Justin Sanchez on going from working at DARPA to helping roll out tech at Battelle

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:15:32 +0000

Dr Justin Sanchez is a Life Sciences Research Technical Fellow at Batelle but before that he was Director of Biological Technologies office at DARPA.

Top 3 Takeaways

"You'll never be able to establish your academic career unless you go and move to another place. I'm like, guys, this doesn't make any sense to me. What's most important is to do great work in the field and establish a foundation of the field." "I still had my university job for a couple of years while I was serving at DARPA. And if my time at DARPA and everybody's term-limited at DARPA. When that term ended, I could have gone back to Miami." "I launched three gigantic programs in neurotechnology each one with 70 or $80 million behind them and found some of the best teams in the world to do that." 1:15 "Do you want to maybe start at the beginning and talk a little bit about your work here in Gainesville?"

10:00 "So on the show and when we're talking about to the other DARPA directors we talk about the moment you got tapped on the shoulder, is that when you were tapped on the shoulder to go serve?"

16:15 "I think of DARPA, as...seemingly throw unlimited resources at, projects to solve them. But it's very time-limited and it can stop at a moment's notice. So it's almost a little bit like cocaine research... So what was that like? And what was the day-to-day or how was that different than being a professor researcher?"

19:45 "So what was your day-to-day like?"

23:30 "Afterwards... you went to go work at Battelle. Do you want to talk about this?"

27:45 "Your official role [at Battelle] is Life Sciences Research, Technical Fellow. I don't know what that means. What do you do?"

32:00 "So what are some maybe specific projects that are exciting you nowadays? "

36:00 "You wrote a book about all this. I'm very curious about it. Do you want to talk about this a little bit?"

39:15 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?"