🧬 2 Identity Crises, 1 Mission: From Broken Shoulder to Biotech Career | Nicole Paulk (Part 1/4)

Episode notes

The Biotech Startups Podcast is powered by Excedr —helping life science startups accelerate R&D and commercialization with founder-friendly equipment leasing. Skip the upfront costs, stay lean, and focus on breakthrough science. As a TBSP listener, you can get exclusive perks through Excedr’s partner network—special savings, promotions, and more. Explore these offers today: . “No one’s going to come and save you. You have to save yourself.” In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we sit down with Nicole Paulk , founder, CEO, and president of SIREN Biotechnology, a company pioneering universal AAV immunogene therapy to fight solid tumor cancers. Nicole takes us back to her roots — a scrappy, off-the-grid upbringing in the Pacific Northwest where a lumberjack dad raised her like a son and sports were everything, until recurring shoulder injuries ended her collegiate volleyball career at 18 and triggered her first identity crisis. She walks us through the hustle that followed; swim lessons, kickboxing classes, deli shifts, and crabbing in Puget Sound just to survive, and how she stumbled into science not out of passion, but out of a need for a paycheck at a small ag school.