Erez Kaminski is currently a Strategic Planning and Operations Manager at Amgen, a major biotechnology company. He moved to Amgen after a two-year stint at Wolfram, where he worked as a Technology Specialist and Special Assistant to the CEO. Erez holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from Birmingham-Southern College. We recently had a great conversation about how he has leveraged his physics education and life experiences into a promising career:
Matt: Hi, Erez. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.
Erez: I’m happy too. I enjoy reading your blog.
Matt: So, you just started a new job, right? What are you doing these days?
Erez: Right. I just started a new job working in Strategic Planning and Operations for a large biotech firm here in Boston.
Matt: How would you describe your new job?
Erez: I’m just starting off in my current job. It’s just week five or week six now. So, I’m still learning, but I think it will involve a lot of different things. One has to do with working within the company’s medical devices organization. Another has to do with working on all kinds of analytics and quantitative and qualitative analysis of different parameters in their development process.
Matt: Interesting. What’s the bottom line product or bottom line result that you’re looking to create in your role?
Erez: There’s a few different hats. The one that I know most about now has to do with assisting in reducing costs of manufacturing, mainly through analysis and building all the analytic infrastructure around different processes. I don’t know a ton about everything I’m gonna do because I’m just starting off. I am also limited by how much I can disclose about the company’s activities.
Matt: Naturally. Okay, I have a pretty good sense of your role. Now, you’re coming to the job not from a biology background, but from a bachelor’s degree in physics background. How do we connect the dots from your undergraduate studies in physics to your current position?
Erez: I think physics is, at its core, the study and analysis of systems, whether it’s the modeling of that system, simulation of that system, or experimental research on that system. In the very abstract sense it is the same process from gases and statistical mechanics, to more mechanical systems in classical mechanics, to galaxies and astrophysics. In this case I’m taking a system that involves manufacturing of certain products and trying to analyze that. For example, we look at it from the differential equations view point, that kind of model, and we say that instead of distribution of particles moving or something like that, it’s just a process that has different parameters and maybe has different distributions and is moving and developing through time.
I think it’s very similar. That’s what I loved about getting a physics degree. It gives you this unique breath and width of subjects you can attack later because you’ve studied all the most fundamental systems and all the most fundamental types of models. Then you can take those models and apply them to new environments.
Matt: Absolutely. The applicability and value of the physics education, as opposed to something else, in terms of first principles thinking and thinking about the whole system makes a lot of sense when you put it that way, but it’s not always the easiest thing to market. So, what was the process that lead to your new job?
Erez: I think my job is kind of unique in that it requires a few different skill sets. One is qualitative and quantitative analytics background, and another has more to do with management skills. I’ve been fortunate enough to have experience in both during a relatively short career. I used to manage quite a lot of people in the military and also had some management experience in my previous job at Wolfram Research. In my education and in my work at Wolfram Research I did a bunch of analytics work.
I connected with the opportunity through a talk I gave. I was giving a talk about “data science,” that’s the hot term everybody likes to use today for this kind of modeling of business or other processes in the business world.
Matt: Yes, it is. [Laughs]
Erez: Yeah, everybody loves data science. It’s like “operations research” was 30 years ago and “math” 100 years ago. So, I was giving a talk at a conference in Boston and I happened to have someone in the crowd that was from this particular company and thought that what I was talking about was very interesting. We started talking and they say that you should take all the lunches that people offer you, right?
Matt: That’s right.
Erez: Then we started talking and one thing led to another. He offered me a very interesting opportunity that had to do with both of the skill sets, the management hat and the analytics hat, which appealed to me.
Matt: Awesome. So, moral of the story is go to lunch with people, huh?
Erez: Anyone that wants you to go to lunch with them, go to lunch with them, right? I think that’s how we met, right?
Matt: That is how we met, that’s right. Making connections. My leadership coach likes to say it’s all about relationships. More often than not it’s true out in the world, I find.
Erez: Yeah, and for good reason. Having relationships with people is important. I think a lot of people are scared of that word because it makes them feel like it’s less of a meritocracy if there’s relationships, but I don’t think that has to be so. There are a lot of very skilled people that want to get to know each other and talk about relevant subjects to each other and then they find opportunities together.
Matt: Absolutely, especially in this day and age when tools like LinkedIn have really leveled the playing field in a lot of ways. It’s a lot easier to find the people that you need to talk to and want to build relationships with than it used to be.
