A Life of Innovation – Finding Your Passion
ACS Webinars: Career Channel
How would you like to shape your scientific legacy? Get inspired with remarkable life stories of great scientists. David Walt’s Laboratory at Tufts is world-renowned for its pioneering work that applies micro and nanotechnology to urgent biological problems. Join us as David Walt, an accomplished educator, researcher, and entrepreneur shares his journey and his passion for science and innovation. Learn how to uncover your passion and build your own journey!
“A Life of Innovation – Finding Your Passion.” A short presentation followed by Q&A with speaker David R. Walt, Robinson Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, and a successful entrepreneur.
What You Will Learn
- How did chemistry inspire me and how to inspire the next generation
- How to take an idea from an academic lab to the marketplace
- What to expect and what not to expect as an academic entrepreneur
- Rules to help guide your path in balancing multiple aspects of your life
- And much more…
Webinar Details
Date: Thursday, June 17, 2010
Time: 2:00-3:00 pm ET
Fee: Free
Meet Your Expert
David R. Walt is Robinson Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Chemical Biology from SUNY at Stony Brook. Dr. Walt is the Scientific Founder and a Director of both Illumina Inc. and Quanterix Corp. He has received numerous national and international awards and honors for his fundamental and applied work in the field of optical sensors and arrays. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Things I learned.
- What struck me in the first part of Dr. Walt’s talk was his incredible opportunity. He was not directly looking to go into industry nor nanotechnology/fiber optics, but the opportunities presented themselves and unfolded in the perfect fashion. He is/was successful because of his brilliant intellect, but also because of the incredible opportunities he was given. They found him instead of vice-versa.
- I was impressed with his humility and the wise advice he gave in regards to starting a business. If you go into any endeavor for prestige or because of your ego, you’re going to regret it. He viewed the lives and careers of the employees of his company as something that is more important than his own goals and aspirations.
- The thing I took away most from this talk was to always be on the lookout for opportunities. You never know when something may come knocking, and if you have a passion for it and want to work HARD, you may be able to achieve it.
- The story of his company represents the creativity and innovation that’s necessary to succeed in a start-up company. He was able to foresee how one of his laboratory breakthroughs could succeed on a larger industrial scale. It seemed like his thinking was always one step ahead, once he got into fiber optics, he was looking to find a way to translate images, and it just happened to be that someone was trying to do the same thing and their paths crossed. Hard work + opportunity + persistence = success.
I was somewhat disturbed by the lecturer when he said a couple of times that someone had given him an idea and he quickly sent that person away so that he could work that idea out in private and then patent it, presumably without listing the idea generator as a co-inventor. As a phama researcher I have been involved many times in helping to write patents and a very inportant task is to determine who had made intelectual contributions and who had simply worked out the details without being considered a inventor. If a true idea generator is left out and others that simply work on the idea but did not make significant intelectual input are included, this is both not intelectually honest and can invalidate the patent.