A-MEDICO Webinar Series - From Lab Bench to Life Sciences Week: How to Approach Industry With Confidence
Most researchers wait too long to think about their career after graduate school. By then, it's just a job hunt. The people on the other side of the table can tell the difference between someone exploring a problem and someone who just needs something.
The researchers who land well, do it differently. They build relationships years in advance. They lead with the problems they care about, rather than a list of techniques. And they leave every conversation with a clear next step. This session shows you how to do that, and it is timed so you can put it into action at Life Sciences Week.
In this session, our speakers will help you:
Learn how three people moved between academia, industry, and startups, including the decisions that did not work out.
Learn why leading with your technical depth backfires, and what to lead with instead.
Understand how to connect what you actually care about to how a company makes decisions.
Learn how to run an informational interview: how to ask, what to ask, and what to do in the 48 hours after.
Speakers:
Richard Roy, Principal Consultant, GxPRA Consulting
Dr. Malcolm Eaton, Associate Director, Life Sciences Innovation Hub, Innovate Calgary
Kritleen Kaur Bawa, PhD Candidate, Medical Science, University of Calgary; Co-Director, Activator, Nucleate Canada
Speaker’s Bio:
Dr. Malcolm Eaton leads the Life Sciences Innovation Hub at Innovate Calgary as Associate Director, working with researchers and founders to move discoveries out of the lab and into the market. He has helped companies secure more than $10M in non-dilutive funding, and co-founded Vessl Prosthetics. Before Innovate Calgary, he was a Flagship Pioneering Fellow in Boston, where he worked on building biotech companies from first principles. He holds a PhD in biology and applies the same evidence-first habits to commercialization decisions.
Richard Roy is a life sciences industry veteran, having held leadership roles from startups all the way to a Fortune 10 company (Cencora). He has led critical functions of organizations, including product development, clinical, regulatory, quality, manufacturing, engineering, project management, and business development. This includes Alberta based medical device companies, PRIMED Medical Products and Nucryst/Smith & Nephew.
He currently runs his own life sciences consulting company, GxPRA Consulting, helping our next generation of innovator founders navigate the product development life cycle all the way to commercialization, including regulatory approvals, working with Health Canada, the US FDA and beyond. In addition to his consulting work, Richard is very active in the ecosystem, as a member of the Steering Committee of the Edmonton Regional Innovation Network, as well as a multi-cohort mentor for programs such as Lab2Market, and as a result, was voted the MVP of the YEG (Edmonton) Startup Community during the 2025 Awards.
He holds a Bachelors in Chemical Engineering from McGill University and a Master of Biotechnology degree from the University of Toronto. You will also find him attending many post-secondary events here in the province, supporting the innovation and startup journey.
Kritleen Kaur Bawa is a PhD candidate in Medical Science at the University of Calgary, where her research focuses on sex differences in the relationships between neuroinflammation and the biological and clinical biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease. Alongside her doctoral work, Kritleen serves as Co-Director of Activator, Nucleate Canada’s flagship accelerator for graduate trainees and postdocs building life-science ventures. In this role, she leads program strategy, execution, and mentorship to help student innovators translate discoveries from the lab toward clinical impact. Through her previous role as a Clinical Research Coordinator, she has gained extensive experience in designing and executing multi-center clinical trials in dementia care, studying both pharmaceutical and non-pharmacological interventions for behavioral symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease. She holds a BSc in Neuroscience and Immunology and an MSc in Pharmacology with a specialization in Neuroscience from the University of Toronto, and brings a scientist’s rigor to innovation management and knowledge translation.