🧬 Quitting Physics to Treat Biology Like an Engineering Problem | Richard Yu (Part 1/4)
The Biotech Startups Podcast · 2026-03-16 · 39 min
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: . Episode Description: "The magic is always at the intersections." In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we explore CEO & co-founder of Abalone Bio, Richard Yu ’s journey from his Midwestern and New Jersey upbringing as the son of Chinese immigrants to UC Berkeley and Yale, tracing how living at the intersection of cultures and disciplines shaped his identity as a scientist and founder. He shares how a friend's pitch about “engineering proteins to eat dirt” pulled him from physics into biophysics, igniting a passion for treating biology as an engineering discipline.