Bakar Labs

Excited to be hiring an EA and a Lab/Facility Operations Manager going into 2025 🚀 Come work with our stellar team! https://lnkd.in/gGshY2Nn

"What if, they thought, they could genetically engineer bacteria to convert sugars in skin lotions into therapeutic proteins continuously pumped onto the skin's surface? In essence, the bacteria would become a 24/7 factory for producing healing proteins." This is the kind of innovation we're proud to support at Bakar Labs!

Game on! The Bakar Labs team gets its game on at Game On Berkeley.

Competition is fierce for the coveted Bakar Labs beanies that mark the winners of our gingerbread house decorating contest: Azalea Therapeutics! They brought their own specialty items (those are NOT actual therapeutics in that baggie). Thanks to all who took part, you're all champs building something special.

🚀🚀 for 2025

We're grateful for the youthful energy that our interns and work-study students bring every day. And also happy to be able to provide opportunities! You'll see Julia Chac at our front desk -- she's closing out the 4th year of her combined integrative bio & psychology degree. Julia's from Fresno where she went to a rural high school. Her parents are farmers growing vegetables such as bok choy, daikon, and cabbage. "Coming to this building was a shocker," she says, and she's enjoyed working with the Bakar Labs team and meeting all the many startup founders. Looking forward to 2025, Julia will be applying to physician assistant schools across California, although she'll be taking a break from the study grind for a cycle. It's been nonstop serious work for her since she got to Cal and you have to make the most of your 20s!

Building bridges for California's climate future: Last Thursday we had the incredible opportunity to to host California’s newly elected state legislators at Bakar Labs, where we showcased the cutting-edge climate technologies being developed right here in California by visionary startups. 🌍 ✨ We organized the event with teams from Project 2030, Berkeley Climate Change Network, University of California, Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy, and UC Berkeley, Rausser College of Natural Resources. The event also highlighted the important work being done on the #UCBerkeley campus and the resources available to legislatures to help drive informed climate solutions. 🌱 💡 We are proud to foster these critical conversations and collaborations that will drive impactful climate action in our state. A big thank you to everyone who joined and contributed to the success of this event. Together, we can shape a sustainable future!

Your company has a culture whether it's explicit or not -- and you can do something about it. That was the upshot from today's panel on "Building a Successful Team & Creating Positive Company Culture" led by Kelly Huggins, PhD of Amgen and featuring Prachee Avasthi, CSO and co-founder of Arcadia Science, Mathijs de Vaan of Berkeley Haas, and Lori W. Perlstadt, CEO of Vivente Search. As a startup leader: 🔬 You should incorporate 360 feedback for everyone on your team, ideally collected by someone from outside who doesn't have an agenda. Nothing that shows up in in written feedback should be a surprise, because you should have discussed it before. 📈 You need to empower "upward feedback" -- get employees to speak up. You need to invite this, and have your door always open. There's no one way to set up a feedback loop, but it's best if people see it affecting outcomes. ⚾ Diversity makes you strong, but then you get a diverse group of people with different skill sets-- "spiky" people who are uniquely good at certain things. You don't want a team in which everyone's striving to be the same, but you do want a Moneyball model in which people's skills are complementary. 🪴 It's maybe not possible to avoid growth pains, but it's a good thing to think intentionally even as a small founding team, so you have expectations about behavior, which can be adopted by new people who join. Thanks to the panelists and everyone who attended!

Learn about generative AI in drug discovery from someone who's doing it -- and differentiating their company in this increasingly crowded space.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas... at least at Stephanie Martin's desk. Not everyone has their own micro tree and lights!