Mary O'Reilly

We love to spotlight those team members with roles whose visibility runs counter to their success. The smoother the lab runs, the easier it is to forget that people like Suzannah, with her no-nonsense, can-do demeanor, are the backbone of everything we are doing here.

We are delighted to congratulate Arena co-founder @SchreiberStuart (2nd from right) on being awarded the Robert Koch Gold Medal in Berlin last week by the Robert Koch Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to supporting science. Photo ©RobertKochStiftung

Dave is a dreamer and a doodler who won our first t-shirt design contest, but you won't find him at the back of the class. His laid-back vibe belies a mind bursting with ideas and insights that challenge, inspire, and fuel an infectious desire to turn them into hope for patients.

Ziyi Chen and Alex Wolff popped over from Arena to talk about challenges in predicting protein binding to small molecules at Connecting the Dots: Biology at Scale in the Age of AI, hosted by @broadinstitute.

Dara Leto exudes the gentle selflessness of a true dog person. But when it comes to finding opportunities to reach across disciplines and form meaningful collaborations, she is as tenacious as the objects of her affection and has just as good a nose for finding worthwhile paths.

First-time dad Travis Blum knows that bringing something new into the world is hard, messy work, and about the most rewarding thing a person can do. He reaches beyond his job description to help in any way he can, his apologetic smile forever signaling regret for time's finitude.

Nicole, like many, charted her course during the Great Recession. Opting to forgo a Ph.D. (you'd never guess), she forged on to become a leader in computational biology—most recently at Pfizer—while building a family. She is thrilled to see today's buffet of post-Ph.D. options.

Always good for a laugh, Dan Gray—voted most likely to reference the Peloponnesian War while talking science—hails from a literary family. Though he broke from tradition to study science, he reads voraciously, and his interests—like his thinking—run both broad and deep.

Arena's first Summer Social was a smashing success! It was a warm welcome for many new faces and a bittersweet sendoff for three research associates who helped turn the Arena dream into a reality and are now taking their hard work and grit to graduate school.

Ken Lam is as humble as they come, but don't be mistaken. During presentations, his kindly asked but searingly insightful questions have been known to leave jaws on the floor. Penetrating minds like his are invaluable to shortening the path from insights to therapeutics.

Like some modern-day reverse Christopher Wren, Tasos might have been an architect but brought his design sense to the molecular scale. Fueled by espresso, this physician-scientist-dad-of-a-toddler never loses sight of the potential impact of his role. He could use a nap though.

Polyglot Giulia Oliva speaks English, Greek, French, and her native Italian. She would love to learn more but is busy with another manner of translation—turning her splendido mind to generating insights in the lab that she hopes to translate to new ways of treating disease.

When Martha walked into Arena's first holiday party and saw chalk drawings of holly in the shape of DNA, she didn't see a decoration. She saw an invitation. We celebrate our doodlers, designers, musicians, and artists of all kinds. Creativity out of lab begets creativity in lab.

Huge congratulations to this legendary Celtics team and to our own executive chairman and Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca, seen here in front celebrating with the champs in his Celtics green shirt. We are inspired by what can be accomplished when we work as a TEAM!

(1/3) With final revisions underway for our 1st Arena publication—a Perspective by @SchreiberStuart likening molecular glues to mutations & PTMs authors.elsevier.com/sd/arti…—serendipity (& Brian Liau's Lab) uncovered a glue mimicking an insertion! #chembiol biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

Manvendra Singh dreamt of becoming a pediatrician before he fell in love with organic chemistry. He still loves children and his young ones inspire him to approach designing diverse and complex compounds in the same way they approach life: with fearlessness, creativity, and awe.

Cornell grad Cristina Dabaco feels at home near our fledgling library. Her growing Goodreads list has her currently logged at 565 books, and her firm grasp of the sweeping narrative makes her a terrific science communicator, voted most likely to ask for a paper from the 1930s.

On a sunny day, you might find Ligi taking a break from her gene editing work to spend a minute on our balcony, feeling as nourished as the plants in her lovingly curated garden. She is a microbiologist by training with good lab hands to house her green thumb.