So I started with an interest in science at a young age and wondered what I would do with it. Um, because of my mother being a nurse, I thought I would go into health and and become a doctor. But as I worked in hospitals and labs, I realized I liked working in the lab more and decided to focus on science. It's a career and, uh, ended up getting my PhD in chemistry. Um, mostly because I really just wanted to understand how things worked, especially at the molecular level. And the more I got to understand that the more I wanted to, um, expand into different types of chemistry. Uh, the same time, I was very much interested in still having something useful come out of what I did, something that would help the world. Um, and I especially liked the experience. I had it three m between college and graduate school. Ah, doing science that ended up in products that people would buy eso coming out of graduate school. I focused on material science and a few other um, types of things and Maurin the life science area, and, um, I had a lot of fun um, working on technology. But where I was at the time, um, the nature of what we were doing had technical successes but didn't have as much business success. And so that's when I started thinking maybe I need to understand more about the business side of what was going on and especially understanding how toe work on technologies that would end up in products that people would use eso. About 20 years ago, I started paying more attention to the business side. And ever since, I've been really on. Both sides always focused on taking new technologies and products to market. Um, but also having business and organizational leadership to help make sure that what we did was successful. And so now I'm leading up a business unit. Um, that's taking materials technology and bringing it to the life science market. Um, for example, for tools used in the production of farms

responsibilities. Start with understanding them on bond, deciding which markets to go into, um, and how to connect the competencies that we have or that we can develop so that we can solve problems in those markets in a differentiated way so that those customers will reward us for the new products that we would bring to them. And then so that leads to them the strategy that we have on. And, uh and then I'm responsible for implementing that strategy, designing the organization, hiring the organization on managing the organization that will develop the products as well and bring them to market as well as the sales team that goes out and and does that. And it's particularly fun because not only are we working on technology and products that, of course, require science, but our customers are scientific or or doing things like developing new pharmaceuticals that it's particularly fun Thio to be a part of, um, weekly hours. Uh, it depends. It's more than 40 hours a week. Uh, you know, and it kind of depends on me How, um, how excited I am about, um, growing new things. So sometimes it's a It's a lot more than 40 hours a week, and sometimes it's only a little more. Um, but, you know, generally I'm, you know, just trying to balance, you know, work in life so that I can always be fresh and always be in a, um, good, um, relationship with the employees so I don't get burned out. Um, but I'd say somewhere between 50 and 60 hours a week is fairly normal. Um, the, um the time spent on travel is very little right now in other parts of my career. I without, you know, pandemics. I I have traveled more than 50% of the time, which was too much for me. Um, but generally be without, you know, the pandemic constrictions. It was between 25 40% of the time. Travel can be a paying time wise, but I really love being able to meet new people and visit new cultures. Our company is global. So have been to, um you know, many places around the world on Dwork with many different folks. And right now, my team eyes in Europe, North America and Asia,

So again, a big part of my job is trying to understand the customers and the markets. We go after and match that with the competencies that we have and then figure out a way to bring bring that together in a way that makes business sense. So, you know, it's, as you might imagine, a bit of a Venn diagram trying to make sure everything overlaps and understanding what we can do now and what we want to do in the future. Um, and at the same time, you know, managing a growing team and helping them be successful and happy Eso balancing is probably one of the biggest things, you know, balancing all those challenges. And sometimes I'm ahead on one and I need to go and bring another, you know, part of the equation, you know, into balance. Um, so ah, big part of the approach to dealing with that is learning from others. So I I really enjoy working at companies where there are people who are smarter than me, at least in, you know, different topics, and I. So I search out and understand. Sometimes that's people I report to. Sometimes that's other senior executives um, or mentors that I look for. Sometimes it's my colleagues or people on a similar level. It's really fun to hire somebody smarter than you and have and learn from them. So But I'd say, you know, constantly learning and finding smart people to learn from, you know, is is a good, um, way to be successful and I think have a fun career. Um, sometimes it's challenging for scientists. We like to think we're the smart ones in the room on DSO you have to be a little humble and recognize that chances are somebody knows something that you don't. And so what can you learn from them? Um, and, uh, some examples, um, you know would be just recently with, uh, some plans we had for for product strategy on, and it just happened toe hire some new engineers, uh, fairly junior folks on the staff, but they saw it differently than we were thinking. So we let them play with it for a while and figure out what we should have been asking what we should have been looking at. And they came back and and, you know, really helped, you know, for C some challenges that turned out to be just around