Transforming Global Health Through Wireless Technology with John A. Rogers

• Rogers’  research, patents and startup companies often intersect with human health and global health. His team is very interested in research at the intersection between engineering, science and medical practice to develop new technologies that can be relevant for patient care.
• After attending University of Texas, Austin for undergraduate studies, Rogers pursued his graduate work and PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later becoming a Harvard Junior Fellow.
• Early in his career Rogers worked at Lucent Technologies, formally known as Bell Labs. There he collaborated with organic chemists who were synthesizing novel polymeric materials with unique electronic properties and abilities to mechanically flex.
• Later he and a fellow Lucent Technologies colleague took their ideas to academia at the University of Illinois and pioneered silicon-based flexible electronics.
• During presentations on these flexible electronics, neurosurgeons from the University of Pennsylvania became interested in his research and later collaborated to explore the biomedical space with his technology.
• His move to Northwestern University allowed his work to be embedded into a large medical school with strong financial support. 
• The Gates Foundation, along with other grants, have provided access and support for Roger’s current global health projects, which has now spun off into a start-up company involving  epidermal electronics to wirelessly monitor mothers and babies across multiple countries in Africa to improve fetal-materal health outcomes.
• Rogers emphasizes the importance of teamwork and building consensus with peers and advises young professionals to understand  their skillset and be willing to collaborate across diverse groups of people. 

[00:00:00] Rob Murphy, MD: Welcome to the Explore Global Health Podcast. I'm Dr. Rob Murphy, executive director of the HA Institute for Global Health here at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. My guest today, professor John A. Rogers, is a renowned physical chemist and material scientist here at Northwestern University, who's known as the founder of the field of stretchable bio electronics, and whose work in wearable technology is making an impact on global health. One project in particular we're gonna talk about today involves the deployment of clinical grade FDA approved wireless health monitoring systems for maternal and fetal health and surgical recovery in low and middle income countries. This work is taking place thanks to technology, that has been developed here at Northwestern. That was ultimately spun into a company called Sibel Health that has secured funding for global health initiatives from the Gates Foundation, Wellcome Leap the Steel Foundation for Hope. Dr. Rogers is the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey professor of material science and engineering, biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science, also chemistry and neurological surgery. He's also the director of the Querrey Simpson Institute of Bioelectronics here at Northwestern, and we are really delighted to have him on the show today to talk about his career and how it has led him to take part in such a major global health initiative. Welcome to the show, John.

[00:01:32] John A. Rogers, PhD: Thanks for that introduction. It's a great opportunity to be here.

[00:01:34] Rob Murphy, MD: Well, thank you so much for joining us. Can you explain your work and how your research patents and startup companies often intersect with human health and global health?

[00:01:46] John A. Rogers, PhD: Yeah, it's a good question. We're very interested in research at the intersection between engineering, science and medical science, medical practice more specifically. And so many of our programs involve the development of new technologies that can be relevant for patient care. We have deep ties into our medical community associated with our medical school here at Northwestern, but also more broadly, the medical community here in Chicago and beyond. And so I guess about 10, 15 years ago, we saw an opportunity to develop new classes of electronic devices that are characterized by sort of soft skin compatible sets of physical properties, that could be , adhered to the surface of the skin at an anatomically relevant location for measuring a body process that is important in the context of various patient conditions. We started that work when I was back at University of Illinois. We're able to put together, the material science, the electrical engineering, the manufacturing science around, you know, novel technologies of that particular sort. And realized pretty quickly that if we really wanted to develop technology that would really kind of move the needle on how we do human healthcare, reducing costs, improving patient outcomes that we really need to position ourselves with an intimate interface to a practicing medical community that could help us identify the key places where new technology could address unmet clinical needs. That was a motivating factor for my move to Northwestern. There were a couple of trustees who got excited about our vision for how engineering could impact healthcare and they put forward an endowment that created an Institute here at Northwestern. I think it's unique across, you know, the academic operations that we have in the US in the sense that it provides discretionary funding that allows us to do work in this space at a very high technology readiness level so we can go from base materials development to handcrafted sensors built by graduate students and tested on a benchtop to tens, maybe even hundreds of devices that are produced with sufficient levels of quality control that allow us to get devices deployed at a statistically meaningful level in pilot scale studies on human patients in hospital settings. So that was a great opportunity. We made the move to Northwestern and it's really led to an explosion of activities within our broader operation interfaced with our medical school and the clinical community. And that's kind of how we got started, and thinking about, you know, these technologies not only as a way to improve the continuity in patient monitoring. Eliminating any kind of wired interface or tether to an external box of that acquisition electronic, to the point where you can sort of continuously monitor health, not in an episodic fashion, but during the entire hospital stay and beyond. After, you know, patients are released to the home. And so that's, you know, a set of performance parameters that you think about in that context. But we got really interested in cost. As well as an engineering performance metric of a sort and thinking about how to build these devices in a very cost effective way. And that's what really led us to engagements with philanthropic organizations interested in improving healthcare in lower and middle income countries, resource constrained areas of the globe. That's kind of at a high level how we got into this space.

