Kirsten Detrick T’92 spent more than 30 years as an executive in the biopharma industry, working for firms such as Takeda, Amgen, and Bristol Myers Squibb. Detrick recently returned to Tuck to teach the mini course “Contemporary Issues in Biotechnology,” which is offered every year in the spring.

Detrick discusses her career, her course, and some of the most pressing challenges faced today in the biopharma space. Detrick uses her position as an adjunct professor to teach, coach, motivate, and inspire. As she explains in the conversation, biopharma is a business, “but unlike other businesses, it has humanity at the very core of what it’s about. The people who succeed, thrive and find themselves attracted to this industry are those who hear a higher calling and want to use business to address that higher calling.”

In a new paper, Raghav Singal creates a model that answers an important counterfactual question for people harmed by delay-and-deny: what if the procedure was approved in a timely fashion? Using specific healthcare data, Raghav’s model can answer that question with striking accuracy, showing the probability that a timely screening or procedure could have had a positive impact on a patient’s health.

Adjunct professor Joshua Lewis spent 35 years in venture capital and private equity and has a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford. He brings that experience and knowledge to bear in a new course he developed for Tuck called Moral Reasoning: From Machiavelli to The Bomb to AI. In it, he blends classic moral philosophy with real and fictional protagonists to inspire students to contemplate and discuss ethical decision-making in a variety of contexts. In this episode, Lewis talks about the genesis of the course, his teaching style, and some examples of the protagonists the students study. Two students, Leen Ajlouni T’25 and Ryan Montgomery T’26 also share their thoughts on the course.