Erez: Totally, and I think a lot of people are open to that. No man is an island, and everybody’s been helped by somebody. I think a lot of people are very open to those types of opportunities, especially if they have the time.
Matt: Definitely. So, at this point I’d like to go back a bit to something you mentioned in passing that’s kind of an interesting story. Before you even went to college you spent some time in the IDF, right? The Israeli Defense Forces?
Erez: Right.
Matt: Can you tell me a little bit about that experience?
Erez: Yes. I was born and raised in Israel. I lived basically my entire life in Israel and, like all the good Israeli boys and girls, at age 18 I enlisted in the Israeli Army. I served in an infantry combat unit in the Israeli military. I spent three years there and eventually became a staff sergeant. At age 19 and a half or 20 I had 36 soldiers under me. At the time I didn’t exactly take it lightly, but it was also just sort of a given that I had to manage this quantity of people. Later in life you realize “Wow, when’s the next time that I’m gonna manage 36 people?” You know?
Matt: Yeah.
Erez: Managing 36 people in the real world usually comes later in the game.
Matt: Right. Just to give some perspective on that, I was 42 before I managed more than 36 people. So, that’s a lot at age 20.
Erez: Yes, and I think it was very helpful for me because as you know, as a manager, there’s another side of the curtain that when you’re only under people you don’t really understand. I think getting a sense of that other side early on is very healthy and it helps in a lot of later interactions, because you’ve been on that other side for a second. It was a pretty character-building experience. I know you have some military in your family and you’re a close-knit family, so I am sure you’ve heard similar stories.
Matt: Yep, Navy husband. So, apparently a military career was not for you?
Erez: No. Everybody in Israel goes into the army. Being a career military person is less common. I have an uncle who spent a longer time and a few of my friends have. I have a great-uncle who’s a famous Israeli general. But I didn’t think it was for me. I was very interested in donating some more time and I tried a few different avenues, but I think being a staff sergeant was the right path for me.
Matt: Coming out of that, I imagine you wanted to go to college?
Erez: Right.
Matt: Did you have a burning desire to study physics, or is that something that you happened into, or how did that evolve?
Erez: I’ve always had an interest in physics. I think I was always that kid who loved math and I had a good aptitude for it, fortunately. So, I loved it and it also went well for me. In my family, either you’re a doctor or a medical person or you’re an engineer or physicist. So, I was exposed to it early on. I also read a lot and I had a great physics teacher in high school. I think for a while I knew that physics is what I wanted to study. I had some thoughts about studying medicine or applied math, but I think maybe the one that really sunk it in happened toward the end of my military career. I was thinking about my next step and I saw a great TED talk with Elon Musk, maybe 10 years ago now, where they asked him at the end of this TED talk “With all your experience, what advice would you give to a young person in this day and age starting their life?” He looked right at the camera and he just said “Study physics in college.” To me that sounded like fair advice, and I thought maybe I should look into the guy and why he says that.
Matt: That’s pretty good, I like that. Musk is famously a devotee of the physics education.
Erez: Yeah, exactly. He has an undergrad degree in physics and economics from University of Pennsylvania, I believe.
Matt: No billionaire status guaranteed though, following that path, unfortunately. [Laughs]
Erez: No, but a lot of interest.
Matt: Indeed. When you were studying physics as an undergrad at Birmingham Southern College, did you have an idea what you wanted your career to be at that time? Were you thinking about grad school or you already knew that wasn’t for you? Where were you at?
Erez: Wow. So, when I started off, I moved from Israel to the US and I went to a little liberal arts college in Birmingham, Alabama where I played football and studied physics. Initially, I did what Elon Musk did, I studied physics and business or economics, something like that. Then I thought “Do I want to go like a lot of other Israelis into technology?” That’s a big business in Israel. It’s a start-up nation. But I also really enjoyed studying. That’s the thing with me. I loved studying physics. I could sit and study and do math and really from simple to more complicated physics problems, pen and paper, all day long. I loved it. That was my favorite thing to do.
So, it was obvious to me that I’d love to continue to develop my education. I had some great internships, and I think that was really pivotal in understanding what I wanted to do. I had a great internship at my school doing some stuff with physics education, and then later an internship at the Israel Institute of Technology working on some electric space propulsion. Finally, I went to Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. I was there for a summer working with great professors and doing some research, which was interesting, but I also found out that I might enjoy studying physics more than I enjoy doing research in physics, which was kind of interesting.