[00:04:52] Rob Murphy, MD: The people that are listening are really very curious about a person's entire pathway. There's really nothing written out there that says. You want to go into global health, you do X, Y, and Z, and you'll be there. That actually doesn't exist. But let's go back to the beginning of your childhood, while you spent much of your career here in Illinois at the University of Illinois, and of course at Northwestern. You're born and raised in Sugarland, Texas, and the son of a geophysicist and a poet. Tell me a little bit about your upbringing and how these formative years may have foreshadowed where you are today.

[00:05:25] John A. Rogers, PhD: Yeah, I guess I was sort of lucky in the sense that I grew up in a home environment that involved, a lot of intellectual stimulation around science, but also sort of creative, artistic aspects of how you view the world through my father and mother respectively. So my father has a PhD in physics and so he has that background to kind of shape his worldview and his, perception of reality. My mother's quite a bit different in terms of her, you know, mindset and, you know, approach to life and things in general. Uh, She's published like 16 books of poetry and is taught at various universities.

[00:06:02] Rob Murphy, MD:  I understand Also, you were an Eagle Scout. I'm very impressed.

[00:06:05] John A. Rogers, PhD: Yeah, my father was an Eagle Scout and so he kind of got me into scouting, and I think that was a great experience for me. Taught sort of leadership skills and how to build teams, I guess, and collaborate with people and take on projects and identify people's strengths and weaknesses and so on.

[00:06:20] Rob Murphy, MD: Scouthood is where I learned how to shoot a gun, sail a boat and fly a plane.

[00:06:24] John A. Rogers, PhD: Yeah. Start fires, you know, with flint. That was great. I mean, I was very fortunate in that sense. I think I started my undergraduate career thinking I would do something in fundamental physics at the intersection with chemistry. So thinking about the physics of molecules and how they react with one another and so on. So I did do a major in chemistry and physics when I was at University of Texas at Austin as an undergraduate. Growing up in Houston, that was a fairly natural place for me to pursue my undergraduate studies. Did pretty well, you know, as an undergrad and decided, I wanted to test myself against the very best and went off to the East coast and enrolled as a graduate student at MIT. Still not quite sure what I wanted to do. Something at the intersection between physics and chemistry. Physical chemistry was kind of a natural choice, in that sense. I think materials science as a separate, well identified discipline of study was still kind of, at a nascent stage at that time. And so physical chemistry was my kind of material science degree in a sense. And so my home department is material science now, and I think that's actually a little bit better match. But anyway, I was there for, you know, six years doing that. One thing that happened, however, when I was at MIT, it's a very interesting place because they value science, but also engineering and practical, sorts of research topics. Maybe a little bit different than the ivory tower orientation that many other sort of elite institutions revolve around. And what I found in that environment and the fact that some of my PhD work was sponsored by industry and they had specific problems they were trying to solve, with, you know, advances in scientific understanding. I was more interested in technology and engineering than I was in fundamental science. Science being a part of all of that but as an overarching goal, what could I do around scientific research addressing questions whose answers actually have the potential for societal impact beyond, you know, published papers and filling textbooks with knowledge. Nothing wrong with that, but this was my own kind of realization growing up and sort of coming of age in that environment as a graduate student.

[00:08:23] Rob Murphy, MD: Yeah, you are also a Harvard Junior Fellow, right?

