Lab-to-Launch Lounge

Join us this week as we sit down with Nicole Black, PhD, Co-Founder of Beacon Bio and Vice President at Desktop Health and Shannon Nangle, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Circe Biosciences.

The Lab-to-Launch Lounge (LLL) series brings Harvard graduate students in CxO roles back to campus to hear how they launched their research out from Harvard labs:

* how did they get here

* what would they do differently--and what they would not do at all--if a student again

* anything else on your mind

Join the discussion, meet fun people, grab a bite, and leave with new ideas. Open to the Harvard community.

BIOS:

Nicole Black, PhD is the Vice President of Biomaterials and Innovation for Desktop Health. Nicole graduated with her PhD from Harvard University in 2020, having conducted her thesis in the labs of Professor Jennifer Lewis and Dr. Aaron Remenschneider. Nicole grew up in suburban Detroit before moving to Boston for her undergraduate studies at Boston University, where she obtained a BS in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Mechanical Engineering and a concentration in Nanotechnology. During graduate school at Harvard, Nicole worked on interdisciplinary projects between the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Mass Eye and Ear hospital in Boston. Specifically, she focused on developing biomimetic tympanic membrane (eardrum) grafts using novel materials and 3D printing technologies. Following graduate school, Nicole co-founded Beacon Bio, alongside Professor Lewis, Dr. Remenschneider, and Dr. Elliott Kozin. This startup company branched from her PhD work designing regenerative tissue grafts that benefit from biodegradable materials and 3D printed architectures. The first product in the pipeline for their technology is the PhonoGraft® device for tympanic membrane repair. Beacon Bio was acquired by Desktop Metal in summer 2021. Nicole currently leads an interdisciplinary R&D team in Desktop Health, a healthcare division of Desktop Metal, to bring innovative, 3D-printed medical devices to patients. She was named a Collegiate Inventors Competition Graduate Team Winner in 2018, a Baxter Young Investigator Award Winner in 2020, a Lemelson-MIT Student Prize Winner in 2021, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Lister in Manufacturing & Industry for 2022. 

Shannon Nangle, PhD is the co-founder and CEO of Circe and has been building out the technology for the past six years. Circe is a carbon transformation platform, that converts carbon dioxide and hydrogen into chemicals on demand through the use of fermentation and synthetic biology. Circe spun out of her postdoc research while in Pam Silver’s lab at Harvard, where she focused on engineering microbes, building electrochemistry rigs, and customizing fermentation systems. She was drawn to the Silver lab for the track record of using microbes for industrial and environmental applications. Prior to joining the lab, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington where she studied crystallography and structural biology of protein complexes. She is an Activate Fellow and was named an MIT Tech Innovator under 35 in 2022. When she is not looking at protein structures and planning fermentation scale-ups, Shannon indulges in surrealist cinema, absurdist literature, is an active member of the small (but growing!) biotech for space community, and upon Voltaire's suggestion, tends to her own garden.