Meet a Whitehead Alum: Alicia Zhou, CEO of the Cancer Research Institute

Alicia Zhou is the CEO of the Cancer Research Institute (CRI), a nonprofit organization that is focused on funding basic science research for cancer immunotherapy. As an undergraduate at MIT, she was a member of Whitehead Institute Founding Member Robert Weinberg’s lab. She then completed her PhD in the lab of William Hahn at the Broad Institute and a postdoc in the lab of Andrei Goga at UCSF before switching career paths. She spent nine years at the health technology company Color, eventually becoming its Chief Science Officer, and has been in her current role at CRI since 2024. Here she discusses her career path from academic scientist to CEO, what she learned from Weinberg, and how science skills have served her well in all areas of her life.

Whitehead Institute: What excites you about your work at the Cancer Research Institute (CRI)?

Zhou: Being able to help make sure that our field, cancer research, has the necessary funding to drive discovery is important to me. There are two things about this moment that make me feel like CRI is the right vehicle to maximize the impact I can have. Firstly, this is an exciting time in biology with the birth of precision medicine. The field of molecular biology is actually relatively young, and I think we’re in an era of explosive discovery, where there is a ton of knowledge being acquired and turned into applications, drugs, diagnostics, and treatments for patients. At the same time, the field is having this atypical contraction of funding or loss of certainty in funding. CRI is helping to make sure that our field is properly funded during this critical time, so that the trajectory of discovery and healthcare advances can continue.

If your work succeeds in the way you hope over the next decade, what do you think will become possible that isn't possible now?

Immunotherapy is a treatment that has been life-changing for certain patients. People who would have been told they had a few years to live are now living for decades. With some cancers, we’re even starting to use the word cure for the first time. At the same time, we are painfully aware that there are many patients for whom immunotherapy doesn’t work. It feels incomplete and insufficient to not be able to bring that level of treatment for all patients. What I hope to be able to crack in the next ten years is a better understanding of how to apply immunotherapy in a way that works for all indications and all patients.

Cancer is a heterogeneous disease, and so the solution is going to require a multifactorial approach. There won’t be just one solution. I’m excited because we now have research tools to do truly combinatorial hypothesis testing. What’s happening at the intersection of single cell RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and AI I think is going to really make it possible for us to transform cancer therapy.

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A Power Ranger, but it turns out that’s not a real profession. I fell in love with biology when I was in high school and had the privilege to work in my very first research lab at the University of Chicago at that time. I really enjoyed working at the bench. Both of my parents were academics, and my initial hypothesis for myself was that I was going to become an academic scientist as well.

You did study to be and work as an academic scientist for many years, including in Bob Weinberg’s lab here at Whitehead as an undergraduate. What drew you to Bob’s lab?

I was a freshman at MIT, and one of the reasons I choose MIT was the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). I decided right away I wanted to be in a lab, and I had worked in a cancer lab in high school, so I googled “cancer lab MIT” and saw Bob Weinberg’s name. Of course, Bob was a hugely accomplished and busy scientist, but to teenage Alicia it seemed completely reasonable to send him an email saying, "Hey, I'm a freshman. I have a little bit of experience doing breast cancer research. I really want to work in a lab. Do you have space for a UROP?” And the magic of Bob Weinberg is that he responded to that naïve request by writing “Okay, come and meet with me.”

I walked across campus to Whitehead and had what you could call an interview, but anybody who's ever interviewed with Bob Weinberg will tell you that it's just a conversation where he asks you about who you are. He hired me and I stayed in his lab my entire four years of undergrad. He treated me like a full-time lab member. Everybody in the lab did. I had an incredible mentor, Sendurai Mani, who was a postdoc in Bob’s lab and is now at Brown.

I had the most transformative experience in Bob’s lab. Bob humanized for me in so many ways what it looks like to be excellent as a scientist, but also excellent as a mentor. I think that he is a person who just deeply enjoys the curiosity of science and the relationships that he gets to have with his lab members. When someone enjoys their job that much, it necessarily rubs off on everybody around them, and Bob was quietly modeling for all of us what it looks like when you love your job. Another thing I learned from Bob is that investing in people and relationships is just as important as knowing the science.

What eventually made you decide to switch career paths away from academic science?

During my postdoc, I was preparing to go on maternity leave with my son, who is now eleven. I realized that I would have to put all of my experiments on hold, and that it didn’t seem to matter to everyone else as much as it mattered to me. That made me ask the question: am I having as much impact as I think I should be?

I also realized that as biologists, sometimes we get a little tunnel visioned about there only being one career path. In reality, being a well-trained scientist means that you're a person who understands how to prioritize, how to project manage, what to do in the face of uncertainty. You plan things carefully, like you would an experiment, and you’re resilient when things go wrong, because they will go wrong. You make the best decisions you can with the data that you have, you're adaptable and data-driven, and all of these skills can make you excellent at many careers. Since my career transition, I’ve come to appreciate that the skills I developed during my scientific training can lead to success in many different ways.

Could you say more about how you apply scientific skills to other parts of your life?

The scientific process is thoroughly embedded in the way I live my life. One of the things that I teach about leadership is the concept of a null hypothesis, which in science means you always start from the possibility of there being no effect or relationship: it’s the baseline you test against to prove whether there is or is not a significant result. In life, I see the null hypothesis as: if we do nothing, if we stick with the status quo, what happens? Then you can ask yourself what you need to change to improve upon that baseline. You have to recognize that the status quo is a position you are choosing to take before you can interrogate whether it is optimal. For example, when you are an executive at a company, you may be planning to launch a product in May, but you realize the product will be bad if you launch then. Once you recognize that launching in May is the default position, you can ask, what can be better than default? What change do we need to make? Change the timeline? Change the product specs? Redefine success? 

Another aspect of this approach is that on any given day, you’re always just trying to be better than what you were the day before. One of our core principles here at CRI is progress over perfection. In the moment, your progress will feel very incremental, but when you look back you will realize how much you’ve achieved. This is exactly how science is done. You ask incremental questions, and then you look back and realize that you’ve answered a fundamental question.

That’s what it was like in Bob’s lab when I was working with Mani on a hypothesis he had for how cancer cells become able to spread and form new tumors: that first they acquire stem-cell-like behavior. The paper that came out of that work ended up being the most-cited paper I was ever a part of and in hindsight was something of a paradigm-shifting discovery for the field. But in the moment, it was very incremental. Mani asked: if this hypothesis is right, what would we see? What data would we need to collect to indicate that? OK, then we need to look for these certain markers, which means we need to do this sort of experiment, which means we need to get some cell culture going… There was no eureka moment, just the next step to take. Recognizing the power of the incremental approach has provided a lot of clarity for me on how to think about my life.

That is a great insight. Let’s end with two quick-fire questions. First: what do you think is the greatest scientific discovery of the last century?

The discovery of DNA completely changed how we understand biology. It led to our molecular and cellular understanding of biology, and the subsequent breakthroughs that have come from that.

If you have one, what is your favorite science fact?

I don’t know if it’s exactly a science fact, but I like to share with non-scientists that a lot of discoveries happen by accident, or at least in a very non-linear way. The discovery of penicillin is a famous example. GLP-1s came from studying lizard saliva. The researchers who found CRISPR were not trying to figure out how to edit genomes. Calling these accidents makes it sound like the discoveries were not deliberate. I think the thing about scientists is that we are really good at following the data, even when it is unexpected, wherever it takes us.

Thank you so much for your time.