[00:08:25] John A. Rogers, PhD: Yeah, that's right. So when I finished up at MIT I was looking around at different postdoctoral opportunities because I still wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do. Startup, large industry lab academics, they gave me a chance to kind of figure that out. I think, pursuing a postdoctoral opportunities, a really valuable thing in retrospect 'cause it's one great chance you have to get into completely new field of study, develop expertise that's different than maybe complimentary to what you were able to develop as a PhD student in a very compact time interval at a point in your career when it's not necessarily disruptive. It's sort of a natural progression and I talked to my PhD advisor at MIT. I didn't know anything about the Society of Fellows at Harvard at that time. It's kind of a weird kind of skull and bone secret type of society. Not well advertised, but it's a really powerful organization, so they take in six people per year as junior fellows, so sort of super postdocs. It's kinda a higher level of compensation. Instead of two years, it's three years, but they take in six people per year in all fields of study. Not just science, but literature, history, psychology, linguistics across the board. And so it's a very sort of elite kind of organization. And I was very fortunate to be selected, you know, competitive application process and all that. And so I was there for two years, from 95 through 1997, working primarily in the group of a physical organic chemist George Whiteside, who's quite famous investigator, 60 year, career as an academic at MIT and Harvard. And it really, thrust me completely outta my comfort zone. I was doing laser-based pulsed studies of chemical reaction dynamics at MIT and now I'm in a lab where there's beakers and Bunsen burners and all kinds of equipment. That was totally, you know, outside of the realm of my lab environment, MIT. But it was a great chance to expand my skillset, I guess, and also to interact with George who really sort of shaped and caused me to rethink my career goals and really sort of how to define an academic problem that's worth pursuing. What are the right topics to pursue? Everybody's smart, but I think it's really that project selection, that programmatic direction that really distinguishes, I think, one group from another. And he's sort of my academic role model, at this point. Just spectacular. But he is also very active in translation. So moving things out of his lab into the real world, primarily through, launching of startup companies. And so I didn't get involved directly in any of his startups, but we were kind of in that environment. He was good at keeping the academic activities separate from the startup companies to avoid, you know, COI type issues. But you still got a window into that process and that was really a formative time for me because coming out of that junior fellowship, I pretty much knew exactly what I wanted to do with my career. But before that I didn't, I was still kind of trying to figure it out.

[00:11:18] Rob Murphy, MD:You ended up at some point, I think right after the fellowship, moving to Bell Labs. Is that correct? 

[00:11:22] John A. Rogers, PhD: Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. You know, coming out of my time with George and kind of wrapping up my junior fellowship, I ended up leaving, one year early 'cause I felt like I was ready to go, and do my own independent thing after a couple years. Yeah, so I, interviewed for faculty positions as you might expect, had a number of different offers at, you know, all the top places and stuff. But I also interviewed at Bell Laboratories, which is the central lab for AT&T. It was Lucent Technologies by the time I was interviewing, but historically it was AT&T/B ell Labs and this is the place where the transistor was invented, where the solar cell information theory, fiber optics lasers, just on and on. It was like, you know, probably the world's most successful scientific laboratory of all time, unlikely to be surpassed in the future, I think because 10 Nobel prizes came out of its stuff. So when I went there, it was just like an absolute no-brainer. It was like 10 times more exciting than anything that I saw in terms of opportunities at universities because it was this really powerful blend of science, technology, and engineering in the context of a parent company that was trying to solve really difficult challenges. And that's the way the transistor came about. It wasn't purely, you know physics-based research. It was directed activities around questions in basic science of semiconductor physics, but in the context of trying to come up with a better switch than a vacuum tube essentially. And so I think feathering into your research topic selection, some questions about if the research is spectacularly successful, who cares? And in that particular case, it was gonna revolutionize not only telecommunications, but really our entire society in a sense, right? It was like, integrated circuits followed from that. So anyway, that was the ideal place for me and that, where I kind of got my independent career started.

[00:13:12] Rob Murphy, MD: While you were at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, that led to a single thread of silicon changed the direction of your research. Can you tell me about that?

