030226 ~ Celebration of Women in Business - Connie Chang

A celebration of women in business on the Lucian Land Show.

During this International Women's Month, Ann Arbor's talk station, 1290 WLBY, salutes

women who are champions of innovation, service, and leadership.

Here's Lucian.

Remarkable women are driving progress throughout the Ann Arbor region and fields such as business

technology, biosciences, and automotive.

Women make up approximately 56% of the workforce in the life sciences industry, representing

a female majority field in terms of overall employment and education.

Though women earn more than half of the degrees in biological sciences, a significant gender

gap persists in leadership.

Ann Arbor's Connie Chang broke through that barrier long ago.

Connie's 25-year-plus career spans a broad spectrum of life sciences, from the commercial

organizations at Big Pharma to early stage biomedical tech commercialization, and now

clinical stage biopharma.

She is currently Chief Operating Officer of ONL Therapeutics, that is a venture-backed

clinical stage therapeutics company.

And I like to describe ONL Therapeutics as they're working on curing blindness, but more

on that in a moment.

Connie, welcome.

Tell us about your personal journey, your early background, and what drew you to a career

in life science and business.

Thank you so much, Lucian, for having me on the show.

It's great to be here today and to be part of this whole initiative, celebrating women

in leadership.

My journey, you know, it's a really great question.

How did I come to like, you know, the biological sciences?

And I think it really stems from my grandparents.

My grandfather came here in the 50s and studied science.

And so I grew up around people who talked about biology, talked about science, encouraged

curiosity.

And so I think it was just very natural for me to tend to move in that direction.

I mean, that said, I think growing up in the 70s and 80s, you know, being a girl who

was considered smart or good at math, that wasn't always the cool thing to be.

So I think a lot of it, too, was just coming to really celebrate the fact that being curious

about the world is really interesting and very rewarding.

Your grandparents came here from Taiwan?

That's right.

Yeah.

I mean, they came as part of a lot of Taiwanese scientists and engineers in the 50s and

60s.

My grandfather came to study his PhD in biology.

My father actually then met my mother who came over as well.

My father is also from Taiwan and he came to study engineering first at Baylor and then

at Brown.

And we like to say as a family that we have this strong and deep connection to Michigan,

my grandfather ended up taking a faculty position at Adrian College and he and my grandmother

ended up settling here with my mother's two sisters, younger sisters for many decades.

And so I grew up spending summers in Adrian, Michigan.

But you certainly had a wherewithal of how importance education is given that family background.

That's right.

I think I was really lucky in that regard, too.

There was a lot of encouraging of the women in my family in particular.

My grandmother herself was not formally educated, but understood the power of having an education

and always encouraged her own three daughters and then in turn, her multiple granddaughters,

including myself, to continue our education and to really go for it in any way that we

wanted to.

You received your Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychobiology from Harvard University graduating

Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Campa as well and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Where did you grow up and what put you on the path to attend Harvard?

Well, you know, I mean, those are a lot of letters behind my name and at the end of the

day, I consider myself a Michiganter.

I did K through 12 in Michigan and I think what really set me up for, you know, academic

success or academic achievement was really having a lot of great mentors along the way.

I talked about my grandparents, I talked about my parents, but along the way teachers in

the public school system in both Troy and Bloomfield Hills were instrumental in helping support

my progress.

I will never forget Pam Ross, my math teacher in high school, really encouraged math and

science with girls.

You probably know this, but girls over the years have always dropped out in higher numbers

and boys at some of the math and sciences.

I think that's changing now and hopefully it's a change for good, but at the time we

spent a lot of time talking about that and how to encourage girls and young women to stay

in the math and sciences.

You were hired as Chief Operating Officer at O&L Therapeutics in 2021.

This is a biotech company.

It's focused on preventing the death of key retinal cells, including photo receptors.

The root cause of vision loss and the leading cause of blindness.

What is your day-to-day role in responsibilities at O&L?

You know, it's funny when you say Chief Operating Officer, I'm sure people have a sense

of what that C-suite means.

