Wafaa N Aldhafiri

I would attribute my success to how stubborn and resilient I am. I'm very stubborn, and I just have this delusion that everything works out for me, that I always get what I want. If I said that I am just gonna get a PhD and win these awards that are hard to win, I'm gonna do it. And if I said that I'm gonna start a startup and do it, I do it. It's just my mentality, how I think about things - that I always get what I want. And I'm resilient and stubborn enough to see it through.

There is a quote that I always keep in my heart that says: art is passion pursued with discipline, and science is a discipline pursued with passion. This means that science and art are two faces of the same coin. Do not forget that science is kind of art, so pursue science with grace, beauty, and an artistic outlook.

It's not that hard. If you think it's that hard, it's not that hard - you can do it. The best way to start is to find a good, supportive mentor, like I did, and you start there. You will make a lot of mistakes when you start, you will face a lot of rejection. There's a lot of rejection in science, a lot of difficulty, because you're developing something new that humanity doesn't know the answer to. There's a lot of rejection, a lot of failure, but just keep on going. Believe me, it's not that hard. At some point, it would get easier as you keep going.

The biggest challenge in biotech and life science healthcare is that we are very slow to integrate new technology or adapt new ways of doing things. I understand why - unlike the tech industry where they move fast and break things and the worst that happens is data leakage, in our sector we have human lives at stake, so we have to be very careful. But that fear sometimes gets amplified and over-exaggerated to the point where we are not taking advantage of new technology. This is strongly seen with how AI is being integrated right now. A McKinsey report from October 2025 showed that less than 5% of biotech companies that invested in AI reported a return on investment. A Deloitte report from 2026 showed that less than 20% of leaders say they actually integrated AI into their workflow, even though they invested billions of dollars. The biggest opportunity is absolutely adapting that tech and applying it in the right way. There are companies that invested heavily in AI but still did not integrate it into their workflow or implement it correctly. The money is there, the tech is there, the great minds are there - it just needs somebody to look at the bigger picture and integrate the whole three parts together. That is a huge opportunity.

I would say integrity is very important. Integrity, competence, and beauty - trying to see the beauty in everything, seeing the beauty in science. Always remember that whatever you do, you need to do it to the best of your ability, be competent, and always never forget your integrity, because your integrity and your values and your boundaries will be tested, and don't ever sacrifice that.