Q&A with Leah Sibener: Building the Pipeline for Women in Life Sciences

March is Women’s History Month in the United States – an opportunity to celebrate the contributions and achievements of women in a variety of fields. As the month comes to a close, we’re pleased to share a recent Q&A with Leah Sibener, PhD.

Dr. Sibener is co-founder and Head of Therapeutic Discovery at 3T. She took a few moments to share her thoughts on leadership styles, mentorship, the “leaky” pipeline for women in scientific leadership, and more. ?

Did you ever see yourself founding a company?

It was never an ambition of mine to start a company. 3T Biosciences spun out of research I and my co-founder, Dr. Marvin Gee, did when we were at Stanford in Dr. Christopher Garcia's lab. It was at a time when immunotherapy was seeing transformational results in the clinic. The question came up: “If we have T cells that we know are producing clinical responses, what are the targets that are associated with those?” We wanted to know if we could identify those targets unbiasedly. From that, we were able to develop a technology where we could take the T-cell receptors (TCRs), find these targets, and then develop therapeutics around that. We spun the company out.

We spent the first few years at 3T scaling the platform and building our initial team, and recently, we’ve been able to build around that success as a platform company and transition 3T into a therapeutics company. It’s a huge privilege to have the opportunity to translate your discovery to patients. I don’t think it’s something any founder takes for granted.

How would you describe your leadership style?

There are many different aspects to leadership on an organizational and individual level. A guiding principle is understanding how we succeed as a team, as a company, and being able to align the team around the strategy. At the foundation of success is building trust within the team, which I see as a crucial component to leadership. It’s important to have crystal-clear communication, be able to motivate, inspire, and to have empathy and gratitude for the team.?

What kind of environment do you try to create for your team members to be successful?

There’s no one way to practice science – there are infinite ways to get to solving a problem. So, at 3T, we try to create an environment of open discussion and discourse on different pathways to get us to our goal.

It’s important that scientists have the opportunity to voice their opinion and be creative, even if it’s not the consensus. Sometimes it’s critical to be contrarian to stimulate discussion and come up with new ways of thinking about things. We want to promote a way of thinking differently about problems and ensure nobody ever feels silenced.

As a society, how can we encourage more women to pursue STEM careers?

In life sciences, there are more women who pursue PhDs than men. But at some point that pipeline breaks down and there’s a disconnect between the distribution of individuals who are getting trained in STEM and those that go on to take on leadership positions. For me, mentorship and from both men and women, formal and informal, has been essential to my growth and development. Finding support is essential. More female representation certainty helps to inspire and provides opportunities for mentorship.

It is also important that we identify the contributing factors for the breakdown in the pipeline and identify how we can enable change and provide solutions to overcome them. Putting effort into finding strategic and tangible mechanisms of support can be something every company and leader investigates. There won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution for all workplaces but identifying what we can do to support women is important at all levels will help grow and retain women leaders in our field.