Eleftheria Michalaki

It’s chaos at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. The stage crew is doing soundcheck, a shirtless guy on my left is doing incline pushups, a couple behind me is running up and down the arena steps, parents are loudly directing family selfies—breaths and drums and yays and bass, all reverberating off the surrounding sedimentary rock formations. Show venues are where I feel most at home but, at this moment, I tell my friend Ria we need to bounce.

The two of us are at this iconic outdoor amphitheatre to take a break from the trails we’ve just hiked across the Red Rocks Park, a national historic landmark known for its red sandstones. It’s Memorial Day Weekend, one of the few opportunities Ria and I have in the year to intersect our parallel lives, and we wanted to meet up somewhere equidistant from San Francisco and Atlanta. The Denver area seemed like the best choice. 

I was keen to interview Ria because the past two years brought many good changes in her life. After years in academia, she started a job at Piezo Therapeutics, a pre-Series-A biotech startup, and then just one year later, she became a first-time homeowner. It’s the most settled she has felt ever since upending her life at the age of twenty-two, when she left Greece for the United States and started a wanderer’s life: five years in the Bay Area, then six years in Atlanta and counting.

“You’ve achieved adult mode,” I tell her. 

“I really have,” she says, incredulously. “But it is hectic. I wasn’t expecting how much the feeling of ownership—having your house, your car, your salary—changes in you. It’s the first time I feel I truly have agency, but it’s also stressful in some way because you’re in charge of everything. I don’t think I pictured myself living this life in Atlanta.” 

“And Atlanta feels like home now?”

“It’s hard to say because I have no idea how things might unfold, but at least for now, it does. I like how open and honest people are in Atlanta. It’s funny, in California, I felt that people were nicer but I never knew where I stood with them. In Atlanta, people can come off as rude but what you see is what you get. I like that.”

How Ria got to Atlanta is a story of how Ria got to California, which is a story of how Ria got to America, and that is a story for which we have to be somewhere sans the chaos. I suggest the Denver Botanics Garden as our next stop, so when we leave the amphitheatre, we go straight to the car and drive to the garden. There, we get our first real break: at a table, over coffee, surrounded by sprawling plots of stunning trees and flowers. In absence of coastlines in this landlocked state, the botanical garden is perhaps the closest interpretation we can have of Crete, the enchanting, cinematic island where Ria—shorthand for Eleftheria, which in Greek means freedom—grew up.

The story of how Ria got to America from Greece is a story of a plan that Ria was not aware of. It all happened at the beginning of her fifth year of chemical-engineering studies at the University of Patras, when her undergraduate research advisor scheduled a meeting and threw a curve ball.

“Totally casually,” she tells me, “he just looked at me and said, ‘What’s next? What are we doing?’ I just sat there, being like, ‘Oh? We are doing something?’”

A hardworking and methodical student, Ria knew the theory and had the research experience, so her advisor told her to consider getting a PhD in biochemical engineering in the US. She followed his advice, applied to US schools, and got accepted at Stanford, a university she knew only through the movies.

“I had no idea what anything was,” she says. “I had no conception of what it meant to live in Palo Alto, that there was a cultural difference between the West and the East Coast, or how big of a change it was going to be from my life in Greece.”

“How was that initial period? The first fall semester?”

“Oh my god, terrible,” she says and laughs. “Beyond the culture shock and leaving Greece, my first year of PhD was also the first time I was barely making it in midterms. The one thing I was good at my entire life—being a good student—was something I was no longer good at. That was soul-crushing. So, I think I just felt very alone during that period.”

Homesick and frustrated, she spent a lot of time questioning her self-worth. A turning point came in a meeting she had with a Stanford professor whom Ria knew only because he had a Cypriot wife—an unexpected link that proved to be of essence. What Ria thought would be a session of solace through a shared appreciation of the Greco-Cypriot pathos  turned into a reality slap, served American style: bullshit-free and with clear next steps. 

“He sat me down,” she explains, “looked at me, and then said, ‘Ria, you need to pull yourself together. You’re in a place where the best of the best are accepted, so you really need to calm down and find a way to keep going.’”

“Really? What did you say?”

“Nothing. He was right. That’s when I knew I had to decide if I was going to keep crying and being miserable or keep trying and make the best of the opportunity I was given.”

