January 7, 2025
When Ephraim Tsalik transitioned from academia to Danaher, he had the chance to combine his infectious disease expertise with teams across various Danaher operating companies. His work aims to accelerate medical product advancement and improve the future. We met Ephraim to discuss his experience and future goals.
My role is chief scientific officer for infectious diseases for Danaher Diagnostics.
Before joining Danaher, I was in academia. I was a tenured associate professor at Duke University, and now I maintain an adjunct appointment there. I’m an infectious disease physician by training, and I still do clinical work at the Veteran’s Affairs (VA) hospital in Durham, North Carolina.
In my role at the platform, I have the privilege of getting to interface with a lot of different stakeholders that are both internal and external to figure out what opportunities we should be pursuing.
I love it. It’s a lot of fun.
I came in part because I have something to give, but I also have a tremendous amount to receive just working with people who are thinking about the marketing components, the technical components, the commercial elements, and just having all of those different perspectives come together so that we can ultimately advance a product that does good in the world, but also is sort of constrained by the realities of how you make something that people are actually going to use and buy.
One of the things that seems to be shifting to some extent at Danaher is that there’s a recognition that if we’re only focused on the next few years, we’re going to miss out on the activities that we need to start now in order to really innovate and drive the field forward five years from now, seven years from now, 10 years from now.
Given that recognition, there are mechanisms to help enable some of that earlier-stage research, like the Beacon programs, which are opportunities to engage with external collaborators — typically in academia — to help cultivate some of the research that they’re doing with an eye on bringing those discoveries internally to Danaher to develop the products of the future.
One thing that I wanted to mention for people who may be looking at a similar transition from academia or the clinical world into industry: Danaher is a place that very much embraces the idea of maintaining that visibility. In Danaher speak, going to Gemba, going to where things are, where the things are happening — I found that really valuable to maintain that connection so that I could continue to be a voice of the customer for the company.
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