Nucleate/ is a student-led non-profit organization (founded in the US, now having numeorus chapter all over the world) that empowers the next generation of biotech leaders.
In September 2025, in InnoDom Cologne, I had the pleasure to first meet Ivan, a US student who is doing his PhD at DZNE Bonn, and started the NRW chapter. Nucleate Germany has existed since 2023 but opened in NRW in 2025. I am happy to be one of 9 members of the ever-growing leadership team.
Apart from the local Biotech Breakfast/Biotech Beer events that we organize, I am also part of Activator, our 6-month flagship program, a type of accelerator for start-ups. Through the 6-month intensive program, we organize workshops where we collect experts, mentors, and panelists for our workshops and weekly sessions with our selected teams. I recently got promoted to Lead Communications for Activator, and I am also part of the Comms team that you see on LinkedIn and Instagram posts.
I enjoy Nucleate, as through them I am learning about the biotech ecosystem in NRW and the whole of Germany. I am sitting at a round table where founders, creators, visionaries, and investors make big decisions. There is no hierarchy, judgment, or micromanagement. Complete freedom to express myself as a scientist and entrepreneur, and to learn from the best.
I am happy that I have a big group of best friends here in Köln (some in Bonn and also Aachen) and expand to The Creator Fund, super cool people. The network is ever-growing, and the challenges are growing.
Working with startups, sourcing experts and mentors, pushing people with emails, handling miscommunications and conflicts professionally -> makes me grow in a way my routine job is not allowing me to. Listening to academics’ problems and bridging them to industry and translational needs provides the biggest pleasure.
Nucleate to me is like a sunny end of a dark tunnel. I was most of my life surrounded by people who deeply believe they are average and wanted a stable, comfortable life. With that thinking, they always pulled me to the bottom. I was forced to break all of my friendships with people due to my entrepreneurial nature and them not matching my vision, integrity, consistency, depth, and emotional sensitivity. Then I was always in workplaces where people do their jobs just for money, highly performative, obedient, and highly hierarchical places that made me shrink and minimize. Nucleate gave me iron lungs in the times of polio paralysis of a rigid system, job market misalignment, and performative friendships.
