Stephen Harwood

President

Stephen was born in a rural town in northern California and found a passion for science—chemistry in particular—as a direct result of the mentorship and instruction he received by Dr. Craig Holt who came out of retirement to fill an unmet need teaching AP chemistry and physics at the local high school. At the time Stephen was failing an online AP chemistry course. With Dr. Holt’s mentorship he was able to find a passion for the subject and score the highest marks on the AP exam.

Stephen went on to graduate UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry as the Koo Liu Siok-Han Awardee with a B.S in Chemical Biology in 2017. While at Berkeley under the mentorship of Prof. Thomas Maimone and Dr. Matthew Condakes he would be a co-author on three organic chemistry peer-reviewed publications. He started his graduate education at the Scripps Research Institute under the tutelage of Prof. Phil Baran as a Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow and would publish his research in Science.

Stephen graduated from the Scripps Research Institute in 2022 after successfully defending his PhD dissertation Radical Strategies and Tactics in Terpene Synthesis and was recognized as a Bristol-Myers Squibb Graduate Fellow.

He is now a Senior Scientist at Mirati Therapeutics researching novel targeted therapies in oncology. Throughout his education he has benefitted tremendously from committed and involved mentors. Through Project SCIFI, he is dedicated to building environments that create involved educational mentorship.