Matt: Interesting.
Erez: I thought that’s what I wanted to do. I was sure, by the way, that I was going to grad school and that was the plan, either back home or here in the US. When I was about to graduate college that was my plan and I applied to a few schools. I unfortunately didn’t get accepted to the schools I wanted to go to. Then I said, “I’m gonna find a job for a year or two to get a better skill set,” hopefully a research-oriented job to show everybody that I’m a good researcher, and from there to go to grad school. That was my plan.
Matt: Okay.
Erez: So, I thought I would be going to grad school, and it just so happens at this point that I haven’t yet. Now, as time goes on, it’s been two years, so it’s not too late. However, I’ve been really fortunate and gotten some great opportunities that are kind of making it unclear to me if I’ll do that or not at this point. I’m starting to go more of the management route, and for that it may be that my basis in math is wide enough to help utilize the necessary tools or engage with people that are expert in these tools, but I’m not sure. I think I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up.
Matt: Sure. Well, that’s normal.
Erez: Do you feel that way sometimes?
Matt: Absolutely. [Laughs] And I’m grown up, I guess.
Erez: [Laughs] Are you sure?
Matt: I suppose, yeah. Once you’ve got the wife, the two kids, the dog and the house, it’s hard not to say you’re grown up. But I’m not set in my ways, and I think life is change, right? So, I think it’s always a very good idea to reevaluate where you’re at and where you’re going. It is tougher to go back to school, especially the longer you’ve been out, but it’s never impossible.
Erez: Right. I agree with that, and that’s what I’m thinking. I was actually about to apply to go back in and then I got this new opportunity that was too good to say no to. Sometimes you need to have a plan, but you also have to be flexible. In Hebrew we’d say “When luck comes knocking at your door, don’t be in the bathroom, go open the door.”
Matt: That’s right up there with “It’s all about relationships,” right?
Erez: Somewhere in there.
Matt: Speaking of luck or fortune, you had a pretty interesting first job right out of school, right?
Erez: Yes, I think so. I’d say I had the best first job anyone could ever hope for.
Matt: You were the personal assistant to Stephen Wolfram, the Mathematica Stephen Wolfram, right?
Erez: Yes. I wasn’t the personal assistant. I think the title was Special Assistant and I was more involved in technical project management, business development and operations type work. So, less about his executive assistant or personal assistant, although I did do that sometimes when his personal assistant was out. Obviously, I can’t talk too much about my job there, but I can say that it was a great opportunity to work with a company and a person who are genuinely creative and innovative, extremely hardworking, and really forward thinking. I learned so much and I was so fortunate to be exposed to that early in my career. I’m sure that I’ll spend a lifetime unwrapping how much that affected me. You spend a year talking to someone like that who’s not just way older, way more experienced, but he’s also the creator of this entire framework called the Wolfram Language, this very famous tool, and I learned so much from that time with him.
Matt: As well as getting to see the leadership style of somebody like that, right? A person with a deep technical background who also becomes the CEO or the top person of a major company is a relatively rare thing.
Erez: Right. He built the business with his own two hands and a group of very smart people. He is highly dedicated to his work. Stephen, to say the least, is the most technical of technical people. Anyone that’s ever met him or talked to him would attest to that. He is really amazing in his depth and breadth of knowledge and his ability to go across all these domains of knowledge. His company is also a very technical place. Almost everybody there knows how to program from the hardcore kernel programmers to the sales people.
Matt: Oh, wow.
Erez: It creates a very unique environment. Managing teams of PhDs, which is what I did peripherally while working there, is very different from managing teams of 18-year-old soldiers. What motivates them are different things, and the motivational structures are so different. Wolfram, as a company, was light years ahead in the remote work environment. Everybody today loves the remote work environment. I’ve read that Wolfram himself and people across the company started working remote in the early ’90s. Stepping into that culture was very interesting, seeing how a company can run like that when it’s privately owned and people have so much room for creativity and they develop amazing things. I think every physicist that’s used Mathematica knows that it’s kind of a different tool.
Matt: Absolutely.
Erez: So, I came out as a big Mathematica fan.
Matt: [Laughs] That’s almost required though, I imagine.
Erez: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: You said you were peripherally helping to manage teams of PhDs. As someone younger and with a lower level credential in physics, what was that like? What was your experience like?
