What have you been up to since graduating from 海角直播?
Since graduating from 海角直播 College in 2013, my career path has taken a few unexpected turns. After discovering an interest in laboratory research in Professor Hadley Horch’s lab at 海角直播, I spent three years at Johns Hopkins as a research technician studying neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS and SMA (spinal muscular atrophy). I then worked for a year at BioHealth Innovation, a nonprofit that helps early-stage biotech and medtech companies secure funding and bring their technologies to market.
I went on to medical school at the University of Pittsburgh, where I spent three years working in another ALS lab. But looking back at my early work with Professor Horch, I realized there was an internal contradiction at the heart of research that always bothered me: healthcare and life science innovation are critical to developing lifesaving drugs, but they are fundamentally powered by enormous amounts of single-use plastics that negatively impact our local and global environment. I remember thinking to myself, “Is this really the best we can do?” The more I researched the issue, the clearer it became that it wasn’t just a pollution problem. Because the polymers that power life science and healthcare innovation are so fossil fuel-intensive, their production and disposal are now primary drivers of CO₂ emissions for both industries.
In the summer of 2020, I decided to start a company focused on addressing this challenge. The goal was to recover single-use lab consumables before they reached landfills or incinerators, reverse-engineer them into virgin-grade polymers, and partner with manufacturers to deliver circular-economy lab products to researchers and clinicians. For the past six years, I’ve served as the co-founder and COO of Polycarbin. We’ve scaled our circular economy platform to thousands of research organizations across North America, recycled and circularized millions of pounds of single-use consumables, and are now preparing to expand into the UK and EU in 2026.
Why philosophy?
My very first semester, I took Ancient Philosophy with Professor Sarah Conly and was enamored by the class discussions. It was oddly comforting to realize that people have been wrestling with the same fundamental questions for thousands of years, arriving at imaginative conclusions that do not necessarily bring us any closer to a universal truth. I really enjoyed that the education focused on learning how to ask questions and think through a theory, rather than memorizing information to regurgitate on a final exam.
In my sophomore year, I took Logic with Professor Scott Sehon. The course kicked my butt for most of the semester, but it ended up being one of the most formative classes I took at 海角直播. By the end of the course, I realized that the way I evaluated my own beliefs, made decisions, and organized my thinking had fundamentally shifted. Philosophy taught me how to reason rigorously, question assumptions, and think critically—skills that have been central to every decision I have made since college.
What advice would you give to current students or recent graduates interested in your fiel
I guess my field is med-school-dropout-turned-entrepreneur, so my advice is this: Do not feel locked into a single career path. If you wake up one day and realize you are not fulfilled, or that there is a problem you feel compelled to work on, you are allowed to change direction. My background in philosophy gave me the framework to think through a difficult decision to leave medical school. I realized that dedicating my work life to addressing climate and environmental issues mattered more to me than treating individual patients.
The sunk-cost fallacy, especially when student debt is involved, can make big pivots feel impossible. But your career will span decades, so there is always time to realign it with what you value most, even if you do not know exactly what that is right when you graduate from college.