[00:13:24] John A. Rogers, PhD: It turned out to be the case. It wasn't clear at the time, but when I was at Bell Labs, we were interested in polymer based electronic materials and we were building flexible circuits at that time, which is a very novel technology in those days, you know, it was like 98, 99 timeframe. And we were thinking about flexible displays paperlike, you know, electronic newspapers, this sort of thing. That was interesting. I was collaborating at that time with organic chemists who were synthesizing these novel polymeric materials that had these unique electronic properties, but also had the ability to sort of mechanically flex because they're more robust than silicon. I moved to University of Illinois because the telecom bubble burst. And, as a result, the core businesses associated with Lucent Technology, the parent company of Bell Labs kind of imploded, and the financial ramifications on the lab, were what you might expect. So there was a dramatic downscaling of the lab. It became a little bit less interesting for me because we kinda lost critical mass. That was my thought. The department head at Bell Laboratories who hired me had moved to become the Director of the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois. And so he started recruiting me, getting me to think about a move back to an academic environment. And so I did that and moved to University of Illinois January, 2003. We were still interested in flexible electronics, but I no longer had access to these, spectacularly talented synthetic chemists. So I didn't have access to the polymer materials that we were previously using at Bell Labs. So it was kind of a forcing function for us to try to figure out an alternative. And I had a couple of great students and postdocs at that time, and we thought about silicon, which would at first glance seem like a bad choice for a flexible device because people are maybe most familiar with silicon in the form of a wafer. It's basically like a plate of glass. You know, you try to bend it, it shatters, you drop it on the ground, it breaks into a million pieces. It's not gonna be useful for flexible devices, but we realize a very simple concept. If you made the silicon thin enough, then it would just become naturally flexible and bendable just in the same way that a sheet of paper is bendable, but a two by four is not. It's basically the same material. It's a consequence of the thin geometry of the paper that becomes flexible. So we were able to realize that simple aspect of bending mechanics And exploit it to build high performance, silicon-based flexible electronics by using these thin slivers of silicon, as you mentioned, bonded to sheets of plastic. And that was sort of an aha moment for us because now we could achieve wafer scale sophistication and device engineering And performance far beyond anything that was possible at that time or even today with these novel polymeric materials. And so we're able to kind of leapfrog in terms of performance and technology readiness, which we had previously been pursuing in the area of flexible electronics, but now with this completely different strategy.

[00:16:12] Rob Murphy, MD: So that takes us to your move to Northwestern 2016. Much of your previous work you continued here and you've increased the emphasis on translational biomedical engineering and creating medical devices that impact human health. Sounds like actually, from what you've described already, it was a logical transition to that area.

[00:16:30] John A. Rogers, PhD: I think that's accurate. There was kind of one step in between, however, and so I moved to University Of Illinois. We figured out how to do this high performance, flexible electronics. We were funded at a very high level by DARPA, sort of the R and D entity associated with the Department of Defense. They were interested in military applications. I was giving talks at various universities about our work publishing it of course, I gave a talk at University of Pennsylvania in their, electrical engineering department. They invited me to visit University of Pennsylvania has a medical school co-located with the main campus, and it turns out they advertised the talk and a few of the neurosurgeons and neurologists saw the, presentation materials, like the title and the abstract, flexible electronics. And they felt like, well, maybe that's interesting. They showed up and then at the end of the talk they came down and they asked me, have you ever thought about taking your bendable, military electronic systems and putting them on a human brain? To understand how the brain works or to use them as a surgical diagnostic. And that was like super exciting to me that seemed like the craziest thing that, you can imagine. And here were these physicians interested in doing it. We had unique technology. And so that was really a pivot point for us in moving toward kind of this biomedical space. And it wasn't just me. It was like all my students were like way more excited about developing a technology that could be used to improve human healthcare by comparison to a military system. Military's important, but you know, just in terms of, you know, motivation, it, seemed to resonate much more strongly with the students. So we got started, but then we realized, well, you know, U of I is great, fantastic large engineering departments. We're doing very well, but there's no medical school and there's really no local medical community. And so we were doing these long distance things with the University of Pennsylvania, Sarver Heart Center, University of Arizona, MGH, and so on. But it's hard to efficiently, you know, develop technologies relevant for clinical use when you're not kind of intimately embedded with the clinical community. So I decided, you know, we're not gonna interview around, but if opportunities came up that we would take a look at them, if they would involve a move that would, you know, get us co-located with a large medical school. So that's kind of what led to the move to Northwestern. As I mentioned, you know, there were a couple of trustees who got very interested in our work and they put forward this endowment, so it's a really unique opportunity. I was already collaborating with a few people associated with the medical school here at Northwestern, kind of these long distance things while I was still at University of Illinois. So it was a very easy move and we had this unique resource to do translation. And that's really what we're interested in.