And for me, Chief is really less about, C is less about Chief, C is more about Comprehensive.

And so I do all sorts of things for the company, big and small.

My job is really to keep the operations of the company going and to be very supportive

of our mission of helping patients see the future.

I essentially make sure that we are running whether it's large-scale contracts that are

multi-million dollar and multi-year all the way down and making sure that our physical

plant and operations and office space is conducive to the work that we do.

But if I'm really introspective, I think the most important thing that I do is to make

sure that we have a company culture that supports the people that we have who every day

work their hard out to see this vision through and to make sure it's an engaging and worthwhile

place for them to work.

Connie, what is the key to developing that company culture?

What does that look like?

I think it's really not rocket science, it's keeping people first.

In my career now that has been multi-decade as you pointed out, I've had a lot of different

functional roles, but I think at the end of the day now it's really all about the people

and making sure that people see ways that they can grow personally and professionally within

our company and also setting them up for success, whether it's in our company or in the longer

term outside of O&L, it's really important to care about people's trajectories.

I certainly have benefited from mentors along the way who have really cared about mine.

We are celebrating women in business on the Lucy Ann Lanshow.

Our guest is Connie Chang of O&L Therapeutics.

What do you think is the best way to motivate young people then, especially women?

That's a really great question and I thought a lot about this.

At the end of the day, I think it is all about setting really high expectations of oneself

and not being afraid to set those expectations for yourself and for other people.

As a leader, I think my leadership style is probably best described as direct demanding,

but also deeply committed to the success of our organization and our people, direct

meaning being very, very clear.

I think it's important for people to be clear on what their personal objectives are and

what the company or institution that they're working for is.

I think it's very important to set goals that are achievable, but a little bit of a stretch

and to push your people to the point where they can be very successful.

And then at the end of the day, being very committed, deeply committed to encouraging young

people today, especially women.

I was really struck by a UN report that came out last year.

It's actually called the Gender Snapshot 2025, and they said equality is not a cost.

It is an opportunity.

And in fact, it's a $342 trillion opportunity worldwide.

If we can lift up women, we're going to lift up everybody.

And so I think it's really important to spotlight women as you're doing so and to continue

to encourage women along the way.

Sometimes women who exhibit the qualities that you outlined there, especially being demanding,

are viewed differently than men are with the same qualities.

How does one handle that in the workplace?

That's 100% right.

As a female leader, I am acutely aware that there's often an extra layer of judgment

about my style and my results that might not be there if I was a man.

Women have been talking about this for ages, and I think we're making some really good

inroads.

But I think the leadership lesson here is to acknowledge and reframe.

Make it positive.

If somebody is feeling that they're underestimated, I say knock it out of the park and show them

why women in particular can make a difference.

Obviously your style has been very successful prior to O&L therapeutics where you are

COO.

You were vice president of corporate affairs at Melendo, therapeutics responsible for building

critical infrastructure.

As that company then went public, became publicly traded.

You also served as the inaugural managing director of Fast Forward Medical Innovation, the commercialization

and entrepreneurship arm of the University of Michigan Medical School supporting early

stage tech development.

And earlier in your career, you were one of those in our community who worked at Pfizer

and you stayed here afterwards.

Unfortunately, a lot of those workers had to leave and go to jobs elsewhere across the

country.

But you were working on commercial teams and allergy, respiratory, cardiovascular, and

CNS.

So as you look at your career and how you've built it up through the years, is that a trajectory

you would recommend for everyone, always look for that next goal to set and to make?

It's funny that you should bring this up because I think when I look at my career and

the thread that you can pull through all of these different experiences, it seems like

it was part of a really great plan.

At the time though, I feel like each move I made was less about moving up or forward

and was more about, can I broaden my horizons, am I learning something?

And the key was always who am I working for, who am I working with?

Are these people people who are going to have my back?

And so with those choices, with that thought in mind, I was able to make a really big

move actually from moving from the Boston community where there's a huge hotbed of biotech

that made the decision to move to Michigan, which at the time was probably one of the biggest

professional risks that I thought I was making, was moving away from that and moving here.

