The Biotech Startups Podcast 🧬 Quitting Physics to Treat Biology Like an Engineering Problem | Richard Yu (Part 1/4)
Mar 16, 2026
38:35
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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. Along the way, Richard contrasts Berkeley’s sink-or-swim entrepreneurial energy with Yale’s rigorous East Coast culture, reflects on mentors who sharpened his scientific thinking, and explains how his early interest in systems biology and an unconventional postdoc path ultimately laid the foundation for Abalone Bio.
Key topics covered:
- Immigrant Roots & Core Values: How Richard's upbringing as the son of Chinese immigrants shaped his core values of kindness, resilience, and an outsider's perspective that still drives him today
- Discovering Biophysics at Berkeley: A chance conversation with a friend that flipped Richard's worldview — turning a physics major into a biophysics devotee who saw biology as an engineering discipline
- East Coast vs. West Coast Academic Culture: Berkeley's sink-or-swim hustle vs. Yale's rigorous academic intensity — and how Richard drew from both
- Early Intersections of Biology & Computation: Applying early machine learning to protein structure prediction and why Richard believes the magic always happens at the intersections
- Choosing an Unconventional Path: Resisting the academic tractor beam to join the Molecular Sciences Institute, a scrappy, under-the-radar hub that helped shape modern synthetic biology
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Find our guest, Richard Yu at these links:
Website: https://www.abalonebio.com/
Find our host, Jon Chee, at these links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonchee
Learn more about Excedr:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/excedr/
Website: https://www.excedr.com
Intro & Outro Songs Created by OkKyojin, Owned by Excedr:
Website: https://flow.page/kyojin
Resources & Articles:
Biophysics as an Engineering Discipline: https://www.nature.com/subjects/biophysics
Protein Structure & Crystallography: https://www.rcsb.org/
Early AI & Neural Networks in Protein Structure Prediction: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2
The Henderson-Hasselbalch Equation: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-chemistry-beta/x2eef969c74e0d802:acid-base-equilibria/x2eef969c74e0d802:buffers/a/henderson-hasselbalch-equation
X-ray Crystallography & NMR in Structural Biology: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26864/
Emergent Behavior & Complexity (Flocking / Murmuration): https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-simple-algorithm-that-ants-use-to-build-bridges-20180226/
Companies, Universities, & People mentioned:
UC Berkeley: https://www.berkeley.edu/
Yale University: https://www.yale.edu/
Molecular Sciences Institute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_Sciences_Institute
NIH (National Institutes of Health): https://www.nih.gov/
Teresa Head-Gordon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresa-head-gordon-873b3759
Roger Brent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roger-brent-0a3b55
Rob Carlson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-carlson-22a9792
Sydney Brenner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Brenner
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
03:24 Richard Yu’s Upbringing and His Immigrant Family Story
06:45 Moving for Work and Growing Up in New Jersey
08:10 Early Interest in Computers, Physics, and STEM
09:16 Discovering Biophysics at UC Berkeley
10:39 First Wet Lab Lessons and Learning How Biology Works
13:40 Choosing Grad School Over the Early Tech Boom
15:36 Arriving at Berkeley and Feeling Like an Outsider
20:10 Yale, East Coast Academic Culture, and Structural Biology
25:56 Startup Energy in the Lab and Richard’s Management Style
27:23 Moving Away from Academia Toward Applied Science
36:47 Outro
The Biotech Startups Podcast gives you a front-row seat to the business and science of building a biotech. Hosted by Jon Chee, CEO of Excedr, the show features honest conversations with founders, execs, and investors about their work, their companies, and how they got there. From scientific breakthroughs to startup lessons, each episode explores what it really takes to grow a life science company—from pre-seed to IPO.