Most graduate students in the life sciences finish their training without ever having been told that starting a company is an available option. The default path runs toward a postdoctoral position, then toward a faculty appointment or a role inside a large pharmaceutical organisation. Leen Kawas took a different route, co-founding Athira Pharma out of research she had worked on at the University of Washington and taking it public in 2020, and she has spent a considerable amount of her time since arguing that the route should be visible to far more students than currently see it.

The Information Gap

The barrier Leen Kawas describes first is not funding or risk tolerance. It is simply that most students do not know what founding involves. A doctoral programme trains people to design experiments and interpret data. It rarely covers how intellectual property is licensed from a university, what a term sheet contains, or how a scientific finding becomes a business case that an investor will evaluate.

Students therefore assess entrepreneurship without any real information about it, which tends to produce one of two errors. Some conclude it is impossibly complex and dismiss it. Others assume it is mostly a matter of enthusiasm and are unprepared for how much of the work has nothing to do with science.

What Scientific Training Already Provides

Leen Kawas has argued repeatedly that the core skills of a research scientist transfer more directly to company building than students assume. Designing a study that isolates a variable is closely related to designing a business experiment that tests an assumption cheaply. Reading a literature critically resembles diligence on a competitor. Managing a project through repeated failure is most of what early-stage company building consists of.

The parts that do not transfer are learnable and relatively bounded. Financing structures and regulatory strategy can be taught, and there are people available to hire who already know them. The scientific judgement at the centre of a therapeutics company is much harder to acquire and is precisely what a trained researcher already holds.

Timing and the Cost of Waiting

Conventional advice tells scientists to accumulate industry experience before founding anything. Leen Kawas is sceptical of the blanket version of that advice. Experience is genuinely useful, and waiting also carries a cost that goes largely unmeasured, since scientific opportunities have windows and a founder’s willingness to accept uncertainty tends to decline as commitments accumulate.

Her position is not that everyone should found a company immediately. It is that the decision should be made deliberately rather than deferred by default until it is no longer practical.

The Role of the Institution

Universities control much of what determines whether student founding is realistic. Technology transfer offices set licensing terms. Departments decide whether commercial activity counts toward anything or is treated as a distraction. Advisers encourage a student exploring a company, or they make clear that doing so will cost them.

Kawas has pointed to the variation between institutions as evidence that this is a policy question rather than a cultural inevitability. Some universities produce founders steadily. Others with comparable research output produce almost none, and the difference usually traces to specific administrative choices rather than to the quality of the underlying science.

What Investors Actually Look For

A recurring source of discouragement is the belief that investors will not back a first-time founder from an academic background. Kawas, who now co-leads a venture fund focused on life sciences, describes the picture as more nuanced. Early-stage biotech investment is substantially a bet on whether the underlying science is real and whether the person presenting it understands its limitations honestly.

A student founder who can articulate exactly what their data does not yet show is often more credible than an experienced operator overselling a weaker asset. The inexperience is a real risk and it is a manageable one, addressed by building a team around the founder rather than by replacing them.

Building the Support Structure

Kawas has been consistent that individual encouragement is not sufficient on its own. EIT Pharma’s research teams and the wider ecosystem she works within operate on the assumption that founders need practical scaffolding, including access to people who have raised money before and honest early feedback about whether a programme is worth pursuing at all.

The most valuable version of that feedback is frequently discouraging. A student told clearly and early that a particular asset will not support a company has been given something useful, provided the message is about the asset rather than about their capacity to found anything.

Why This Matters Beyond the Individuals

The argument is finally about where good science ends up. A substantial amount of promising academic work never reaches patients because nobody with the relevant expertise chose to carry it forward, and the person best positioned to do that is usually the one who generated the data. Further detail on her work is available at https://www.leenkawas.com/.

Nearly every large institution now holds a climate ambition of some kind. Most have published one. The harder question, and the one that has occupied a great deal of Dame Alison Rose’s attention since she stepped down from NatWest Group in July 2023, is what happens in the long stretch between the announcement and the deadline, when nothing dramatic is scheduled and the work is mostly unglamorous accounting.

The Distance Between a Pledge and a Plan

A pledge is a statement about a future state. A plan is a statement about the next eighteen months. Rose has argued that the space between those two things is where most corporate climate commitments quietly come apart, because the pledge generates the press coverage while the plan generates the cost. An organisation can carry a 2050 target for a decade without ever encountering a single decision that the target would actually change. Nothing about the pledge forces a confrontation. The deadline is always someone else’s problem, sitting beyond the tenure of whoever announced it.

The correction Rose has pushed for is not more ambition. It is shorter intervals. A target dated 2030 behaves differently inside a company than a target dated 2050, because 2030 falls inside the planning horizon of people who are currently employed and currently accountable.

Why Interim Targets Do the Real Work

Interim targets convert a slogan into a budget line. Once a bank commits to a specific reduction in financed emissions by a specific year, that commitment starts to interact with credit policy and with how relationship managers are compensated. Dame Alison Rose spent three decades watching how targets propagate through a large organisation, and her account of it is fairly unsentimental. A goal that does not eventually change what someone is measured on will not change what that person does.

This is also why interim targets attract more internal resistance than headline ones. They are the point at which the ambition begins to cost something.

The Measurement Problem Underneath All of It

Measuring progress requires a baseline, and baselines in this field remain unstable. A bank calculating its financed emissions depends on data supplied by thousands of client companies, many of which are estimating rather than measuring. Methodologies change. A firm can appear to reduce its footprint substantially in a year when the only thing that changed was the emissions factor applied to a sector.

Dame Alison Rose has been candid that this instability gives institutions an easy way out. If the numbers are contestable, then any inconvenient result can be attributed to methodology rather than to performance. Her position has been that the answer is not to wait for perfect data, since waiting is indistinguishable from inaction, but to publish the methodology alongside the number so that movement can be traced to a cause.

Who Owns the Number

In many organisations, climate metrics live with a sustainability function that has influence without authority. The function reports the number. It does not control the lending decisions that produce the number. Rose has consistently placed ownership further up, arguing that climate performance belongs on the same page as capital and credit quality, reviewed by the same board committee, at the same frequency.

Her experience since leaving NatWest Group, chairing and advising across sectors, has reinforced that view. Where the metric sits determines whether it survives a bad quarter.

What Happens When the Numbers Move the Wrong Way

Any honest measurement regime will eventually produce a result nobody wanted. A portfolio shifts, an acquisition lands, a client base changes, and the trajectory bends upward. Rose has treated this as the moment that reveals whether a company’s climate programme is a management system or a communications exercise. A management system explains the deviation and revises the plan. A communications exercise restates the ambition and changes the chart.

She has noted that institutions willing to report a bad year build more credibility over time than institutions whose numbers only ever improve, because a perfectly monotonic line invites the suspicion that something is being managed other than emissions.

Measurement as a Management Tool

The most useful reframing in Rose’s argument is that emissions data is not primarily a disclosure product for regulators and investors. It is an operating instrument, in the same category as credit loss data. A bank that knows precisely which parts of its book carry transition risk can price that risk and allocate capital accordingly. A bank that only knows its aggregate figure to two decimal places for the annual report has bought a compliance artefact rather than a capability.

Where the Discipline Comes From

None of this depends on believing anything particular about climate policy. It depends on a much older institutional habit, which is that organisations improve what they count and neglect what they estimate. Rose’s contribution to the debate has been to keep dragging it away from ambition, where everyone agrees, and back toward measurement, where the disagreements are real and the progress actually happens. Further background sits at https://www.damealisonrose.co.uk/.