Corporate boards in the life sciences are assembled with care, yet they are often populated by people whose deepest expertise lies in finance, law, or general management. The scientific work that actually drives a biotech company forward, the drug discovery, the clinical trial design, the regulatory navigation, frequently occupies a minority of the boardroom perspective. Leen Kawas, a pharmacologist, inventor, and co-founder of Propel Bio Partners, has a particular view on what that absence costs, as argued here.
Kawas arrived in the United States from Jordan in 2008 to pursue a Ph.D. in Molecular Pharmacology at Washington State University. She went on to co-found what became Athira Pharma, serving as its CEO from 2014 through 2021, during which time she co-invented the company’s lead Alzheimer’s drug candidate and steered the company through an IPO that raised over $400 million. That path, from bench scientist to public company chief executive, gave her a vantage point that is genuinely uncommon: she has been the scientist in the room, and she has been the person responsible for capital allocation and investor relations at the same time. The experience shaped a clear conviction about what boards need in order to serve their companies well.
What Scientific Literacy Changes
Kawas has spoken directly about the value she brings to the boards she serves on, including Inherent Biosciences and Persephone Biosciences, by drawing on expertise in drug discovery, clinical trial methodologies, regulatory strategy, and commercialisation. These are not abstract categories. They describe the sequence of decisions that determine whether a promising compound ever reaches a patient, and at what cost, and on what timeline. A board that cannot evaluate those decisions independently of management is a board that is working at a disadvantage.
The point is not that scientifically trained directors override management judgment. It is that they can ask different questions. When a clinical programme produces unexpected results, a director with deep scientific background can help the board understand whether that result changes the thesis for the drug or merely adjusts the path forward. When a regulatory strategy is presented, a scientist on the board can probe its assumptions in ways that a finance-trained director, however capable, may not be positioned to do. The quality of board oversight in biotech depends substantially on whether the people providing it understand the science.
The Networking Dimension
The argument at the heart of Leen Kawas’s case for scientist-directors includes something less discussed in governance conversations: the network value that scientist-directors bring. She has noted that one of the most important capacities for a scientist making the leap into entrepreneurship is the ability to build relationships across the industry, and that this is a skill which does not develop automatically in an academic or research environment. Scientist-directors who have successfully navigated that transition carry relationships with key opinion leaders, regulatory advisers, potential collaborators, and investors who understand the science. Those networks can be activated on behalf of portfolio companies in ways that generalist board members are rarely positioned to replicate.
At Propel Bio Partners, the investment firm Kawas co-founded in 2022 (her background is on EIT Pharma’s leadership page), scientific depth is built into the support model. The firm offers not only capital but operational and technical assistance to early-stage and small-cap public biotech companies. That structure reflects a view that the gap between promising science and successful commercialisation is frequently a gap in practical expertise rather than in the underlying biology. Boards with scientists can help close that gap from the governance level downward.
Diversity as a Related Argument
Kawas has been consistent, noted in this account, in connecting the case for scientific representation on boards to the broader argument for diverse leadership. She has pointed to research demonstrating that companies with diverse management teams tend to outperform on financial metrics, and she frames this not as a moral claim but as a strategic one. A board that draws on a narrow range of professional backgrounds is making a choice about the range of perspectives it will bring to critical decisions. In a field as technically demanding as biotech, where the consequences of poor scientific judgment can be measured in years of development time and hundreds of millions of dollars, expanding that range is not a concession. More detail is at https://www.inherentbio.com/team/leen-kawas. It is a competitive decision.