms or milligrams of product for thousands of dollars, that's a pretty good ROI when it comes to manufacturing. By contrast, how much are you selling butadiene for? You need butadiene for rubber. Rubber is a strategically important commodity, but butadiene is really cheap. So now all of a sudden, all of that R&D effort that you think you can put in to create a pharmaceutical product, now you're thinking about that in the context of, well, okay, you might put all that money in, but to recoup those costs, you're not talking micrograms, milligrams, grams. You're talking metric tons and metric tons per day. Enormous amounts of material that go into a very, very complicated chemical economy. And BioMADE exists to try to make it easier for companies, small, medium, and large, to make that transition, to bridge the gap between those two things. How do you reduce the cost of goods sold by a little bit? Because a little bit in industrial bio manufacturing is the difference between a profitable company and one that's losing money. And if a company is losing money, it's not going to exist for all that long. And we're at really a turning point in the industry, which is why this area of bio industrial manufacturing is of critical importance. Because if we don't transition to commercialization across a wide array of technologies in the US, then we're not going to see the full scope of benefits that have come from the last 20 years of investment. And at its core, that's what BioMADE is for and what BioMADE is about. I'll just say, again, in making a contrast to EBRC and BioMADE, as we were talking about EBRC first, BioMADE does fund work. So that is part of what these institutes do. So BioMADE has three program areas. It has technology and innovation, education, workforce development, and what we call 4S, safety, security, sustainability, and social responsibility. And in each of those areas, it co-invests money from the federal government that we've been entrusted with to develop technologies that are going to help strengthen the foundation for all the reasons I just described. And that includes technology development. It includes training the workforce of the future. It includes doing so in a safe, secure, and ethical manner. And everything that underlies that is part of what our program is about. I think I'll just end this part by saying, I do talk about BioMADE as having these dual missions. As you mentioned, it was a Department of Defense funded institute. So on one hand, part of our mission and the part that I really focused on was developing a set of underlying capabilities for economic interests. Ultimately, this is about making companies, about driving commercialization. On the other hand, this is a Department of Defense funded institute. And so we are transparent about the fact that the Department of Defense sees a strategic interest in the chemicals and materials that biology can produce. How can we do so in a secure, ethical, and distributed manner inside the US and try to solve some of the problems that come from the petroleum economy? How do we deal with some of the challenges that come from climate change that have serious implications for the Department of Defense and the chemicals that they need to do their mission? So we have both an economic security and a national security mission. We glom those together and are now working with a network of over 150 organizations to try to drive that forward against those kind of top line objectives. Very cool. That actually fits really well into our next question, which is about something that I see as a similarity between BioMADE and EBRC, which is bringing together different groups of stakeholders toward really interesting and important problems in engineering, biology, and bio-manufacturing. How do you manage to make these collaborations successful and how do you convince different stakeholders to get involved? Good question. The short answer is just listening. I started this conversation by saying that I don't actually know a lot about biology or manufacturing. That also means that I don't think there's such thing as a stupid question. I ask a lot of questions. I spend a lot of time listening to companies, listening to academic researchers, reading, really trying to deeply understand what, whether it's core fundamental synthetic biology or engineering biology or bio-manufacturing, what are the drivers that affect not one company but hundreds of companies? What are the drivers that affect not one academic research group but the entire academic research enterprise? As much as I have a lot of relationships and I care about the successes of all of BioMADE's members and EBRC's members and the people I interact with, at the end of the day, what drives me is the success of the field. That is what I always fall back on. Not every company will be successful. Not every idea is a good commercial idea that is happening at the right time so that a company can be successful. And for me, if we're doing this right, it's about really listening to the ecosystem as it exists, serving as a translator. We do a lot of work with government. That's the other part that ties this together. Government doesn't know anything about bio-manufacturing or engineering biology, but there are core governmental interests that both of those fields can positively impact. And so I spend a lot of time understanding what drives government. What do they need to understand about our field so that they ultimately will care about it so that we can try to make a difference in the world? And so I kind of end the way I started the response to this question, and that is ultimately it's about listening to the stakeholder group, really understanding where they're