Talar Tokatlian, PhD

Senior Scientist, Drug Discovery at A2 Biotherapeutics in Agoura Hills, CA

Talar received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at UC Berkeley before joining the Segura lab at UCLA in 2007. She was one of the first 5 graduate students of the lab! Her PhD thesis was focused on the design and characterization of porous hydrogels for non-viral gene delivery for wound healing applications. Upon receiving her PhD, Talar was a postdoctoral associate in Darrell Irvine’s lab at MIT, where her research focused on the development of a nanoparticle-based HIV vaccine. Currently, Talar is a scientist at A2 Bio developing novel CAR-T therapies for solid tumors.

Not only does she miss the camaraderie of lab family and the 4pm coffee breaks, but practicing presentations as a group was a fond memory as well! For those future scientists out there, she tells us: “Don’t be so quick to dismiss ‘bad’ data (I did this a lot as a grad student). Think hard about what (1) could have gone wrong or (2) was done differently than before. Sometimes those weird results actually are pointing to more interesting and unexpected findings.”