[00:18:51] Rob Murphy, MD: Let's, uh, switch to global health As it ends up, this has really been a natural fit for you and your projects. Can you explain how your project with epidermal electronics to wirelessly monitor premature babies led to a global health initiative across multiple countries in Africa along with funding from the Gates Foundation, with the goal of reducing obstetric morbidity, mortality.

[00:19:13] John A. Rogers, PhD: So when I moved to Northwestern, I was already in a dialogue with Amy Paller, head of dermatology here with a background in pediatric dermatology. I was already in contact with Aaron Hamvas, whose head of neonatology at Lurie Children's Hospital, and we had decided that this soft skin like wireless electronics would add the most value for premature babies as a class of patient. That it would be valuable for everyone, but that particular class of patient would benefit most strongly. And so we really focused on that shortly after my move, to Northwestern and that's a pretty daunting environment to operate in with new technology at the NICU facility. But we were able to get IRB approval. We had great collaborators, still do have great collaborators and we're able to put it together. We published a paper in Science in 2019, so it was a pretty heavy lift. We started it probably in 2015, but that was kind of a landmark demonstration for us because we hit all the clinical requirements in terms of fidelity and accuracy and measurement and breadth of sensor capabilities. We're doing all the vital signs. That you would do in a level four NICU, like the one they have at Lurie. So we published that, it created a tremendous amount of, interest kind of in the public domain as you might imagine. So it was blanket coverage. And I think what happened is that, program managers at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, became aware of that work and they proactively reached out to us and said, That looks like a very interesting technology. Can you engineer it in a form that would allow economically viable deployment into lower and middle income countries where there's no monitoring technology at all wired or otherwise? And so you'd be introducing a completely new capability into those regions of the globe as opposed to just replacing wired based systems that are used today, like in Europe and the US. And so that's what got us started in thinking about cost as an engineering performance metric, that could drive our research, try to kind of force us to come up with strategies and manufacturing material selections and so on that would provide that cost effective capability for LMICs. And so we had to put together some spreadsheets around here's the cost structure, here's the projections at volume, what it would cost. They were mostly interested in the cost per patient monitoring day. Not the cost of the device, because the device could be reusable, you could reuse it hundreds of times, amortize the cost of the device out of the cost of patient care. So we went through that. It wasn't a proposal, but it was just a cost analysis. They liked what they saw, and so then they provided funding for us to sort of execute on this plan around cost reduction.

[00:21:37] Rob Murphy, MD: It kind of reminds me of what happened with telephones when I was first starting to work in Africa. I mean, finding a phone was really difficult. Very important people, highly placed people actually had telephones then all of a sudden they introduced mobile phones. President Obasanjo came up here to Motorola. You know, Motorola at the time said, Hey, this is gonna be easy. You don't need to put any more wires in. Forget about it. and now they have better wireless coverage and better wireless phones than we do. I mean, it's amazing. They just skipped the whole like, landline thing.

[00:22:07] John A. Rogers, PhD: That's kind of the same, by analogy what we're hoping to do here is just skip the wired based expensive systems and just go right to wireless devices. And as you mentioned, you know, cell phones, smartphones are ubiquitous now. So we just use the smartphone itself as the user interface, all the data appears on the phone, so they don't need to pay for that. They already have it. And so that's an important part of the cost argument as well.

[00:22:28] Rob Murphy, MD: So you just went on a three country trip to Africa? As did I, I was in Mali, South Africa and Nigeria in the last two months. to check out on projects that you have going on, could you tell us a little bit about your most recent experience?

[00:22:40] John A. Rogers, PhD: Just to follow on, the conversation around the great Gates funding. So one year after the first paper on this epidermal, you know, neonatal monitoring system, we published the cost effective version in, Nature Medicine. And that was spring of, 2020, At the end of 2019, we already were beginning our first deployments into Africa. So I spent some time in Zambia, and Kenya in December, 2019 and that looked pretty good. And it was the Gates Foundation that set that up. The Save the Children organization came in and provided funding and boots on the ground, which was really important just from a logistical standpoint. We trained some healthcare workers, everything looked good so we got more funding. and the other thing that we had to do was to set up a startup company because at that point it was pretty clear we're not gonna be able to support this with grad students because the scale and the quality control, all that sort of stuff, you can't do it kind of in an academic setting. So that was the basis for launching Sibel Health. It wasn't VC coming in or, you know, a large company partner. We eventually did partner with Dragger, but it was really that opportunity to work with the Gates Foundation, Save the Children Organization on this. So that was my first trip to Africa, actually. It was, end of 2019. Like I said, Zambia brought a couple of my grad students out there. We deployed some devices and from that point on, it's really been engineers at Sibel Health who've really driven the process. They've gotten the devices through multiple FDA clearances, they have high volume manufacturing. They've staffed some of the staff at Sibel, come from my lab undergraduates, working in the lab. They get interested in global health and they're now at Sibel. So it very much has a culture built around that idea of global good.

