I’ve been fortunate in my career to drink deeply from the wellspring of science, spending time in brief research roles spanning wireless communications, nuclear fusion, and accelerator engineering, before making the jump to join the BioEngineering team at Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub in 2019. Before I started the zig-zag journey through research and engineering which landed me in biotech, and ultimately founding my startup Eta, I actually thought I was going to be a sociologist, before going back to school to pursue a degree in Engineering Physics at UBC.
Indeed my first degree was a first-class honors BA in Sociology from McGill…
Now that the COVID-19 pandemic is winding down, with vaccination rates increasing across the world and our lives regaining some semblance of normal, I thought I would reflect on my time over the last 2 years working at an infectious disease non-profit and some of the lessons taken away from it.
Before joining the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub (CZB), an infectious disease non-profit that runs as a collaborative effort between Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF, I had spent the previous few years working in accelerator physics designing radio-frequency structures to accelerate beams of particles at close to the speed of light.
Radio-frequency engineering…
We know full well the cost of the current pandemic — lost lives, lost jobs, shuttered businesses, personal isolation, suffering at the community and individual level. Traumatic events are always opportunities for growth and change, however. Here is a short list of ways in which the pandemic might save us from ourselves.
- By greatly damaging the oil industry, leading to the lowest yield and most destructive extraction methods no longer being profitable (tar sands, fracking), forcing closures of business and depreciation of infrastructure that imposes significant barriers to future re-entry.
- By triggering a long overdue economic recession (ie. deleveraging), giving…
Andrew Cote
Founder, engineer, explorer of this world.
