We’re excited to welcome you to the Radicle Rebellion, where we’re revolutionizing healthcare and clinical trials by disrupting the status quo. Come meet the rebels who make up the bones of Radicle Science: the Technology and Data Science team (the tech team for short). This team works tirelessly, usually into the wee hours of the night, coding and designing our databases, studies and anything else we need, including cooking up some ridiculously good barbecue. Fun fact: Four of the five are graduates of UCSD (go Tritons!) and roomed together in school.
Ready to meet the team? In no particular order…
Sheldon Borkin
Chief Technical Officer
What or who led you to join the Radicle team?
I met Pelin and Jeff soon after the company’s founding when I was introduced by Satish Tadikonda, an early advisor to Radicle and a longtime colleague of mine. I first helped create a software technology plan for Radicle.
What’s your role at Radicle?
As CTO I lead the Technology and Data Science Team. Our job is to turn Jeff and Pelin’s vision into reality creating technology solutions for our research team conducting the studies, and then to create data science-based solutions for both the natural product brands and for a broader consumer base interested in natural health and wellness products.
What can you tell me about your role at Radicle that you find interesting or stimulating?
The most stimulating aspect of my role is simply being part of the team on a day-by-day basis. Between the exciting work we are doing, the sharp and creative team members, and the collaborative supportive culture, each discussion and each daily team meeting is simply fun.
What’s something “radical” about you?
Nothing—I am happily boring. But I do work to keep a radical focus on supporting and mentoring my team.
How do you see Radicle Science as visionary and different from other companies?
Radical Science is uniquely visionary in working to harness the power of direct-to-consumer virtual studies with standardized protocols at magnitudes lower cost than traditional clinical trials, but with full rigor and our focus on natural products. The potential for this to provide direct benefits to those of us who deal with common problems such as pain or sleep disturbance is huge.
What is a larger goal or purpose in your life and how does working at Radicle satisfy that?
A big portion of our lives goes into work—I think it is important that the time and energy devoted to work produces results helpful to others in meaningful ways. There is no doubt in my mind that Radicles’s work meets that purpose.
Anything else you want to add? Weird hobbies? Quirky talents?
I am not a person who tends to indulge in fads, but Wordle has caught me—I now look forward to playing the game each midnight followed by sharing results and fun commentary with family.
Harsh Maheshwary
Research Technology Project Manager
What or who led you to join the Radicle team?
I heard about Radicle through Armin. He informed me about an opening in the Project Manager role and I was up for the challenge!
What can you tell me about your role at Radicle that you find interesting or stimulating?
Over the course of my employment I have gained many technical as well as soft skills. The learning curve has been steep and intense but I believe I’ve come out of it with a good handle on my role and a better employee. The fact that my role directly impacts the participant experience of our studies is extremely exciting and rewarding.
What’s something “radical” about you?
My ability to go with the flow and adapt to situations.
How do you see Radicle Science as visionary and different from other companies?
Radicle’s vision in the health space was something that really stuck out to me when I was first interviewing for the company. The need to validate natural medicine was something that I didn’t know was such an important stepping stone for the well being of people.
What is a larger goal or purpose in your life and how does working at Radicle satisfy that?
My larger purpose in life is overall to have a positive impact on the world, whether as an entrepreneur, engineer or an artist by creating things that would bring value and positivity to many people. Working at Radicle helps me be part of this collective effort of making a positive impact in the world by improving the well being of people and therefore aligns with my larger purpose in life.
Anything else you want to add? Weird hobbies? Quirky talents?
I love music and singing! I was a music minor in college and part of a collegiate a cappella group. I have started delving into songwriting. I love playing and watching soccer and also love watching Formula 1 racing.
Armin Jamshidi, MS
Director of Data Science
What or who led you to join the Radicle team?
I met Pelin through a mentor/mentee speed dating activity as part of UC San Diego’s entrepreneurship program. We had several workshops together where she would give me marketing advice about a project I was working on at the time. After one of our calls, she sent me an email asking what I was doing after graduation followed by a brief five sentence introduction on Radicle Science. At the time, the company was secret and in the planning stage so there was no information online, so all I had were those five sentences. I joined the company primarily because I believed in Pelin’s ability to get things done and also pivot when challenges arise.
What’s your role at Radicle?
Currently, I hold the position of Director of Data Science. This includes the responsibility of creating the data pipeline for our research team, building models to find patterns in the aggregate data, and creating database systems in the cloud. Additionally, I have taken on some product manager responsibilities and spend a lot of time prototyping new products.
What can you tell me about your role at Radicle that you find interesting or stimulating?
There’s something new to do every week at Radicle. As a developer, I usually get quite bored working on the same thing over and over. Fortunately, there’s always a new product to prototype or a new feature that’s challenging to work on. It’s rare to have easy time-consuming tasks. Additionally, the responses we get from participants in our study saying how much the products have helped them in their life give my work a sense of purpose, which is very fulfilling
What’s something “radical” about you?
