My advisor asked me where I wanted to be in five years.
I said: "Happy."
He got upset.
I remember sitting with that reaction for a long time afterward. Not because I thought I was wrong. Because I couldn't understand why the right answer, the only answer that actually matters, was the one that caused offense. And I kept thinking: this is a person whose job is to help shape careers. And "happy" is apparently the wrong goal to have.
That moment is where this story really starts. Not in the lab. Not in the van. Not in the boardrooms or the fundraising pitches or the medical spa I'd eventually build from scratch. It starts with a simple question and an answer that made a scientist uncomfortable — and what I chose to do next.
What Nobody Tells You About Academic Science
When you're a PhD student in the sciences, the path is very clearly drawn for you. You do your research. You publish. You do a postdoc — ideally at a prestigious institution with a well-funded lab. Then you apply for faculty positions, fight for grants, and spend the rest of your career building a lab that exists, in large part, to produce the next generation of people who will do the same thing.
I was at the National Institute on Aging, working on inflammatory disease, aging, and longevity research. The science was genuinely fascinating. We were sitting on things that could change how people understood their own health. And we weren't telling anyone.
I pitched NIH on writing a blog about longevity and health span. The answer was essentially: no. Can't say this, can't say that. Everything I wanted to communicate ran into a wall of institutional caution. I looked at my advisors — brilliant people, serious scientists — and I noticed that very few of them seemed happy. They seemed like they were fighting for survival: fighting for funding, fighting for publications, fighting to balance a career that had consumed everything else.
I didn't want that.
Not because I wasn't capable of it. I had an offer at Harvard, working on mitochondrial function and longevity research — which, if you follow the longevity space today, is right at the center of one of the most exciting conversations in science. But I looked ahead at what success looked like in that world, and I couldn't see myself happy there. Maybe that was a self-limiting belief. I've sat with that question. But I also knew, even then, that suffering isn't proof of commitment. And busy is not the goal.
So I left the bench. And I started looking for a way to do what I actually wanted to do: help important science reach the people who needed it.
Inventing a Career That Didn't Exist Yet
When I made the transition out of research around 2013, "science communications" was barely a career path. Organizations were just starting to hire scientists for communications roles, but they weren't entirely sure how to use them. I knew what I wanted to do — translate complex science for the people who needed to understand it. But the job description didn't really exist yet. I essentially had to carve out the work before I could get paid to do it.
I joined Spectrum Science Communications in DC, and then founded Decode Communications, a consultancy that helped pharma, biotech, and life science companies tell their science stories to investors, to media, to physicians, to patients.
The work was harder than most people realize. Pharma is one of the most tightly regulated communication environments that exists. What a company can say, post, claim, or imply about a drug or treatment is governed by the FDA and enforced hard. Building communications that are compelling, activating, and legally compliant is not a generalist marketing skill. It takes a particular kind of thinking — the kind, it turns out, that a decade of scientific training produces pretty efficiently.
I built what I called "get smart decks" — rapid intelligence briefs that helped marketing and PR teams get up to speed on a company's science, competitive landscape, and clinical trial pipeline. Then I'd work with those teams to build activations: media strategy, conference presence, press releases, on-site events. I was working across AbbVie, Procter & Gamble, AI drug design startups, cancer drug companies, immunology R&D firms, and neonatal care research. I ghostwrote a white paper on the biological imperatives of neonates — what a newborn's body needs to thrive — called From Womb to World. I built infographics explaining how the immune system works for companies that needed to explain themselves to people with no science background at all.
I was everywhere. And at each company, the work was the same in essence: take something deeply complex and make it land for the people who need to act on it.
The PhD skills were more transferable than anyone told me they'd be. I build protocols. I test hypotheses. I train people and run experiments. I track what works, monitor what doesn't, and break complex goals into steps that actually move things forward. Turns out, that's not science. That's operating.
The Startup Chapter: A Van, a Platform, and $3.3 Million
Somewhere in the middle of all the consulting work, my life changed shape.
My husband and I built a Sprinter van from scratch and started living nomadically. Our first wedding anniversary goal was to be on the road, and we made it happen. We traveled full-time from 2017 to 2022, running a consulting practice from campsites, from parking lots in national parks, from wherever we happened to park. Along the way, I met my future co-founder, and together we built a company.
The company was Sēkr — an outdoor travel platform built for the way people like us were actually trying to travel: finding dispersed camping, connecting with a community of van-lifers and outdoor adventurers, planning trips off the beaten path. We raised $3.3 million. We built a team. We built a product people actually used.
I also co-founded Project Respect Outdoors, a women-focused outdoor community, because the outdoor space — like most spaces — had a gap between who was welcomed loudly and who was actually there.
The fundraising years taught me things that don't fit neatly into any pitch deck or business school curriculum. They taught me what investors actually care about versus what they say they care about. They taught me what it means to navigate a room as a woman building something real. They taught me that the best founders aren't the ones who know what's going to work — they're the ones who stay alert enough to notice when something surprising does.
We stopped living in the van in 2022 when we bought land in Temecula. And then I built something new.
The Medical Brand Nobody Expected (Including Me)
Here's something I haven't said publicly very often: toward the end of my PhD fellowship, one of the directions I seriously considered was anti-aging skincare. It felt adjacent to the longevity research I was immersed in, and the consumer-facing side of it interested me in a way pure research didn't.
I didn't pursue it then. I went the science communications route instead, then the startup route, then kept building.
And then I founded SOM Aesthetics — a concierge dermatology and medical spa in Encinitas, California, where I live now. Where I research skincare, Botox, fillers, bioregenerative treatments, and hair restoration. Where I still design and run clinical studies, because the scientist never actually left.
The thread was always there. I just didn't see it until I was living in it.
SOM is also regulated, which means everything I learned about communicating in constrained environments — what you can say, what you can claim, how to be compelling inside a box that most people find paralyzing — applies here too. The industries change. The skills are the same.
The Through-Line I Didn't See Coming
When I look back at the whole arc — the bench, the blog pitch that got rejected, Decode, the van, Sēkr, SOM — there's a through-line that wasn't obvious when I was living through each chapter, but that makes total sense now.
Every move was a translation problem. I was always taking something complex — scientific knowledge, a company's pipeline, a market opportunity, a hard truth about what it means to be a woman building something — and finding a way to make it land for the people who needed to understand it. That's not a skill I developed. It's the skill I had, and I kept finding new contexts to apply it in.
And underneath all of it, a philosophy I've held since the moment my advisor got upset about the word "happy": suffering isn't proof of commitment. Busy is not the goal.
I didn't build these companies by grinding harder than everyone else. I built them by building smarter — by applying the same rigor I learned running experiments to the decisions I made in business, by staying alert to what was actually working instead of what was supposed to work, and by refusing to accept that success and happiness are mutually exclusive.
They're not. I've spent fifteen years proving it.
And if you're a founder who's been told otherwise — who's been collecting opinions from a dozen mentors pointing in different directions, running hard but not sure if you're running toward the right thing — that's exactly what I do now. I help founders build smarter. Not harder.
Bring the vision. I'll bring the blueprint.