Leen Kawas on Turning Curiosity Into Career Pathways
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Curiosity is the trait every scientific institution claims to select for and almost none of them actually reward. Admissions committees ask about it and grant applications invoke it, while the career structures that follow are built around a narrower set of behaviours entirely. Leen Kawas, whose own path ran from doctoral research at the University of Washington through founding a therapeutics company and into venture investing, has been direct that the gap between the stated value and the operative one is where a great many scientific careers quietly stall.
What the Structure Actually Rewards
An academic career advances on publications in a defined area, on grants that require demonstrating expertise in that same area, and on a reputation built from consistency. Each of those pushes toward depth in an established line of work.
Following a genuinely new question means starting from a weaker position in an unfamiliar field, with no publication record and no obvious funder. The system does not forbid this. It simply makes it expensive at exactly the career stage when a researcher can least afford the cost, which produces the observed outcome without anyone intending it.
Curiosity as a Discipline
Leen Kawas has resisted the romantic version of the trait. Curiosity understood as following whatever seems interesting produces a scattered body of work and very little of consequence.
The useful version is narrower. It means noticing when a result does not fit the existing explanation and being willing to spend real time on the anomaly rather than filing it as noise. That behaviour is unglamorous and it usually leads nowhere. It is also the mechanism by which most significant findings actually begin.
The Commercial Translation
A specific kind of curiosity turns out to matter in company building, and it is not curiosity about science. It is curiosity about why a thing that should work does not.
A programme fails to reproduce. A trial design that looked sound generates ambiguous data. The gap Leen Kawas describes between researchers who thrive commercially and those who struggle is largely a matter of whether the unexpected result is treated as an obstacle or as information. The disposition is the same one that makes a good scientist, applied to a domain that includes manufacturing, regulation, supply logistics, and human behaviour.
Where Pathways Actually Open
Kawas has pointed to a pattern in how non-linear careers begin. They rarely start with a decision to change direction. They start with a question the person could not stop thinking about, pursued initially on the margins of their actual job.
The practical implication is that the intervention worth making is not career counselling. It is protecting the marginal time in which such questions can be pursued at all. A postdoctoral researcher with no unstructured hours will not develop the side interest that later becomes a company.
What Institutions Could Change
Several of the constraints are administrative rather than cultural. Whether a laboratory permits time on unfunded questions. Whether a department treats commercial exploration as a legitimate use of a trainee’s time. Whether technology transfer terms make a spinout worth attempting.
EIT Pharma’s early programmes and the wider ecosystem Kawas operates in reflect an assumption that these are design choices rather than fixed conditions. Institutions with comparable research output differ enormously in how many founders they produce, and the variation traces to specific policies rather than to the quality of the underlying science.
The Investor’s Version
Sitting on the financing side has given her a different vantage on the same trait. In early-stage diligence, the most informative question is often what the founder finds puzzling about their own data.
A founder who cannot name anything unresolved has either stopped looking or is managing the conversation. One who can articulate precisely what remains uncertain is usually the better bet, since the uncertainty will surface eventually and it is far cheaper to have it surface in a meeting than in a clinical trial.
Curiosity Without a Destination
The framing Kawas returns to is that a pathway is visible only in retrospect. Nobody follows a curiosity because they can see where it leads, and the ones that lead somewhere are indistinguishable at the outset from the many that do not.
That makes the advice unsatisfying as career guidance and accurate as description. What can be managed is the input rather than the outcome, which means preserving the capacity to notice anomalies and the time to chase a few of them. The pathway, if there is one, gets built out of that behaviour rather than chosen in advance of it. Leen Kawas sets out more of her own at leenkawas.com.