Chaz Stephens

I've spent over a decade in and around cancer biology. It started with graduate research on TGF-β signaling in fibrosis and cancer, then became a run of program management roles: overseeing cancer clinical trials at the National Cancer Institute, cancer diagnostics at Quest Diagnostics, and now broader clinical data standards work at Merck. What's kept me in this space is the patient population at the other end of it: clinical trials and diagnostics only matter because someone is waiting on the result.

What I've found I enjoy most, though, is owning that whole arc myself: taking a product from an idea through to a real commercialization strategy, not just one piece of it. A hands-on product management course let me build a full example of that, end to end, and produced the SubQ-Confirm case study below: market sizing, product requirements, and a go-to-market plan for a real patient-facing need. I hold a patent and two peer-reviewed publications from my earlier research, and I write Indigo & Asphalt, an independent menswear publication, on the side.