Helical Brew

First to market with NFC payments two years before Apple Pay. First smartwatch for tarmac environments. Now helping the largest life sciences companies in the world build autonomous labs. Rui Campos has been ahead of the market his entire career, and he's here to talk about where lab automation is actually going. Rui Campos is VP of Product at Automata, leading product, engineering, design, da...

Donkey work. That's what a British scientist called it — the tedious, repetitive, unglamorous work that keeps labs running. Petia and Safwan Hak heard that phrase and built a company around it. Lab Donkey is focused on one of the hardest problems in lab automation: execution, scheduling and robotics for the problems that are too big, too complex and too challenging for anyone else to tackle. A...

Compilers for the wet lab. High-level languages for biology. A co-founder who started pipetting and ended up writing code that talks to robots. Alexandra Rolfness is building something this industry has never seen — and she's here to explain why lab automation needs a new language. Alexandra Rolfness co-founded Tetsuwan Scientific straight out of Caltech, where she studied computer science aft...

Spider silk in yeast. Antibody AI models. Pharma companies pooling data across competitors. Rich Cohen has been at the intersection of biology and systems for over a decade — and he's here to talk about what actually scales and what doesn't. Rich Cohen is Senior Director of Ginkgo Datapoints at Ginkgo Bioworks, working at the intersection of antibody drug discovery, data and product strate...

She walked into one of the most technical industries on the planet and started closing deals. No lab background. No engineering degree. Just relationships, research, and the confidence to own any room. De'Nye Hopkins is a Business eDvelopment Account Manager at E Tech Group managing a $2.5M territory — and the founder of Financially Abundant, a platform dedicated to helping women build financi...

Unfiltered Brew – Podcast Playlist | #HelicalBrew #ViralVideo #Podcast No guest. No agenda. Just two people in lab automation who haven't talked in a while — and apparently one of them landed in the wrong state. In this Unfiltered Brew episode your favorites hosts catch up on life, travel chaos, new gear, upcoming guests, and whatever else comes up. Which is a lot. 🎙️ Hosts: Sura Hadi & Mi...

Automation in the Wild – Podcast Playlist | #HelicalBrew #ViralVideo #Podcast Lab automation runs on software nobody talks about. Schedulers, drivers, integration layers — the invisible glue holding million dollar systems together. Today we're pulling it apart. Mike Salmi is the founder of Cheshire Labs and creator of Orca, an open source scheduler built from years of real automation work in c...

🎙️ Guest: Dave May | Owner & Lead Service Engineer, DCM Bioservices 🎧 Hosts: Mike Ouren & Sura Hadi 📺 Series: Automation in the Wild "You can't lie to the robot. It doesn't know." – Dave May When a 500lb robot dumps a $250,000 instrument on the floor, someone has to show up and fix it. That someone is Dave May. In this episode, Dave pulls back the curtain on what lab au...

🎙 Hosts: Sura Hadi & Mike Ouren After 55 episodes of Helical Brew, we’re cracking open an Unfiltered Brew - a candid, behind-the-scenes conversation about what’s actually working, what’s changed, and what growing a technical podcast really looks like. From YouTube algorithms and Shorts strategy to why professionals rarely leave LinkedIn, this episode is an honest check-in on content, platforms...

A quick Unfiltered Brew from Mike - Warzone endgame chaos, a clutch moment, and the most satisfying kind of win: using someone’s own gear against them. More shorties like this coming. 🔔 Subscribe to Helical Brew We explore the intersection of AI, automation, and the future of science. Subscribe & never miss an episode →    / @helicalbrew   📩 Want to promote or be a guest? Email us: helicalbr...

Guests: 🎙️ Lukas Bromig - Co-CEO & Founder at UniteLabs (Munich), building infrastructure for AI-ready labs 👩‍🔬 Hosts: Sura Hadi & Mike Ouren 🎧 Episode Title: “Standardization Before Intelligence: Building the AI-Ready Lab Stack” AI is moving fast - but labs are still stuck in the interface gap. In this episode, Lukas Bromig joins Helical Brew to explain why standardization is the real...

This week on Helical Brew, Mike Ouren takes the mic solo for a deep dive into Apple — from the early PowerBook days to today’s M4 Macs, iPhone evolution, and the massive shift coming with iPadOS 26. From the “every-year iPhone upgrader” cycle to the future of Mac silicon and the return of Apple’s glassy aesthetic, Mike breaks down how Apple got here, what they’re getting right, and what’s around t...

🎙️ Masaki Yamada — Head of Product at Invert, helping biomanufacturing teams quantify trust in AI. 👩‍🔬 Hosts: Sura Hadi & Mike Ouren 🎧 Episode Title:“Beyond the Algorithm: Measuring AI Confidence in Biomanufacturing” Hallucinations, trust, and the space between - that’s where the future of science is being written. From NASA’s microbial fuel cells to AI-native bioprocessing, Masaki Yamada j...

Hosts: Sura Hadi & Mike Ouren Series: Unfiltered Brew – Helical Brew Podcast Bold summary: After a few weeks abroad, Mike’s back — jetlagged, caffeinated, and ready to unpack everything from the Munich SLAS meetup to airplane fuel stats, Aurora Borealis sightings, and why Sura’s dog might just be her emotional support animal. It’s an unfiltered catch-up episode filled with travel stories, food...

