FOR YOUR DUE DILIGENCE:

WHO I AM

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 did not 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. It taught me to read a person's mood in the first few seconds, 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 principal investigator with my own research group at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I watched my department chair, Patrick Hwu, build and lead a department of brilliant, strong-willed scientists and physicians by putting them first, not himself. Once I reached tenure myself, 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 that followed kept showing me the same truth:
 
Brilliance is not enough.
 
Good data are not enough.
 
Being right is not enough.

You have watched this too. The brilliant colleague who could not navigate the politics, inspire a team, or make the hard call under pressure. The obvious talent who stalled, or burned out, or grew quietly disenchanted — and never quite delivered what they were clearly capable of. What was actually missing, when it so plainly wasn't intellect? A different kind of intelligence — and the more capable and senior the person, the more its absence costs. Easy to see in someone else. Nearly impossible to see in yourself.

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Some of what I teach, I teach because I had to learn it twice. Years into the academic climb, I began to trade the reason I came into science for the nearer rewards of the field: the grants, the papers, the standing. I didn't notice until a painful professional setback and long nights of rumination made it impossible not to.

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Finding my way back was not something I could think my way to. It began an inward inquiry — the kind a trained mind can begin but not complete on its own.

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It also returned me to the reason I had come into science: to make medicines for people whose diseases had none. Over fourteen years leading my lab, I had watched immunotherapy go from a fringe idea with more detractors than believers to a reality that cured patients. The basic science was happening in academic institutions like mine; the medicines were delivered by companies.

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My lab was working on a new therapeutic I believed in, and I saw a chance to help bring it to the clinic. So I left tenure at MD Anderson and followed the drug to Nektar Therapeutics in San Francisco, as Vice President of Oncology Research.

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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.

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The Phase III failed. I broke the news, and stood with the teams whose work I cut that day. Not long after, the failure took down the majority of the company, and most of us with it — including me. I did not look for another version of the same job. The inner work I'd started years before had run underneath all of it, and when everything outward fell away, it was what remained. I turned toward it, and it became my work.

For decades now, I have pursued two disciplines: 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.

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 is quick or comforting. This is what I now teach, and a throughline in my work with leaders: staying with their real question and inquiring into it until something moves. Obstacles loosen, and what was stuck starts to show up in how a person leads and lives.

As my practice of inquiry deepened, the results showed 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. I also got back a lightness, an aliveness, a pleasure in my own life I'd lost somewhere along the way.

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And I want that for you: to lead as a real person of presence, not just a highly functioning personality. People feel that difference, even when they cannot name it.