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

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. A summer treating patients in Kenya and Tanzania convinced her that clinical medicine wasn't her path, and one offhand comment from her chemistry professor set the entire trajectory of her scientific career in motion.