Today we’d like to introduce you to Dawn Barry.
Dawn, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I grew up in rural central Connecticut. As a kid, I loved playing sports, gardening, building (my dad was a carpenter), and cooking (my mom left work to raise me and my brother, so she was very present to explore turning what came out of the garden into dishes). I went to University of Vermont, where my degree in science plus a pharmacology internship landed me my first post-college job in genetics at the Yale Genome Analysis Center in Connecticut. The fact that I played Division 1 softball and my boss at Yale fielded a fiercely competitive recreational co-ed softball team that I promised to join gave me an edge.
With a few years of practical lab techniques under my belt, I found myself increasingly gravitating to the business side of science. In retrospect, this was a significant crossroads for the evolution of my career. I joined a start-up in New Haven, Connecticut, called Genaissance as employee number 13. They were one of the first companies talking about personalized medicine and how people’s unique biology contributed to their response to medications. The challenge to rethink how we approach healthcare was thrilling. My true pivot from science to business, however, was when I landed a role out of the lab and into Genaissance’s business development team. I had a strong reputation with the executive team but it was actually the CEO’s executive assistant who commented on my integrity and character that sealed the deal. After seven great years in the start-up, I joined Illumina in 2005, their early days, and helped build one of the greatest biotech companies in the world.
Has it been a smooth road?
I’m grateful for all there is in my life. I wouldn’t call my career road a smooth one but the strength I’ve acquired in the journey is well worth the lessons learned. I enjoy a blurry line between my personal and professional lives because so much of what I do is shaped by life experiences and the thoughtful leaders I’m delighted to call friends. Losing both my parents to cancer in almost the same year and not seeing any evidence of personalized medicine – the field I’ve spent my whole career in – was sad and infuriating. I shared this story at TEDxSanDiego to emphasize the importance of understanding and prioritizing your health. I manifest this energy in the workplace to ensure people have the best opportunity for a clean bill of health, recognizing that the healthcare system and the research that medical interventions have been built from have been largely based on data from white men.
I’m also very invested in supporting girls and women in tech. We need more women and more diversity in general in biotech and life sciences. No doubt, I had to work harder as a woman to get to where I am today. In my mentoring relationships, I have found many women are uncomfortable advocating for promotion and negotiating for a higher salary. Tech’s gender and wage-gap is real, and, until that’s solved, we need to advocate on our own behalf. The good news is that the pay gap is exposed and leaders are mobilizing to fix it. Regardless, even when fairness in the system is established, you still must always be your biggest ambassador.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
The way health and disease research is done today is flawed – it’s incomplete, long, expensive, and not representative of population diversity. When research is broken, discoveries are inadequate, people stay sick, and healthcare remains one-size-fits-all. We’re challenging researchers and people to do things differently by transforming people from subjects of research to partners in discovery.
LunaDNA is a data-sharing platform for you to safely share your health data to power research that’s important to you. DNA files from your purchase of kits like 23andMe or Ancestry, electronic health records which are produced every time to visit the healthcare system, even just responses to questionnaires – it’s all valuable information at your fingertips, and you can easily put it to good work to help find cures.
People who share data own this company. LunaDNA is a cooperative effort qualified by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) so that when you share data, you can take shares of ownership, if you wish. When value is created, it’s shared as dividends that you can keep or push to charity. Here, you share data and stay in control of it. And you power ethical science in a way that’s representative of people’s lived experiences.
What sets LunaDNA apart is that it’s member-owned and managed by a public benefit corporation chartered for social impact. Operations are transparent as part of the SEC qualification, data is privacy protected, and questions can be answered inside the platform, versus people’s data being copied and distributed. The best science can only be done with the best data, and we believe the best data from people’s voices and lived experiences – will come directly from people who are properly protected, who can join studies digitally from home, and treated fairly.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
San Diego’s culture is one of cooperative impact. We celebrate the individuals that invest their time and wisdom to foster the next generation of companies and leaders. We reward vision, social responsibility, and balance here, versus churn and burn badges of honor for hours worked or sleep missed. Growing a company is mentally and physically challenging, but it’s productivity, not an activity, that really moves the needle. San Diego is demonstrating that we can reproducibly execute life-changing ideas when individuals invest bigger than themselves and for longer than today. I strongly recommend San Diego as an excellent place to live and work, especially if you are in the life science, high-tech, or biotech industry.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://lunadna.com/
- Email: info@lunadna.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lunadna/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LunaDNA-140504936727716
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lunadna_
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/dnamovement
Image Credit:
EMI Fujii Photography
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