100+ MCB Alums Reconnect at JP Morgan Healthcare Conference
By Kirsten Mickelwait
As the largest healthcare investment symposium in the industry, the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference attracts global leaders in the field, emerging biotech creators, and investors. In January, the 42nd annual conference was held in San Francisco.
Among the nine keynote speakers were Tony Blair, executive chairman of the Institute for Global Change and prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; and Danielle Carnival, who serves as deputy assistant to President Biden, is the director of Cancer Moonshot and deputy director of health outcomes in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The symposium drew more than 100 alumni and guests with MCB affiliations, who attended an MCB-hosted reception toward the end of the four-day conference. Department Co-Chair and Professor Matthew Welch spoke at the event to welcome alumni and highlight MCB’s synergies with biotech and business.
“It’s important to network with our alumni, both to celebrate their successes and understand their challenges,” says Welch, “so that we can assist them with their career development and better prepare our current students for future careers.”
Patty Chiang Love BA 2005, a strategy director at Thermo Fisher Scientific, attends the symposium every year and always looks forward to reconnecting with her Berkeley peers. “The JP Morgan conference is focused on business development,” she says. “But at the MCB networking reception, we’re all business people who are or were scientists. We can talk about the science underlying the business or the business underlying the science. It’s fun for me to nerd out on the science and technology of what we do.”
Another benefit of attending the MCB-hosted reception is the chance to see how MCB is changing over time and how it’s innovating its programs. “Twenty years ago, undergraduates in my field were offered very limited career paths,” Love says. “You could be a professor or you could be a doctor; there were few other obvious choices. Now it’s great to see other options being offered through these masters in biotechnology degrees and other cross-departmental programming.”
The benefits go both ways; reuniting with alumni and affiliates allows MCB leadership to build and strengthen connections with the scientific community outside of academia, learn more about science and labor-pool trends, and spread the word about the new talent coming through the MCB pipeline.
“I’m always amazed by the variety of paths pursued by our alumni and impressed that so many of them have successfully found diverse opportunities in their career trajectories,” says Welch. “Our alumni are the reason we exist as an institution and department. We take great pride in learning about their successes, and we gain from engaging with our alumni in ways that assist them and enable them to give back to our community.”
Banner image credit: Johnny Gan Chong
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