My greatest fear is leading a stagnant life. Every month I pick up a new hobby, so I’m constantly learning new things and challenging myself to get better really quickly—this is the radicle spirit.
Varun Malik
Data Scientist
What or who led you to join the Radicle team?
I have been friends with the rest of the tech team throughout the six years of my undergrad and graduate school journey at UC San Diego. In the last quarter of my Masters in Data Science & Machine Learning, I was interning with another company for over six months and I was set to go full time. Armin and the rest of the tech team continued to share their “Radical experience” that intrigued me to apply for the Data Science position. I had never come across such a motivated and passionate team working towards making a real difference in the world. I knew I found my team and the rest is history.
What’s your role at Radicle?
My role at Radicle is split between two areas: First is to support projects for our internal customers (Research, Sales and Marketing teams) by automating processes by building custom software and empowering the team with the right tools and insights to enable them to excel in their tasks. The second half of my role is to build, design, drive and support analytics and machine learning efforts to drive actionable insights from our data. I support both the technical implementation and product ideation.
What can you tell me about your role at Radicle that you find interesting or stimulating?
My role is not bounded by a strict role of responsibilities but it grows and changes as the team takes up new challenges and initiatives. From coming up with a solution to a technical problem or flushing out product features that solve a core issue for the user, my role revolves around being solution focused. Every week, I come across new challenges that push me to grow and learn new and meaningful technical and non-technical skills. Unlike most companies, being a part of the Radicle team allows me to ideate features, implement solutions and identify roadblocks while contributing to the complete end-to-end engineering process as opposed to working on a small piece of the larger system.
What’s something “radical” about you?
I was lucky enough to grow up in different countries across the world including India, Kenya, Singapore, Netherlands and experience various cultures. Experiencing each culture has set me on a journey to explore what life has to offer and to use my experiences to become the happiest, healthiest and most positive version of myself.
How do you see Radicle Science as visionary and different from other companies?
Our mission to stick to science and leverage cutting edge technology like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to revolutionize healthcare on a personal level is extraordinary. What makes us unique is that every single person at Radicle is 100% behind this mission and strives each day to reimagine healthcare.
What is a larger goal or purpose in your life and how does working at Radicle satisfy that?
My current professional goal is to gain a wide breadth of experience that spans across different disciplines. Working at Radicle Science has allowed me to wear different hats and work with cross-functional teams, exposing me to new areas I would never have thought of at any other company. I value engineering products and solutions that have a positive impact on the world and Radicle’s B-corp mission has embedded generating public benefit into our culture and day-to-day thinking.
Kaus Lall
Data Scientist
What or who led you to join the Radicle team?
I joined when Armin introduced me to Pelin, during my summer before I graduated grad school. I had worked with him for a few years in a lab at UC San Diego, and we have known each other since freshman year. I initially joined as an intern with no intentions to either stay or leave, but I enjoyed the creative process of designing systems and solutions, which I hadn’t done at such a scale, and how nice and easy to work with everyone was. Generally, it gave me a chance to gain a birds-eye view of how services and companies operate, and use the entirety of my engineering repertoire rather than a very small sliver.
What’s your role at Radicle?
I work as a data scientist, and analyze and pipeline data. My primary role is to help automate a large-scale study system powered with automated metric tracking and intelligent analytics. Broadly, I have also worked at designing the system architecture, and software components for our cloud services. I also help break down requirements, and communicate/create applications with the SWE team.
What can you tell me about your role at Radicle that you find interesting or stimulating?
Very few engineers get an opportunity to influence the data pipeline down to the exact schema, or the data format, and at the same time be responsible for producing the final design and output of analytics. De-containerizing those roles is one of the most interesting things about my role at Radicle, since I get unique opportunities to optimize parts of the process which would otherwise be infeasible if I didn’t have the ability to constantly be able to control and change the mechanisms by which we collect, pipe and analyze data. This also lets me rapidly test and develop tools, and very quickly identify bottlenecks which I would have never seen in most other companies.
How do you see Radicle Science as visionary and different from other companies?
I like the flexibility, culture and energy of the company. We also occupy a unique position in the supplement/drug industry which bridges the gap between the heavily technical, rigid and slow existing techniques as well as an industry-driven, but consumer-focused mentality. I think we are in a great position to leverage the growing access to medical information, which consequently puts us in a prime position to help disseminate and break down our technical findings and understandings to a large audience.
What is a larger goal or purpose in your life and how does working at Radicle satisfy that?
My goal is to find purpose and fulfillment in what I do and hone my skills to the best of their utilization to the goal of wherever I work, in tandem with my creativity to generate unique and efficient solutions for important and complicated problems for the rest of my life :).
Anything else you want to add? Weird hobbies? Quirky talents?
Chess, video games, reading, can solve a Rubiks cube in about 20 seconds, fooooood, never lived in a place for more than six years, stayed up for 60-something hours once.