In retrospect, this anecdote is a salient backstory in the context of our friendship. I met Ria through my friend Mariana on a rainy night in January 2016. I was living in Boston at the time and came to Palo Alto to visit Mariana, who had just started her PhD at Stanford. I knew the night carried a certain weight because I was finally going to be introduced to Ria—the second-year grad student with an exacting work ethic and an unwavering commitment to excellence, the new friend who was Mariana’s voice of reason and anchor to practicality. The Ria I met that night was already the Ria who pulled herself together, the Ria who always did her job—day or night, rain or shine, genesis or apocalypse—without a tear or a whine. I found her intimidating and, somehow, quite entertaining. We became friends quickly.

“How are you able to be so committed to work?” I ask her. “I feel like I have never seen you give up on anything.”

“Work, for me, is something that needs to happen. And I need to be good at it.” She then pauses. “Maybe it’s because the things I do at work I can’t do in real life.” 

“What do you mean?”  

“For instance, things like surgery on animals,” she adds. “In everyday life, if I see blood, I actually faint. At work though, I can do any surgery and have zero issues with blood. And my hands, which are not steady at all outside of work, become super precise in the lab. My dexterity is off the charts.”

Whatever the explanation, her professionalism was fascinating to witness. When I moved to San Francisco a year later, the three of us started spending more time together, cooking dinners, watching movies, or going on road trips. That is, unless Ria “had cells,” which was often, and which was code for lymphatic endothelial cells plated under a tissue culture hood in a lab room at Stanford—cells that Ria studied as part of her research and that demanded tender loving care. Getting on Ria’s social calendar, therefore, meant meeting the cells halfway and working around their schedule. 

These cells were important because they helped answer how lymphatic valves—the flaps in our lymphatic vessels that prevent the lymph from backflowing—form. The endothelial cells which Ria was plating are the building blocks of the valves and the vessels, and what she discovered as part of her five-year doctoral research was that these endothelial cells change direction when exposed to different types of fluid stress, a reorientation which triggers the first step of valve formation. The finding was important because it gave the scientific community insight into which chemical and biological processes can be used to induce formation of the lymphatic valves, structures that become dysfunctional or entirely absent in conditions like lymphedema. 

After PhD, Ria wanted to stay in academia for at least a few years as a postdoctoral researcher. Her project at Stanford focused on lymphatic valve formation in vitro (done in glass labware) but she wanted to take things further and understand how the lymphatic system responded to therapeutic agents in vivo (in a living organism, not in labware). She reached out to a professor she met during her PhD, the head of the Laboratory of Lymphatic Biology and Bioengineering at the Georgia Institute Of Technology in Atlanta. She flew to Atlanta to meet with him and got the job soon after. Just as I was beginning my third year of life in San Francisco, Ria packed her bags and left California for Atlanta.   

“I guess your choice was never about the city, but more about the lab?”

“Yup,” she says. “I wanted to join the lab because it was going to give me the skill set I needed for where I wanted to take my career, which is clinical work. My undergrad research in Greece was computational, my PhD at Stanford was in vitro, so animal work in vivo felt like the natural next step to take if I want to ultimately do clinical research on humans. I never really considered Atlanta as an option, but I am glad I made the move. I like the city.” 

Over the next four years, Ria worked on developing treatments for lymphatic diseases, particularly lymphedema. While her work at Stanford was more foundational, focused on understanding healthy lymphatic cellular behaviors, her work at Georgia Tech was more applied,  focused on formulating and identifying lipid nanoparticles designed to carry therapeutic drugs specifically to aberrant lymphatic tissues in live animals. 

“Why nanoparticles?” I ask. “How did those come into play?” 

“In general, there aren’t many ways to deliver drugs specifically to the lymphatic system. A major challenge is that drugs are often rapidly cleared or degraded in the body before they can reach the lymphatics. Lipid nanoparticles, which are excellent at carrying therapeutic cargo, were just emerging as a powerful delivery technology, but they hadn’t been applied to lymphatic targeting. So, that’s what we developed as part of the research. We were successful in an animal model; we showed that therapeutic cargo delivered via nanoparticles decreased lymphedematous swelling in mice.”

“Wow, so that means nanoparticles are the way to go?”

“If you had asked me that question two years ago, I would’ve said lipid nanoparticles are amazing. They’re very effective at carrying cargo and can be tuned to improve how well they reach certain tissues. And now, with AI, scientists can screen thousands of formulations to see which ones perform best. They’re powerful tools. But at the same time, more recent data have pointed out some limitations, particularly around long-term use and repeated dosing.”

“Huh,” I say. “Like, more recent research?”

