Written by Lauren Clubb
Welcome to the debut of the Nucleate Network! This new series on Signal joins our lineup of content, including Hidden Layers, Ecosystem Reports, and the Nucleate Podcast. If you're discovering Nucleate for the first time, we're thrilled to have you! Nucleate is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering the next generation of bio and ecotech leaders through resources, networking, and hands-on workshops. Our flagship program, The Activator, supports the translation of academic discoveries into entrepreneurial ventures.
In the Nucleate Network series, we'll spotlight the diverse and inspiring individuals who make up our community and explore how personal connections drive our organization's impact. By featuring leadership team members and Activator alumni, we'll delve into the heart of Nucleate. My hope is that this series will foster deeper connections across our community by offering a personal perspective on how Nucleate intersects with each person's unique journey.
For this inaugural edition, I sat down with Marissa Pettit Jones, one of Nucleate's co-founders. What better way to understand the breadth and depth of the Nucleate Network than to go back to where it all began?
Marissa grew up in a science-oriented family. As the daughter of a doctor and a nurse-turned-business development professional at Eli Lilly, dinner conversations often revolved around therapeutics and biotech advancements. From a young age, she developed a deep appreciation for science and medicine and sought to explore how discoveries could translate into real impact for patients. She saw that the field of biomedical research had made monumental advances in recent history, but was still "at the tip of the iceberg, with so much untapped potential to help patients in need." This sense of possibility led her to study Biomedical Engineering at Yale as an undergraduate, where her research focused on optimizing nanoparticles for dendritic cell transfection.
While Marissa loved science and the scientific process, she realized that she thrived in collaborative environments working directly with others, which often clashes with solitary lab work. As graduation approached, she sought advice from mentors and decided to explore the intersection of business and science to combine her long-standing interest in translating science to benefit patients and a desire to work closely with others in a dynamic work environment.
She began her exploration of business by diving into the deep end at Bain & Co. as a management consultant. She found herself now focused on "strategy, business decision-making, and the complexities of the US healthcare ecosystem", a stark change from her scientific training. Though a powerful learning experience, she felt distant from biomedical discovery and sought opportunities to be closer to it.
Marissa continued her training in business by pursuing an MBA at Harvard Business School. With her background in biomedical engineering and consulting, she was uniquely positioned to make an impact in the business side of science. However, she struggled to find clear pathways to such careers. Although Harvard had support for biomedical researchers and business students separately, at that time there were very few systemic programs in place to allow students to pursue training at the intersection of entrepreneurship and science.
A peer suggested she explore the Harvard Biotech Club (HBC), which was primarily attended by STEM PhD students interested in biotech. Seeking to broaden her horizons, Marissa joined HBC and connected with like-minded graduate students.
Engaging with STEM PhDs led to "fascinating conversations and insights, because our distinct backgrounds led us to approach topics with different mindsets...with each perspective being equally valid, interesting, and important to consider."
Through HBC, Marissa met Soufiane (Souf) Aboulhouda, a PhD student in George Church's lab with a budding interest in biotech entrepreneurship. They realized that many students were asking the same questions: "How do you build a network in the biotech space?" "How do you fundraise for a biotech startup?" and "How do biotech companies even start?" They had identified an overlapping gap in their training: how to actually translate scientific research into disruptive ventures.
One afternoon, Marissa and Souf found themselves at Area Four in Boston, discussing this unmet need over pizza. They began to envision a way to bring together graduate students with venture capitalists, biotech entrepreneurs, and business development professionals. They wanted to build a community platform that would "foster community to optimally enable education, learning, and networking."
In 2018, they worked with a team of peers to launch Activate Bio, a program designed to connect Harvard MBA students with Harvard PhD students and empower them to take the first steps toward launching entrepreneurial ventures. The program began with team formation, followed by interviews and selection of the top five teams to participate in hands-on workshops with experts and professionals in the Boston area. The program culminated in a final pitch to local venture capital firms. In 2019, Nucleate was incorporated, and Activate Bio was renamed The Activator, which remains as our flagship program.
Marissa graduated from Harvard in the spring of 2019 and moved to California to start her career in business development at Genentech. The distance made it challenging to stay actively involved in the day-to-day operations of Nucleate, but she remained connected with Souf and others. In Nucleate's second year, it expanded to include other schools in the Boston area. However, an even greater expansion was on the horizon.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to the rise of Zoom, which served as "a completely unexpected catalyst for Nucleate's growth. Suddenly all Nucleate programming was online and therefore accessible in any geography."
This allowed Marissa to dive back into Nucleate's development and enabled people from all over the world to join the community and programming. Nucleate actively encouraged this growth through a Global Expansion initiative. The initial 5 teams from Harvard in 2018 have grown to 255 teams (101 currently incorporated) across 24 core chapters in just five years. Marissa shared, “The global reach and strength of the Nucleate network is bigger and greater than I could have imagined.” This year's Summit in San Francisco drew 490 attendees from 14 countries. We see members around the world "introduce each other to jobs and to mentors" leveraging the diversity and power of the network to accelerate careers and ambitions. Marissa also especially appreciates staying connected with the first cohort of five teams and witnessing how their work inspires current Activator participants.
When asked about her "post-Nucleate chapter," she replied, "I'm not in a post-Nucleate chapter. I'm still very much in Nucleate, but it's just a different flavor now."
She now serves on the Board of Directors and works with the C-Suite and Co-Presidents to execute goals and ensure the organization remains sustainable to provide opportunities to academic trainees and alumni for generations to come. Despite Nucleate's incredible growth, Marissa believes "we're just at the beginning."
At Genentech, Marissa works as Director of Business Development, focusing on oncology. Her work involves bringing new technologies and assets into Genentech's pipeline, establishing partnership strategies, evaluating potential partners, and negotiating partnership terms. She also helps bring visibility to business development careers through the Nucleate BD101 course in partnership with Genentech.
As I chatted with Marissa I was particularly struck by one similarity between the two of us, a sentiment that is echoed across my peers as well: a desire to contribute to the process of translating scientific discoveries to impactful technologies. The rapid and vast expansion of Nucleate was born out of this widespread interest to explore and pursue paths that take our scientific work beyond the academic bench into industry, investing, entrepreneurship, law, policy etc.
This collaboration between an MBA and PhD student gave rise to an international organization focused on empowering trainees by sharing perspectives and expertise between students and experts in various fields. Fostering connections has been crucial to Nucleate's growth, from its early days in HBC to its current global network. The connections between Marissa, Souf, and other co-founders, as well as between Harvard trainees and local experts, laid the foundation for the global Nucleate network we see today. I was left feeling struck by the idea that impactful things can happen when you take a courageous step toward a solution to your own unanswered problem, much like an MBA stepping into a room full of scientific PhDs to conceptualize, and then build, a bridge between science and business.
About the author. Lauren is a 5th year PhD student in Biomedical Sciences at University of California San Diego (UCSD) in the Gutkind and Mesirov labs studying the role of G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) in anti-tumor immunity. Lauren joined Nucleate leadership in 2024 as the co-director of Communications for the San Diego chapter and content lead at HQ.