Stacie Calad-Thomason is Head of BioPharma Labs and Manufacturing Business Development at NVIDIA. She has a PhD in Chemistry from UC Irvine and a B.A. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley. Topics &amp; Timecodes: Physical AI Tools (Omniverse, Cosmos, Isaac, Groot) [04:46] Lab Automation Bottlenecks [06:20] Simulation vs Physical AI in Biology [09:42] Stacy&#x27;s PhD Journey &amp; Serendipitous Discovery [13:21] Transition from Academia to GSK Industrial R&amp;D [19:15] Early AI Adoption in Drug Discovery (ADAM Consortium) [23:57] Efficiency as Career Motivation [27:14] Leadership at Atomwise During COVID [29:02] Biosymetrics &amp; Phenomics Work [33:31] Vision for AI Scientists [35:11] AI Impact on Research Workflows [38:09] Career Advice: Perseverance, Adaptability &amp; Skill Breadth [41:10]

95. Stacie Calad-Thomson, Head of BioPharma Labs and Manufacturing BD at NVIDIA, on AI as an endless collaborator

Once a Scientist

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**Podcast:** Once a Scientist

## Transcript

Anybody that has a PhD, I know that they've got some grit and some perseverance, and they're capable of learning, right? That's what I see in others when I see, you know, those letters behind a name. I don't use my PhD on a daily basis now. I'm not doing organic chemistry reactions. I have the capacity to learn and understand and ask questions that help me learn something new about what other people are doing, though, and I use that in my job every day.

This is the Once a Scientist podcast. I'm Nick Edwards. We're back with new episodes, so keep an eye out and subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. I am super excited to have Stacie Calad-Thomson on the podcast. Stacie is an OG in the AI life sciences space. She's the Global Business Development Lead for Pharma Labs and Manufacturing at NVIDIA, if you've ever heard of NVIDIA.

And so, Stacie, thanks so much for taking the time to come on. I'm excited to chat with you. Yeah, thank you for inviting me. Yeah, of course. So, what is it that you do at NVIDIA? Yeah. So, I've been at NVIDIA for two years now. I got to join in this awesome role in business development and light sciences, where I've been working across all pharma and biotech,

and really understanding sort of how people are using AI, how we can help them accelerate some of their models, some of their training, some of their inference. And ultimately, hopefully, that drives more compute somewhere wherever they're consuming it. So, recently, I took on a new role just focusing on labs and manufacturing. We see this as really an emerging area of growth for us.

So, what that means is I get to talk to people that are focused on lab in the loops, whether that's on physical AI and robotics or automation, or the data platforms where data is coming off of all these instruments, or the agentic layer that's helping to orchestrate all of it. You know, manufacturing has equivalent systems that are, I think, even more complicated.

And all of this, I think, has been currently maybe the bottleneck to really unlocking new scientific discoveries, at least on the lab side. So, I'm excited to pull together some of the technologies and research that NVIDIA is doing in this space and connect it to a life science audience and hope that the lab won't be a bottleneck going forward. Yeah, you have, like, probably one of the coolest positions.

I mean, because you get to, like, really work across the entire ecosystem, lots of different AI companies, probably pharma companies. So, it must be a really interesting kind of perspective. You play a really interesting role. Tell me, like, how you guys think about kind of building an ecosystem, because it seems like that's a really important part of NVIDIA. I've been to GTC and some of the events that you guys host. You do some, like, model hosting for BioNemo, for example, for life sciences models. But then you play this really important intersect...

95. Stacie Calad-Thomson, Head of BioPharma Labs and Manufacturing BD at NVIDIA, on AI as an endless collaborator

Transcript

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95. Stacie Calad-Thomson, Head of BioPharma Labs and Manufacturing BD at NVIDIA, on AI as an endless collaborator

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.