coming from, what drives them, what their needs are, not getting too invested in any one individual entity, but being there for the ecosystem as a whole. And if EBRC is doing that, if BioMate is doing that, if I am doing that, that is the measure of success that I follow because I truly believe that that's what's ultimately going to drive both of those fields forward. So hearing you talk about listening, there are many different voices across different stakeholder groups, even within individual stakeholder groups, people who think differently about a variety of issues related to engineering biology. How do you manage when disagreements come up where the field isn't a united front on any particular subject? That's a good question. The short answer is it depends, which is I realize also not a very helpful answer. And I think the reason the answer is it depends is what are you trying to do at that moment? Why are you having the conversation you're having? Sometimes I'm having conversations just to learn. That's rare these days, but often are the ones that I like the most. There I'm really interested in where there are disagreements because I want to understand why. Is the disagreement because there's incomplete information about some technology development because we, at the end of the day, really don't understand biology and it's always working against you. And so, okay, there's this core biology problem and there's sort of a tech fight. That's one thing. Is it a fight about business models? There are a lot of different business models floating around this area and people have really strong opinions about which ones make the most sense for any given area. So it depends, but it really has to be thought of in the context of what you're trying to do. So if you're developing a roadmap for the field, right, BioMade develops roadmaps and then puts financial support against them, puts dollars against those roadmaps. If we're developing a roadmap, understanding what that underlying difference is, and then if we're doing it right, articulating that challenge as a challenge in the roadmap, right? You don't have to answer every question. If you can outline with certainty everything that's going to happen over the next five years, you're not doing a good job, right? You got to identify real challenges. And so those disagreements often are the things that get to challenges. You know, frankly, sometimes when you're talking about putting financial support against projects, what are the individual interests at stake, right? BioMade receives proposals from its members, right? And they advocate hard for what they think is right to do in this field against a project call or an RFP. I'm not personally involved in that process at all. I have an awesome technology workforce and 4S team that drives those forward. But it's really starting to understand, okay, what is in the collective benefit? Because at the end of the day, our goal is around what is best for the industry as a whole. And understanding that, including its disagreements, is what allows us to make the best decisions we can. And I will be transparent and say the best decisions we can is not right 100% of the time, right? We're right as much as we can be, but we also monitor ourselves and the decisions we make so that as we gather more information, we can appropriately pivot as lots of external input comes into the system. So all of that is how we really think about disagreement and think about challenges amongst different people. But at the end of the day, it comes down to being as specific as you can about what you're doing and always measuring against that and not something that's more general or more generic and ultimately outside the mission that you're working to accomplish that given day, week, month or year. I want to pivot a little bit and ask about what's been different between building BioMADE than building EBRC. Obviously, as you just said, there's pretty different goals between the organizations. So we're curious what have been the biggest challenges and surprises that you've encountered in both of those endeavors? Interesting question. So I think there's probably two answers to this and maybe I'll start with EBRC and then I'll move to BioMADE. As I mentioned before, EBRC was sort of figuring out what it was supposed to do, right? It was coming out of another organization and it was coming out of something, right? The engineering research centers that was really structured and going into something that had no structure, right? We could make up whatever we wanted to do. And there's some serious benefits to that, but there are some serious challenges that come along with that too. It also had very modest financial support at that time. So figuring out how to sustain a reasonable model. All of that figuring that out in the earliest days of EBRC was hard, right? All while the community was trying to figure out what this could be too, right? Don't get me wrong. There was actually a lot of motivation. I was really excited to work with the community to figure out what to do, but it was hard. In some ways, we've kind of gone and flipped the whole thing on its head with BioMADE. So BioMADE is now back part of a structured program, right? So I mentioned it's part of Manufacturing USA. Manufacturing USA is a structured program. Technology and innovation and workforce development, all 16 Manufacturing USA institutes do that. We've added the 4S area because it's the right thing to do in biology and biotechnology. They all basically work as member organizations. They're all public-private partnerships. I have 15 other institute executive directors and CEOs that I can call up on the phone. Didn't have that with EBRC, that's