And unbeknownst to me at the time, the decision making was, am I going to learn something,

is this going to challenge me?

And unbeknownst to me at the time, it ended up being one of the best decisions I could

have ever made coming to Michigan.

It is really interesting because we're in the Midwest here.

We don't belly who are successes.

We don't position ourselves the way they do on the west and the east coast when it comes

to technology and the sciences, the life sciences.

We're a little quieter about the successes we're having here.

So I can see where someone would be surprised coming back here that all of this is here for

the taking, isn't it?

That's absolutely correct.

And I think when you come from a big company background, like I did, big farm pseudicals

like Pfizer, you don't realize,

that a lot of the innovation happens in the academic setting, a lot of the innovations

that eventually become drugs or cures or new standards of care, they start in the academic

setting with the very brilliant people that we have at University of Michigan, but also

the other great Michigan institutions like Michigan State University and Wayne State.

So the kernels of innovation happen in those labs and some of them can be taken forward

into small companies, medium-sized companies like the one I'm in and then ultimately into

big companies to become things that are going to be life-saving solutions for people.

People.

So let's talk about the future of ONL therapeutics then.

In late 2024, ONL secured 65 million in series D financing.

Johnson and Johnson Innovation led the round that was backed by a consortium of investors.

Give us insight as to how close ONL is to meeting its goals and the trials that you have

underway and how this positions your company for the future.

We are just thrilled that we were able to, at the end of 2024, partner with investors

like Johnson and Johnson Innovations and like Novartis Venture Fund to be able to embark

on a very large scale clinical trial of our lead compound.

It's called Zella Fastletide and it came out of the academic lab of Dr. David Zachs here

in the University of Michigan.

Our next step is that we are in the process of executing this clinical trial.

It is to study geographic atrophy, which is a degenerative disease of the retina where

people will slowly go blind.

And if we're successful, at the end of 2027, we should have a really good sense of whether

our drug is working to help patients slow down the progression and perhaps even halt the

progression if we're lucky enough and be able to help patients in their quality of life.

We need to think this is going on right here in our backyard and it's replicated over

and over again in many different companies with great people like yourself working so hard.

It's hard to fathom, I think, for those of us that aren't in this industry.

Well, it takes a village and I think if I'm broad enough in the net that I cast, I've

got to say that the university has a really big role in that, the tech transfer, all of

the university leadership, but then also the community of entrepreneurship here in Ann

Arbor.

We've got Ann Arbor Spark that does a great job of encouraging founders and helping them

with the resources that they need to get these ideas off the ground.

Is the eventual goal then for ONL to be acquired or what happens after that?

No, it's a great question, Lucian.

There are a lot of different paths forward for a company like ONL clearly being acquired

by a bigger company is definitely one potential path forward.

I also think that the company, if it wanted to expand and continue to grow and choose its

own adventure, so to speak, it very well may be able to do that.

There's a lot of great talent here in the area and then there's also the hybrid work

environment that we find ourselves in now.

Many of our employees actually do live and work in the greater Ann Arbor area, but some

of our employees are fully virtual and work in other states and I think that's sort of

the new normal now post-COVID.

Well, you can tap into so many other great minds doing that too.

Absolutely.

Connie Chang, what are you most proud of in your career so far?

You know, I would remiss if I didn't say that a lot of part of the journey for me has

been on the personal front also being not only a woman leader, but also a mother and I've

been able to raise two daughters with my very supportive spouse.

My two daughters now are young women on their own trying to move from their college experiences

into being independent young adults.

And so that's one of the things I'm really proud of is hopefully having served as a good

role model to them and good role model to others as well who are going to experience both

the highs and the lows of trying to balance all the things that they want to do in life.

And it's never easy, as you well know as well, but it's always a lot of fun.

Connie Chang, Chief Operating Officer at O&L Therapeutics, a woman of distinction in the field

of life sciences.

As we celebrate women in business, I'm Lucy Ann Lance.

Ann Arbor's Talk Station, 1290 WLBY.