Alumni Spotlight on Hunter Rogers, PhD

Hunter Rogers, PhD, is a CRS alum. He received his PhD from Northwestern and was a graduate student in the Woodruff Lab. He is currently a Principal at Cleveland Clinic Ventures.

Thesis mentor: Teresa K. Woodruff, PhD 

Thesis title: "The Development of Microphysiological Systems for Reproductive Biology Applications"

What is your connection to the CRS community and what is your current position? 

My connection to the CRS community comes from my time as a graduate student (and briefly a post-doc) in Teresa Woodruff’s lab where I worked on developing new microphysiological systems to create new in vitro models of reproductive biology. I am now a Principal at Cleveland Clinic Ventures where I focus on company building and venture investments in the life sciences.  

Could you describe your current research/studies? 

In my current role, I spend time understanding the wide range of science that is coming out of the Cleveland Clinic and finding paths to commercialization for new inventions and intellectual property through venture-stage company creation. For example, if a lab at the Cleveland Clinic develops a new drug against a novel target in an indication of high unmet clinical need, we may pursue continued development of that drug through the formation of a new company. This involves a deep dive into the science and market opportunity to build an investment thesis to support initial formation and investment into this potential new company. Assuming that a viable investment thesis is derived from that due diligence, we then make the case before our Investment Committee, which includes many of the Executive Team at Cleveland Clinic, to make a cash investment in this new company. If approved, we then go on to recruit a team, attract additional investors, and continue to support the company as an investor through its lifecycle. We currently have an active portfolio of 24 companies across life sciences, medical devices, and healthcare I.T./digital health.  

What aspect of CRS did you find most valuable?  

In looking back at my time with CRS, one of the most valuable aspects was the level of cross-team collaboration that occurred as a function of having a formalized aggregation of various scientific groups who may have all focused on very different scientific areas but shared the common thread of reproductive science. Being regularly exposed to science beyond your own lab was an extremely valuable opportunity to learn new things and have discussions that could lead to new findings that may not have otherwise occurred. If there’s one thing I have learned in my professional career, it’s that it is extremely important to get outside of your own professional/scientific ecosystem as its at the intersection of various schools of thought that innovation occurs. 

What has been the most valuable aspect to your training as a reproductive scientist in CRS? 

The most valuable aspect of my training across my career as an investor is undoubtedly the critical thinking and analysis skills that were developed during my time in CRS. My career path is somewhat atypical for a CRS member as I moved to the investment world soon after my graduate training, trading my lab desk for a desk in the bullpen. Despite working at an investment bank, the vast majority of my team were also PhD-trained scientists. The reason being that it’s much easier to train a recent PhD grad how to do financial modeling and interpret an income statement than to train a finance major how to do a literature search or understand complex signaling cascades (no knock to my friends from finance). While I don’t use a ton of the specific scientific knowledge I developed as part of my time in CRS, there is not a day that goes by that I don’t heavily rely on the skills I developed in accumulating, interpreting, and translating that knowledge. 

What would you recommend to junior scientists in order for them succeed in their scientific careers?​  

My primary recommendation would be to put yourself out into the world. As scientists we can become so hyper-focused on our own work that we miss out on opportunities to learn new things and chances for collaboration that are not going to arise within your own lab. You should go to conferences and actively participate in Q&A’s during oral presentations, and talk to people you don’t know at their posters, and go to various social events where you’re forced to talk to people you don’t know. There is nothing more valuable in your scientific (or maybe investing) career than making a new connection that opens a new door for you along your career path. While you may stumble upon some of those in the natural course of your lab work, you’ll have much greater success when you put yourself in unfamiliar situations. Don’t be scared to talk to someone you don’t know, even if they seem to be an extremely important person, because at the end of the day they’re just a person just the same as you! 

What do you think will be the next big contribution in the reproductive biology field?  

This will come as a surprise to no one within CRS, but the field typically referred to as Women’s Health has been critically underfunded not just from a research perspective but also an investment perspective for far too long. Thankfully, the significant unmet need in this space is becoming increasingly appreciated by investors and there is now real and growing interest in committing more capital to solve some of the field’s largest problems. What has become clear through conversations I have had with investors is that many are unsure where to even start given the wide range of opportunities. One area where I think we will see significant activity is in endometriosis given the significant size of this patient population and the dearth of medical/therapeutic options. There is definite interest in developing both diagnostics and therapeutics to address endometriosis and I expect to see a wave of companies in the coming years focused on addressing this issue.  

Do you have any notable stories from your time in CRS? 

I have probably too many notable stories from my time in CRS as it was such a critical (and fun) period of my professional development, but one story in that sticks out in particular involved a day of extensive biological sample collection from a large mouse study we performed in Evanston as part of research we were conducting investigating potential reproductive toxicities associated with exposure to 3D-printed materials. This experience was notable for the amount of coordination and collaboration (thank you to Emma Gargus, Sarah Wagner, and Max Edmonds particularly) required to execute in order to collect the large number of samples in a single day to conduct an extensive tox analysis and then transporting the samples from Evanston to our lab in Chicago without messing anything up. It was a very long day in which I don’t recall eating until we were finished sometime into the night, at which point I ordered food from restaurant that I thought was around the corner, but ended up accidentally ordering from a location very far away in my haze of exhaustion and then had to drive to pick up my food before the restaurant closed and then of course was unable to eat until I arrived back home, extending my period of exhaustion and starvation unnecessarily!