for sure. But again, that's sort of a blessing and curse thing too because with BioMADE, you have this structure in place, but ultimately your individual industry, right? Engineering, biology and biomanufacturing are different than lightweight materials, which is another one of the manufacturing innovation institutes. So figuring out how to structure everything in a way that drives innovation and drives the mission forward sort of in the shadow of all of these other ways of doing it can be hard. Now we're a couple of years in, that's not hard anymore because I think we have a lot of confidence that we're doing the right things and we're listening to the community and moving things forward. The other thing that is just different about BioMADE, I often liken it to how startups get rolling. So BioMADE, unlike EBRC, is a 100% independent entity. So EBRC has an association with the University of California, Berkeley that comes out of its history with SINBURG and that's been extremely beneficial in driving EBRC forward. But the Department of Defense cares deeply and has very strict requirements about independence when it comes to BioMADE. So the reason EBRC is not running, say, a BioMADE program is because there are strict requirements for BioMADE to be independent and it goes back to this idea that ultimately we have to listen to the industry and make decisions based on what's best for the industry as a whole. And you can't do that if you're caught up with one or more other pre-existing organizations, even if they've only been around for a few years. You just can't do that in a way that's meaningful and credible. The way I think about it though in the context of startups is, oftentimes startups have stealth mode. We all know about this. And people are working quietly behind the scenes, raising money, coming up with ideas, developing whatever. And then one day there's a big splash about something where a little bit of work has been accomplished, maybe some money's been raised, and you now start to really talk about it. BioMADE's just the opposite. So BioMADE had a press release the day it signed a very large contract with the DOD in October of 2020. And it signed this contract, but it had nothing. It was basically an organization that hadn't even gotten started yet. So all of a sudden there was this big press release, this big push about how very so exciting BioMADE is getting started. We've been awarded. I was grateful to the DOD and to others for all of that push. But then it was, okay, well, the entire industry all of a sudden is looking at us. And I'm like, we don't even have a staff yet. We have a bunch of people who worked really hard writing this proposal and bringing it, but we don't have an organization yet. At that time, BioMADE was a couple people. It's more than 30 people now. It's a big difference. And that made establishing and getting the thing going harder in a lot of ways, because there was a lot of expectations to get going. And I was like, we just need to get our feet under us. We just need to get people in positions. And let's not forget that EBRC started when there wasn't a global pandemic and BioMADE started when there was a global pandemic. And I will just be clear and say, I do not recommend anyone start an organization during a global pandemic. It makes it a lot harder than it otherwise would have been, and it's already a hard thing. And so that brought a lot of challenges to getting BioMADE going. And I'm really grateful to the people who worked incredibly hard to overcome those challenges together. But all of those things made getting BioMADE rolling just a very different looking scenario than getting EBRC rolling. You're talking about the pandemic. I think one of the things that I've heard through the pandemic is that maybe biomanufacturing might be able to help strengthen the supply chains that have been disrupted. Is that something that's come into the framing of BioMADE after the pandemic kind of became an issue? So I would say it came into the idea of BioMADE before the pandemic became an issue. Supply chain resilience is a topic that no one really cared about in a public kind of way, say in 2019. And then all of a sudden, when global supply chains seized up because of a global pandemic, it was like, wait a minute, what's the problem here? But in all seriousness, it's a huge part of what BioMADE is focused on. And it was before the pandemic started when BioMADE was just an idea. One of my examples that I really like to give is about the petroleum industry. So in the US, most of the petroleum industry is on the Gulf Coast. And it's on the Gulf Coast because that's where the petroleum is. And that's where there's water, where big boats can come bring petroleum from other parts of the world. It turns out the Gulf Coast is really having a climate change problem these days. And it's only going to get worse. The numbers of hurricanes on the Gulf Coast are going up. The severity of those hurricanes are going up. Texas had this mega freeze. It turns out that refineries were not built for those freezing temperatures over extended times. So the refineries that are used to working in hot weather can't work in cold weather, also can't work in wet weather. And so this has caused real problems for the chemical industry. Well, it turns out industrial bio manufacturing is really well suited for a distributed model. And so if you imagine instead of making all of your chemicals, industrial chemicals on the Gulf Coast, and then shipping them across the country. And let's not forget that the energy requirement associated with shipping large quantities of chemicals across the country is enormous. But even without that, you ship it across the