Kyle Black

Background

About Kyle Black

As a child, I always enjoyed putting puzzles together. I don’t know how many legos I have assembled, but the giant tubs of jumbled up Lego pieces in my mom’s attic would suggest that is was more than a few. I even enjoyed traditional puzzles, choosing to put together and gift my grandmother a beautiful Thomas Kinkaide puzzle for Christmas when I was 11 years old. As I got older, the types of puzzles that I enjoyed solving became more and more complex. Algebra in high school, human physiology early in college, and then organic chemistry. Originally a pre-med student, I heard endless horror stories about “Orgo 1”. So, a little nervous, I walked into the classroom on the first day of class and saw some hieroglyphs on the board. In the first lecture, the professor walked us through how these different hieroglyphs could be put together through a series of chemical reactions. And ultimately, he ended up with one large hieroglyph that turned out to be a small-molecule drug. I don’t remember actually learning any organic chemistry that day, but I do remember knowing that I was about to have a lot of fun solving some very complex puzzles. I went on to become an organic chemist and worked in a medicinal chemistry lab in graduate school and then the Avanti Polar Lipids synthesis lab after that. I enjoyed learning about the different types of lipids and new synthetic chemistries to put them together. But after working on a specific class of molecules for a year, I later learned that nobody was buying them. And so I started trying to solve another puzzle - why aren’t these being purchased? The pandemic hit, I decided to get an MBA and work towards moving into the commercial side of the chemistry business, and started doing technical marketing for the same company. My first goal? Sell the lipids I had worked so hard to make. To make a long story short, after a lot of research, I solved the puzzle. As technology often does, the technology those lipids provided had been surpassed by something else. So my hard work never really “paid” off but I solved the puzzle.And that’s what I do. I solve puzzles. I use my background in research, strong analytical reasoning skills, and data analysis to drive business. I work hard to make sure that the incredible puzzles our chemists put together become a piece in another researchers beautiful puzzle.