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I grew up in a farm town in the Netherlands, bookish, with glasses. An elementary school teacher once wrote on a report card that I was “sometimes a bit different.” I wanted, even then, to make medicines for people whose diseases didn’t yet have any. But there was no one in my immediate world who could tell me how. I spent the next thirty years finding the people who could.

 

I paid for university by ringing doorbells for a market research agency, asking strangers what they thought of a new potato chip or detergent. The job paid for college and taught me something I have used every day since: how to read a person’s mood, right away, and meet them there.

 

I crossed the ocean for training at the National Cancer Institute under Steve Rosenberg and Nick Restifo, who taught me rigorous science. From there, a PhD at George Washington University, and a postdoc at the Netherlands Cancer Institute with Ada Kruisbeek — a razor-sharp scientist who showed up to work in bright red lipstick and a black leather miniskirt, ran a top-tier immunology department, and taught me by example that a serious person does not have to disappear into the role, and that the work is better when they don’t.

 

I built my career through the academic ranks to full professor and head of the Cancer Immunology Research Laboratory at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Once I reached tenure, junior faculty started asking me how I had done it, and the institution asked me to build a course. I called it Getting to Tenure. The conversations it started taught me something I still think about:

 

Brilliance is not enough.

 

Good data are not enough.

 

Being right is not enough.

 

I have watched it play out, in academia and in biotech. The brilliant minds who couldn’t navigate the politics, inspire the team, make the hard call under pressure. I watched some of the most promising young leaders stall in their careers, burn out, become disenchanted. Not because they lacked intelligence, but because real impact and satisfaction required capacities their training had not built.

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After fourteen years leading my lab, I joined Nektar Therapeutics in San Francisco as Vice President of Oncology Research. Biotech is a different animal from academia — the reorgs, the failed readouts, the investor pressures, the politics. There is nowhere to hide for long: not from the data, not from the market, not from the team, and eventually not from yourself. I have broken the news after a failed Phase III and stood with the teams whose work I cut that day. I have walked the hallway after the hard meeting.

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Some of what I teach, I teach because I had to learn it twice. There was a stretch, in the middle of the academic climb, when I quietly traded the reason I came into science for the nearer rewards of the field: the grants, the papers, the standing. I did not notice any of it until a painful professional setback and many long nights of rumination made it impossible not to.

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Finding the original thread again was not a mental exercise. It was a recalibration with my heart and my gut. It also opened an inward inquiry — one that required a different practice, rigorous like science, but with a different method.

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For decades now, I have pursued two disciplines with equal seriousness: cancer immunology in my scientific work, and contemplative practice in my inner life. The Gurdjieff Work taught me how much of life can be lived mechanically, half-awake to ourselves, and how to begin waking up. Zen taught me to sit, simply, until what is real cuts through the mental noise. The Diamond Approach is where I found my home — and where I now teach.

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What drew me to this approach was its rigor. It does not ask for belief; it asks for investigation. It brings the same seriousness to inner experience that good science brings to outer reality: observe closely, question assumptions, follow what is so, and do not settle for what's quick or sounds good. Through this practice of inquiry, inner obstacles loosen, and new capacities come online — for yourself, for the people around you, for what the moment in front of you actually requires.

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That is how it played out in my own life. As the practice of inquiry deepened, the results began to show up in how I ran my lab, and later as an executive. Conversations got cleaner. Hard calls got easier. I became more present to myself and others, and people remarked that I was easier to be around. And I recovered a sense of lightness and aliveness I had lost somewhere along the way.

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And I want that for the people I work with: more of themselves, available to the whole of their lives.