Erez: I think the higher up you go in everything you do, and the more people you manage, at the end of the day you have to trust in their knowledge and their ability. Essentially, you say, “Here’s a problem, let me help facilitate this conversation about the problem. I’m not a subject matter expert, but I can bring the subject matter experts inside in a room or in an online session, have them talk and then trust that they know what they’re talking about and they find the best tool.” You as management or project management are enabling that conversation. So, I think it’s a big thing and important to understand that not only am I undergraduate trained, but even if I had a PhD I’d know very little about most of these subjects. Wolfram’s research and development cycles, as you can see in their development sessions, some of which they now stream on YouTube, span a huge range that goes from what kind of fonts do you want to have in Mathematica, which is a huge topic, to machine learning. Nobody can be an expert in all the subjects.
So, at the end of the day, like in any management job you have to trust the people under you and you have to respect them. There are a lot of challenges involved in being younger and being less of an expert, but you have to get used to that if you want to manage later on. If I compare my Wolfram experience to one of my first experiences of commanding soldiers where I was a year younger than all of my soldiers, it’s a lot easier to manage teams of PhDs that are 30 or 40 than to manage a few 20-year-olds when you’re 19.
Matt: [Laughs] Or ever manage a bunch of 20-year-olds, I imagine.
Erez: [Laughs] Or ever managing 20-year-olds, yes, but especially when you’re younger than them and they have been there forever. What could be worse?
Matt: Right. Well, congratulations on coming to that realization earlier rather than later, because I actually see a lot of PhDs who, because they have a PhD, feel like they have to be the subject matter expert at everything in order to be the leader. As you point out, that’s basically impossible. So, trying to do that is kind of a no-win scenario, and you really have to be humble in that sense, right? Take the role of facilitator and leader but not pretend that you know it all because hey, you just can’t.
Erez: Yeah. You’re only one person, and that’s why you have different people with different expertise working on different things. I think that’s the role of a good manager: to recruit the right people that have good expertise, then trust that they’re doing the right things, and let them fly as far as they can.
Matt: Absolutely. Let’s move on a little bit. We did talk some about the advantages of choosing physics as a bachelor’s major as opposed to maybe something else, but let’s flip that question around. What do you see as the biggest gaps between your physics education and the knowledge and skills you needed to be successful in industry right out of undergrad? Obviously, you landed a good first gig and you parlayed that into some more good opportunities. What was missing from your physics education?
Erez: I was very fortunate to go to a liberal arts college where I sensed that maybe my physics breadth was not as wide as if I went to a very technical school like WPI, MIT or one of these T’s at the end. But I was very fortunate to learn a lot about communication, public speaking, writing good essays, which was a big push all over in my education but even surprisingly in physics. We had to write a lot of essays about physics.
Matt: How interesting.
Erez: I think if I didn’t have that I’d be in a lot more trouble, because communication is of the utmost importance.
Matt: In fact, that’s how you got the job you have now, right? Communication?
Erez: Totally, 100%. If someone can say, “He’s a guy who can communicate about technical subjects,” then that’s really a lot of what you need in a technical manager, as long as he’s not directly driving everything.
What else? Working at Wolfram really showed me where computation and computational thinking is at today, and where it can be. Stephen Wolfram has a bunch of spectacular broadcasts about computational thinking and what people should be doing. Given that experience, I think the biggest thing I see that I don’t understand in higher education is why any test is taken without a computer. That’s a big thing. Somehow education needs to come to the 21st century and realize you have to have computers all the time and that need comes in two forms. One is just the ability to search for information, and the other is programming literacy. I got a flavor of programming in Excel and LabVIEW in my coursework, and then at Princeton I got to program a little in MATLAB and FORTRAN, but I felt like it should have been everywhere and wider and deeper.
Matt: Instead of the old reading, writing and arithmetic, maybe we need to add coding?
Erez: But not just coding. It’s also the ability to think in a computational fashion. It’s not just the ability to write the program, but it’s about the ability to think “Can I define this process in terms of a program and give it to someone else to write?” Which is a lot of what I think I’ll be doing in my current role, helping to understand processes and how they should look in a computational way. If that makes sense.
Matt: Okay. How would you differentiate that from say logic or analytic thinking?
Erez: I’d say you can analyze things and you can even model them in math, but it won’t necessarily mean you would understand how to even conceptually put them into an algorithm that does A, B and C in a way that a computer could do them. It’s looking at the architecture and saying, “These are the inputs, these are the outputs, these are, for example, the kind of transformations this information needs to go through, and this is how I would present it to other people.” That communication part through a computer is really important. Physics gives you a good base to learn all those, right?