country, and then it gets used and turns in turned into products, plastics, other materials that you care about. Well, what would happen if you have industrial manufacturing distributed and outside every major city in the country? Most parts of the country grow something. If we figure out how to leverage what we grow in those feedstocks for bio manufacturing, we then do some of that manufacturing. Then we do next step manufacturing. Remember, we're talking about chemicals. Chemicals get sold to other businesses that make them into something that people buy at the store. If all of that is physically located closer together, you reduce the energy requirement for moving them around, and you build in supply chain resilience. Because now it turns out if you have a severe weather event on the Gulf Coast, well, maybe you're not having a severe weather event in the upper Midwest. And so that can be still doing manufacturing. Let's say you have a severe weather event in the upper Midwest, which does happen. There, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina can be focused on manufacturing where something's not going on there. And so thinking really critically about what the world is going to look like five, 10, 20 years from now, and are we going to be prepared for what that world is going to look like? Those are the questions that we're trying to answer now. Because if we can get even close to the right answer, we're going to be a lot better off than where we will be if we just go down the status quo kind of examples that we followed, unfortunately, for the last 50, 100 years. Well, as a former resident of the Gulf Coast, I appreciate your efforts. Former. Speaking of the biomanufacturing landscape, I think you sort of just hinted at the answer to this, but I'm hoping you can speak a little bit to what you think you wish that the biomanufacturing landscape will look like in 10 years. And maybe relatedly, more broadly, if you had $100 million, say, to do something other than biomade, and so the biomanufacturing and biotechnology space more broadly, what would you want to do with it? Turn it into a billion dollars. Okay, so say you had a billion dollars. That's a fun question. I think we need to be doing a whole lot of a better job at bringing the country together around these areas. And so, I think all three of us speaking right now are in the Bay Area. Not a huge surprise. This is a podcast, so I don't get to bring props. But if I could bring props, I have a slide that shows what venture capital investment has looked like in the biotech space. And it has these circles, these purple circles in various regions of the country and where the money has gone. Well, we're sitting here in the Bay Area and it turns out that if you take the largest purple circle on the map and put it right over where we are, and then you take the second largest circle and put it right on top of that, I'm pretty sure they're trying to do San Francisco and San Jose, that's where the money's gone, right? Where else do you have a giant circle? You have a giant circle in Boston, right? Where else do you have giant circles? Well, not really anywhere else, but you have moderate-sized circles in places like Chicago, Houston, a few other large cities. But then the rest of the country is just nothing. And so, what I'm really interested in is how do we build an equitable manufacturing ecosystem? We have all of this underlying technology. And I have lots of reasons why I think technology gets developed when people are physically co-located, which is why it happens in the Bay Area and Boston, et cetera, et cetera. But we're now at a point where we can actually do something. And so, what I want to see is real substantive investment that brings these technologies to more rural communities that have not seen the positive benefits that have come from the developments that we've seen living here in the Bay Area and try to really bring up those communities through biomanufacturing. And so, if I had my billion dollars, what I would start to do is that, right? How do you build infrastructure in those places? How do you put it there? And how do you train a local workforce to be able to do modern biomanufacturing to make chemicals and materials that, if we're doing it right, are really good for their local communities? And they're good both because they bring relevant resources there, but also because it makes jobs there. And as the economy changes, as automation picks up, as a lot of manufacturing sectors are struggling to keep jobs, this is an area that could really create jobs and do it in an equitable and distributed manner. And so, if I had my billion dollars, that's what I would try to focus on. I'd try to say, okay, well, where are these giant circles, right? Not there, right? All of the other space that hasn't seen this investment and figure out how to bridge between what we have worked on with EBRC, what BioMADE focuses on in its underlying technology development, and bring a workforce development program with relevant infrastructure to places that really need it and start to prove out a business model that I really believe works and can work so that private capital then picks it up so that a billion dollars turns into half a trillion dollars. And I am not just saying that number, right? That is not crazy, given the size of the U.S. chemical economy to transform it so that you have bio-based products making all of the chemicals that we need in a distributed and equitable manner. I really love that. I'll get off my soapbox now. Well, hopefully the funders, the private capital with a billion dollars to spare are listening in and able to help fulfill that goal. Let's hope. We've talked a lot about your