[00:24:18] Rob Murphy, MD: Based here in Chicago?

[00:24:19] John A. Rogers, PhD: Yeah. Just, right across from Goose Island. They have three pillars to their business. One is LMICs, primarily philanthropy. So Gates, Save the Children, Steel Foundation for Hope. Merck for mothers ,Welcome Trust, supporting that. and then they have digital clinical trials. Pharma customers interested in quantitative assessments of how their new drugs are performing. And then the third is in hospital deployment. So we have, initial deployment here at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, several other hospitals. We launched the first wireless NICU at Montreal Children's Hospital about a year ago. A partnership with Dragger and Space Labs. So I think everything's in a pretty good spot in that sense and so I stay very interested in the LMIC piece, and as you mentioned, I was just there in January with the Sibel team, to kick off a program that represents an expansion of our initial Gates program focus on neonates to include maternal fetal health. So just upstream right, of, care of a neonate. So they were awarded a $20 million program fall of the last year. And this was the first actual deployment of devices and I wanted to be there and, you know, help the guys and watch what was going on. So we were in Nairobi, Kenya, Kigali, Rwanda, and Lagos, Nigeria.

[00:25:30] Rob Murphy, MD: You recently accepted a position as one of six members of the advisory board to the maternal newborn Child Nutrition and Health organization within Gates. Can you tell me about this and the important role the Gates Foundation and you, and it looks like their role is gonna be increasingly important, especially in the climate that's going on right now.

[00:25:49] John A. Rogers, PhD: I don't wanna speak for the Foundation, but just as an empirical observation, I think they're much more interested in technology solutions for challenges in LMICs than they may have been historically. I think in the past it's mostly vaccines, things like that, pharmaceutical approaches. But I think engineering is gonna play an important role going forward. Not as a replacement to those other therapeutics, but as a pairing with them. To allow for early detection of complications, disease, this kind of thing. So there's a great amount of interest. We've been very grateful obviously for their funding. Not a lot of that funding comes to my academic group. We have other sources of support, but a lot of it is helping Sibel to pay for their efforts. We were just on a conference call with Bill Gates himself, in the middle of March, basically summarizing what's going on with maternal health. Specifically c-sections and how you can monitor the health of that dyad, the maternal and fetal, component of that through the intrapartum period. To make a more quantitative determination of whether a c-section is needed or not. And you know, there's a lot of mortality associated with childbirth in these parts of the world and what can you do with technology to sort of reduce that? And I was really impressed with Bill's engagement and his fluent knowledge of all the key issues. It was quite, striking.

[00:27:05] Rob Murphy, MD: One final question and I ask this to everybody that I interview. What advice do you have for a young person today wanting to work in global health?

[00:27:15] John A. Rogers, PhD: I think you have to kind of understand your skillset and you have to be willing to collaborate across diverse groups of people. You know, I think global health is extremely challenging. There's kind of a political element to it. For us, there's a medical and an engineering aspect. There's a manufacturer. I mean, you really have to build teams and consensus I think is really important. And, Yeah, I think sometimes undergraduate, even graduate, education doesn't teach students how to work in interdisciplinary groups as well as we might, we try to keep a very collaborative kind of Bell Labs in type environment here in my group. But I think that's been, you know, a hallmark of my own career, not just restricted to, you know, what we're doing in global health, But more generally is, understanding what your expertise is, what you're good at, and what your skillset is, and then finding collaborators with skill sets that compliment your own and then gluing that together, in a powerful way. I think that's probably one of the most important things.

[00:28:09] Rob Murphy, MD: Well, John, so impressive to hear from you again and all the wonderful things that you're doing. Thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:28:17] John A. Rogers, PhD: Yeah. Well thanks for those kind comments. I appreciate your interest and thank you for your invitation to participate in this podcast.

[00:28:23] Rob Murphy, MD: Follow us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, to hear the latest episodes and join our community that is dedicated to making a lasting positive impact on global health.