Matt: Right. Yes, and I think depending on your particular institution or particular program there’s probably a lighter or heavier computational component.
Erez: Totally. Right.
Matt: I see what you mean by computational thinking and I definitely agree with that.
Erez: I think a lot of places that have that big computational part, they’ll have less of a communication part.
Matt: Which can be a big Achilles heel, right?
Erez: Yes. What else? What do you do in a company? You work with people, and then you need to be able to study new subjects. I think physics gives you a unique ability to study new things, because it makes you good at studying the most difficult things. Then you apply the new subject knowledge in a few settings. We did some group projects in physics, maybe more of those, or maybe more group projects that require not just reviews but also problem-solving would have been useful.
Matt: Right.
Erez: I think a lot of the times people tend to take group projects into the review space, which is the easier of the group project, instead of a research group kind of thing.
Matt: Okay. What do you mean by the review space?
Erez: I mean that a lot of times you’ll give your undergrads a review project. For example, I did a project about superconductors. I just reviewed superconductors: what they are, some of the basic equations, and presented it to a crowd. However, to get really knowledgeable about a subject you need to solve a problem. If you don’t have that feel, if you didn’t go through that process of trying to understand how the equation looks and why it looks like that, then you can only superficially explain what the equation is.
Matt: I agree. I was fortunate enough to have a couple of open problem group laboratory courses as an undergrad where we had to build something from scratch. That was a highly valuable experience.
Erez: Right, exactly. Building an experiment from scratch, there’s nothing else like it.
Matt: Nope. You learn a heck of a lot more than just reading a couple papers.
Erez: Yeah. It’s the same thing with a lot of work in the buzzword area of data science. People want you to give them some assessment about a project by generalization, and it can’t really work like that because you have to see the data at least briefly. How’s the information formatted? What does it look like and how complicated is it to put it into a more computable form. Even if it’s very preliminary prototyping work, it’s sometimes good to do it in your own hand. Then you are in a better position to explain it to someone who’s more of a professional and can go through the whole process and make it more robust.
Matt: Absolutely, because then you have a feel for the job you’re asking someone else to do, right? You get a visceral sense of the difficulties and the problems.
Erez: Right. Like you said it’s definitely not the right thing to feel like you have to know everything about how to solve a problem as a manager, but having a general sense is healthy.
Matt: Absolutely. Which I think brings us full circle, because that’s kind of what you’re doing at your new company, right? You’re looking at the problem, you’re trying to understand the data, how that can be processed, how that might be turned into cost reduction.
Erez: Yes. How can you create actions from that insight about the data? How can you help other people communicate through it? How can you explain it? Biotech companies work in a very complicated environment with a lot of FDA regulation, so a lot of your assumptions about data might not hold for them. For example, an algorithm that’s 95% accurate isn’t always good enough anymore because 95% is not enough for some FDA-regulated subjects. So, it’s a super interesting question that I think is under serviced by the applied math community. When’s the last time you talked about all of your analysis having to be 100% accurate?
Matt: Yeah. That’s definitely a challenging problem.
I always like to wrap up with one final question. One of the reasons I do this, and thank you for participating, is for all the younger physicists and people studying physics both as undergrads and graduate students out there. So, if you had one key piece of career advice that you could give to all those folks who are still in school right now, what would it be?
Erez: And are they studying physics already?
Matt: Yes, assume they’re studying physics already. What would be your one key piece of career advice?
Erez: I have to give two, I’m sorry.
Matt: You can give two. That’s fine. It’s a bonus.
Erez: One of them is do internships. Get as many internships in as many different fields as you can to learn about what it is that people actually do. Do you like doing research? You might say, “I want to be a researcher,” but you’ve never seen people do basic research. You might just like studying, or you might just like doing something else. So, do internships in everything you can: engineering, finance, experimental physics, theoretical physics, computational, whatever. The second thing is learning how to program. I think in anything that you do learning a little about programming and algorithm design is beneficial. Overall, just do stuff, do projects, be interested.
Matt: I think that’s fantastic advice. Thank you very much, Erez. I really appreciate it. I think you’ve got a fantastic future ahead of you whether or not you decide to go back to graduate school.
Erez: Thank you very much, Matt. Appreciate your time.