career and many different experiences that you've had about building communities, building organizations from the ground up and working at the interface between science and policy or government and at the nexus of many different stakeholder groups. What do you like the most about working in these areas? And following up on that, do you have any advice for graduate students or post-docs who might be interested in doing entrepreneurship or policy-related work? Sure. What do I like the most? I like that I get to learn new stuff all the time. That's been kind of a theme in this conversation, but I really mean it. I just like to learn new things and I like to chase areas that I think can be impactful. At the end of the day, that's what I enjoy about this work. The other part that I enjoy is being able to present an aha moment to people. I am really fortunate that I get to listen to all of these companies, learn about all of this underlying research, these business models, combine it all, and then go to a member of Congress or a senior government official, the White House or at the Pentagon and explain to them why biomanufacturing can really help them. Because I have all of this underlying knowledge that I have just absorbed from other people and I know what they care about on the other side, I get to present things so that there's this real aha moment. That's why I should care. That's when you start to see real things moving because at the end of the day, all of this is about people working together and people work harder for things that they care about. That is just a fundamental truth and owning that and really understanding that is something that I think is really important in this area, which gets to the next question. Do I have any advice? Learn about what other people care about. If you want to go into policy work, policy work is all about understanding what the person you're talking to cares about. I know what I care about. I know what a lot of my members care about. But if I don't know what policymaker X cares about, and I mean specifically, then I'm not going to get anywhere. I'll have a nice pro forma conversation. Everyone will say, oh, it was so nice to meet you. Then everyone will immediately forget the conversation as soon as you've left the room or the phone call or the Zoom machine or whatever. Really understanding what someone cares about is I think really important when it comes to policy related work. The other thing that really matters a lot is leaving your ego at the door. It's interesting. We're just getting back into travel so I don't actually bring people anywhere even yet. But I used to bring people to DC to go, say, meet with congressional staffers. I don't know what the average age of a congressional staffer is, but it is not very old. You may be the world's best at whatever you do. That's why you're here. But if you don't convince this 24-year-old, forget about it. It's not going anywhere because that's the person you need to work for you. That's the person you need to care. If they care, they will work for you. As a general rule, want to learn, but don't think that you're going to get it done any other way. Got to leave your ego at the door. Last one you mentioned on entrepreneurship, I'd like to think that I'm just a very weird entrepreneur. I don't start actual companies. I start these nonprofit things and then try to turn them into something useful. I think perseverance is really the crux of it. I think that's true regardless of what you're working on. Starting things is really hard. Believing in yourself and believing in the people around you and motivating the people around you can often be hard. Having perseverance to be able to drive through it and believe in yourself is really important. One of the ways to get that is by developing a network of people that can support you, support you professionally. I would like to think that things like the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association and even EBRC itself and BioMade and these other community organizations can help provide some of that, some of that personal support that's needed to drive these things forward. At the end of the day, it's about perseverance and caring about what you ultimately want to do. Well, those are some really wonderful sentiments for us to end on. It's been a pleasure having you on the podcast. Thanks so much for being with us. Is there anything here at the end that you'd like to promote to our audience? Promote. I'll put my cheerleading hat on. Get involved in BioMade and EBRC. I guess those are the things I would like to promote. If you do not have a lot of background or experience in synthetic biology, engineering biology, or bio manufacturing, you're in good company. I didn't either when I got started. If you think it's cool, still get involved. It is worth getting involved and learning about this technology space. Definitely listen to the other episodes of this podcast. We appreciate the plug within the plug. I'm here for you guys. Thanks again, Doug. This has been another episode of EBRC in Translation, a production of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium Student and Postdoc Association. For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you're a student or postdoc interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, you can find our membership application linked in the episode description. A big thank you to the entire EBRC SPA podcast team. Catherine Brink, Fatima Anam, Andrew Hunt, Kevin Reed, Ross Jones, Kogzili, David Mai, Heidi Klumpa, and Raina Said. Thanks also to EBRC for their support and to you, our listeners, for tuning in. We look forward to sharing our next episode with you soon.