🎙️ Hosts: Sura Hadi, Mike Ouren 🎧 Episode Title: ISPE Boston at Gillette Stadium – Robots, Enclosures & Boston Energy From Rockwell rails to Germfree enclosures (and a field-goal after-party), Sura and Mike unpack what went down at ISPE Boston 2025 — hosted inside Gillette Stadium. This Helical Brew episode brings the perfect mix of automation insights, event chaos, and Boston flavor. 🔍 We c...

🎙️ Hosts: Sura Hadi, Mike Ouren, Elizabeth Rodziewicz 🎧 Episode Title: Unfiltered Brew - Class Rings, Metric Fails & Why Women’s Pockets Still Suck From class rings and college debt to metric vs. imperial hardware fails, McMaster wins, and a Theranos throwback — this Unfiltered Brew episode is all chaos, caffeine, and comedy. We even end with the rant of 2025: women’s pockets. 🔍 We cover: •...

🎙️ Hosts: Mike Ouren, Sura Hadi, Elizabeth Rodziewicz 🎧 Episode Title: The 2025 Hiring Curve: Biotech, Automation & What’s Next (Part 2) Ghosting. Bottlenecks. Myths about hiring made easy. In Part 2 of our Science Means Business conversation with Ian Cooper and Chris Gaetani of BioMed Recruitment, we dig into the hard truths shaping biotech and automation jobs in 2025. 🔍 We cover:• Ghosting...

🎙️ Hosts: Mike Ouren, Sura Hadi 🎧 Episode Title: The 2025 Hiring Curve: Biotech, Automation & What’s Next (Part 1) What’s changed in biotech hiring since January? What hasn’t? And what’s next for lab automation jobs in 2025? In this exclusive two-part episode of Science Means Business, Sura and Mike sit down with Ian Cooper & Chris Gaetani of BioMed Recruitment for a mid-year hiring check...

🎙️ Hosts: Mike Ouren, Sura Hadi, Elizabeth Rodziewicz 🎧 Episode Title: Red Chair, Closet Beer, Peloton Fame & Frenchie Drama Red chair returns. Closet beer gets cancelled. Peloton price therapy, Frenchie recovery, and a lab-events blitz. This week on Helical Brew: Unfiltered Brew (Ep. 46), Sura, Mike, and Elizabeth go full cozy chaos: 🔴 Red-on-red & the chair that wants a mic 🍺 Closet b...

🎙 Episode 45 – Cristian Ponce | CEO & Co-Founder – Tetsuwan Scientific "Interfacing with the Future: Why Lab Robots Still Don’t Understand Scientists "What’s really broken in lab automation? According to Cristian Ponce, it’s not the hardware—it’s the human interface. In this episode of our AI Thought Leaders series, we sit down with Cristian, a Caltech-trained bioengineer and co-foun...

🎙️ Hosts: Mike Ouren, Sura Hadi 🎧 Episode Title: Flying Tylenol, Gamer Rage & BBQ Sauce: Unfiltered Travel & Tech Talk Cloud storage meltdowns. Overnight flight delays. Double Wild Turkey. In this episode of Unfiltered Brew, Mike and Sura unpack the real reason people drink on airplanes, private equity destroying good airlines, and the chaos of modern travel — before spiraling into gaming...

🎙️ Hosts: Mike Ouren, Sura Hadi 🎧 Episode Title: From Lanyards to Lollapalooza: Unfiltered Trade Show Tales Lanyards, swag regrets, boutique hotels, and a diagnostics mega-show colliding with Lollapalooza. Your favorite lab automation crew gets real about ADLM 2025, diagnostics business models, and the quirks of conference life—plus some unexpected gaming and tech tangents. This episode dives int...

🎙️ Hosts: Mike Ouren, Sura Hadi, Elizabeth Rodziewicz 🎧 Episode Title: Unfiltered Brew: Summer Trade Shows, Surf Racks & ShrinkageBold opinions. Bigger laughs. No guests, just guts. Your favorite lab automation crew gets real about diagnostics, biotech trends, and a little turbulence—literally. This episode dives into ADLM, biotech meetups, automation trends, and the evolving diagnostics indu...

🎙️ Guest: Madeline Wolf | Founder, The Automated Lab 🎧 Hosts: Mike Ouren, Sura Hadi, and Elizabeth Rodziewicz 📺 Series: Automation in the Wild Title: Blueprints, Bots & Breaking In: Building The Automated Lab from the Ground Up "You can’t automate what you don’t understand." – Madeline Wolf In this episode, we sit down with Madeline Wolf, a seasoned automation engineer, product man...

🎙️ Guest: Ali Glaser | Antibody Discovery & Cell Therapy Automation Strategist 🎧 Hosts: Mike Ouren & Sura Hadi 📺 Series: Science Means Business "You can’t innovate in a vacuum." - Ali Glaser In this episode, Ali Glaser shares field-tested lessons from the frontlines of lab automation, platform adoption, and scientific product strategy. From custom ClonePix setups to dead-cell d...