🧬 Kickflips and Bacterial Pellets Built a Founder | James Evans Rerelease (1/3)

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“Yeah, tastes like corn, doesn't it?”

James Evans calls himself a late starter. Childhood in the UK was skateboarding and video games, not science kits. His dad was an engineer, and his mom was a nurse, which only looks like a straight line if you draw it afterwards. Science wasn't in the house. Soccer was mainstream. Skateboarding was not, and that counterculture stubbornness is the part he still recognizes in company building.

The fuse lit in Belgium. Coventry University's Erasmus year put him in a Liege lab resuspending bacterial pellets with a mouth pipette, the kind of training that includes a French-speaking grad student shrugging off a mouthful of culture with "tastes like corn." He came home, actually applied himself, and later landed in an endocrinology lab as the imaging outlier. One accidental meeting stretched into a decade at MIT's Whitehead Institute.

At the Whitehead-MIT Bioimaging Center, he learned the habit he still sells: don't do time-resolved FRET in 3D because it sounds fancy. Ask what data you need and take the fastest reliable path. Paul Matsudaira had gone to grad school with Lance Taylor, who originated high-content screening, and that mix of academic freedom and automated platforms is the through-line into PhenoVista.

Key Topics Covered:

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Find our guest, James Evans, at these links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesgevans

Website: https://phenovista.com/

Find our host, Jon Chee, at these links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonchee/

Learn more about Excedr:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/excedr/

Website: https://www.excedr.com/

Intro & Outro Songs Created by OkKyojin:

https://flow.page/kyojin

Resources & Articles:

High-Content Imaging Guide: https://www.excedr.com/blog/an-introduction-to-high-content-imaging

How Do Core Labs Support Life Science Research?: https://www.excedr.com/blog/core-labs

Choosing the Right Microscope for Your Workflow: https://www.excedr.com/blog/choosing-the-right-microscope-for-your-workflow

Confocal Microscopy and Imaging Systems: https://www.excedr.com/blog/confocal-microscopy-and-imaging-systems

Companies, Universities, & People Mentioned:

Whitehead Institute: https://wi.mit.edu/

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: https://www.mit.edu/

Harvard University: https://www.harvard.edu/

Coventry University: https://www.coventry.ac.uk/

University of Liège: https://www.uliege.be/cms/c_8699436/en/uliege

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:40 A Late Starter

03:16 Science Kits, Not Science Class

04:14 Kickflips and Perseverance

05:00 Counterculture on a UK Skateboard

05:34 Mrs. Akhtar and Tractable Biology

07:05 The Erasmus Year in Belgium

08:31 Tastes Like Corn

09:17 Coventry Versus Cambridge

13:22 Nobody Sticks the Landing First Try

14:02 An Outlier in an Endocrinology Lab

21:52 Ten Years at Whitehead

22:26 The Bioimaging Center

23:16 The Quickest Way to the Data

25:47 Outro

The Biotech Startups Podcast gives you a front-row seat to the business and science of building a biotech. Hosted by Jon Chee, CEO of Excedr, the show features honest conversations with founders, execs, and investors about their work, their companies, and how they got there. From scientific breakthroughs to startup lessons, each episode explores what it really takes to grow a life science company—from pre-seed to IPO.