Leadership Focuses on Alignment and Psychological Safety
Dr. Gabby Everett, who leads the BioLabs incubator at Pegasus Park, emphasized that building an innovative ecosystem requires aligning people rather than controlling them. She stressed that creating psychological safety is critical, as it allows technical and scientific teams to own mistakes, iterate, and innovate without fear.
- BioLabs at Pegasus Park provides 37,000 square feet of state-of-the-art coworking lab and office space as part of a 26-acre campus initiative by Lyda Hill Philanthropies to accelerate the North Texas biotech ecosystem. - The incubator is institution-agnostic, providing a level playing field for innovation, and reached 85% capacity within its first year, filling four years ahead of schedule. - To retain maturing companies, the campus features the 135,000-square-foot BridgeLabs, which offers "graduate suites" and purpose-built R&D space for startups that outgrow the initial incubator. - Initial tenants included immuno-oncology biologics developer Aakha Biologics and genetic medicines company ReCode Therapeutics, which closed an $80 million Series B funding round around the time it joined. - The broader Pegasus Park campus is also home to the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Customer Experience Hub, a $2.5 billion federal initiative to accelerate breakthroughs in diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's. - Before leading BioLabs, Dr. Everett was a Lead Scientist at NCH Corporation, is an inventor on 12 U.S. patents with 8 more pending, and was a co-author on nearly 50 peer-reviewed publications. - The concept of psychological safety, defined by Harvard's Amy Edmondson, is considered a business imperative in biotech, as it allows teams to navigate ambiguous data and challenge assumptions, which is essential for innovation. - In practice, creating psychological safety in a scientific setting involves framing experiments as learning problems, with leaders acknowledging their own fallibility to encourage open dialogue about mistakes and unexpected outcomes.
