A L U M N A P R O F I L E | C E L I A E CO N O M I D E S ’ 9 7
A Biotech Executive Persists in Life and Work Celia Economides ’97 is well acquainted with persistence. As an executive at a biotech company in San Francisco, persistence is a trait that comes in handy. Fostering the development of new drugs for rare diseases often requires soliciting millions of dollars in investments, decades of trial and error in the labs, and lots and lots of patience. Economides said she learned about persistence early on. When preparing for college while at Hutchison, she applied to her dream school, McGill University in Montreal. After she didn’t get accepted, her mother told her to reapply. “I thought she was crazy,” Economides remembers thinking. She talked with Leonard Frey, who was associate headmaster and college counselor at Hutchison, and set up a conference call with the admissions office at McGill. She resubmitted her application with a new essay and an additional letter of recommendation from Glenda Pera, her English teacher. She recalled getting a phone call from Mr. Frey after exams and assumed the worst. “Instead he told me he had just received a fax from McGill (yes, a fax!) that I had been accepted! From that moment on, I learned to be persistent, steadfast, and tenacious—qualities that I attribute to my success.” You might think that would only happen once in a person’s life, but it didn’t. Later, when Economides was working at Columbia University in New York on an Alzheimer’s research study, she applied to study for a Master’s of Public Health. Like her previous experience, she wasn’t admitted. She persisted though, meeting with the dean of admissions and resubmitting her application for a different discipline. Three days later, she was accepted to Columbia. Economides doesn’t hide these experiences. In fact, they are almost a mark of pride. “It’s a story I continue to tell in my professional life and when I mentor people,” Economides explained. “I learned at a young age that persistence pays off, and you have to be your own advocate. You will never get what you don’t ask for, and there’s no downside to trying.” Putting a Wide Range of Experience to Use Economides works for Kezar Life Sciences, a clinical-stage biotech company researching treatments for patients with autoimmune diseases. The diseases the company is focused on usually affect about 200,000 people or fewer, so they are rare, but not ultra rare. Kezar currently has a drug candidate in Phase 2 trials across five separate autoimmune diseases, including lupus nephritis (inflammation of the kidneys caused by lupus), dermatomyositis/polymyositis (types of muscle weaknesses 20 | Hutchison
Photographs by Mo Saito