“Yes,” Ria answers. “And these findings are not relevant to only the lymphatic system. Remember that lipid nanoparticles were a huge hit during the COVID-19 pandemic. The mRNA molecules in the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were delivered via lipid nanoparticles. At that time, they were the best technology available, and the benefits far outweighed any risks. But now, with more data and less urgency, we see they’re not entirely without drawbacks.” 

“Interesting. Does that mean nanoparticle-based vaccines were maybe not the best approach in the pandemic?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Ria says. “They were absolutely the right choice for that moment; they enabled the first mRNA vaccines to be deployed quickly and effectively. But now that we’re not in crisis mode, there’s more room to explore alternatives. Even big pharma companies that relied heavily on lipid nanoparticles are investing in new delivery technologies. To me, that suggests lipid nanoparticles are still extremely good, but they are not the end of the story. We can keep improving.”

Four years into postdoctoral research, Ria felt it was time to take the next step—toward clinical work. That’s when Piezo Therapeutics, a biotech startup spun out of Georgia Tech came into the picture.

“A job posting from Piezo had been showing up on my LinkedIn feed since March, but I kept ignoring it because I was set on leaving Atlanta,” she explains. “Then one night at the movies, I saw it again and noticed that one of the co-founders was a former lab mate from Stanford. That made me think, ‘Why not?’ I sent over my CV, he connected me with the CEO, and the rest is history.”

It was the most ironic career progression: the expertise she built in lipid-nanoparticle delivery would be entirely deconstructed in service of Piezo’s therapeutic delivery without nanoparticles. She is currently the Vice President of Research and Development at Piezo and has helped scale the company both scientifically and commercially.  

“I think it was because I was getting older,” Ria says, “and I wanted to do more with my skills. I wanted to move with a greater sense of urgency, so academia no longer felt like the right place for me. Which is definitely what I got to do at Piezo, and I also learned all these things I never thought about in the context of biotech, like sales, marketing, and product development. That’s been very fulfilling.”

Here’s how it works. Piezo is reimagining the drug delivery device much like reinventing a barbecue lighter; only instead of sparking a flame, their handheld electroporator sends quick electric pulses through microneedle electrodes that touch the skin. These pulses momentarily open pores, allowing “naked” RNA, DNA, and other biological payloads to pass directly into targeted cells. This means no lipid nanoparticles, no complex formulations, and far less loss of payload. The result is a precise, controlled, and painless way to deliver nucleic acid medicines, from vaccines and immunotherapies to therapeutic proteins and gene therapies, offering a more effective and accessible alternative to injections.

“It’s interesting,” I add, “because this job at Piezo, in a way, required you to dissociate from any progress you made while working on lipid nanoparticles in academia. That feels hard.”

“It is hard,” she notes. “It’s very easy and natural as a scientist to think you’re the cleverest person in the room when you have worked on something for so long. But you can’t fall into this trap.”

“How do you do that?”

She pauses for a moment.

“I always try to remind myself that science is meant to evolve and that my role as a scientist is to be open-minded. A solution that seems ideal at one stage may later reveal limitations as more data comes in. When that happens, I see it as my responsibility to be transparent and share what we’ve learned.”

𐫱

The next morning—while we are getting ready for our day trip to Convergence Station, the trippy art experience in Denver built by Meow Wolf—Ria is showing me two cards given to her by two interns who worked at Piezo for six months.The handwritten notes are dense, the sentiment effusive: Ria was a great mentor to have, someone they saw as both a boss and a friend, someone who shows how to set up an experiment and then gives advice on love and relationships. 

It’s not the first time something like this has happened. Over the past six years, Ria had managed and mentored close to fifteen students and interns, all of whom she is still in touch with today. It’s a noble service because it is a selfless choice—being a good mentor takes work and the incentives are not in place for anyone to want to be one. 

“How did you know you wanted to step into this de facto role of a mentor?”

“I think it became clear during my postdoc,” she answers. “As in, that I needed help. There was just no way to run all the experiments on my own. That was the impetus, I would say, but I always wanted to mentor people. Maybe because I never had that in my career and because I felt it was something that makes building a career so much easier.” 

It also might have something to do with Ria’s own tussle to conquer the maze of elite academic circles. Ria did not grow up in privilege—her life in Greece epitomized the experiences of middle-class Balkan families. This meant opportunities and connections that would eventually lead her to where she is today were not obvious. She had to decipher the rules herself and carve her own path. Ria had to figure it out alone and, through the struggle, promised herself she would never treat her or other people’s successes as a zero-sum game.

“How does that manifest in practice?” I ask. 

“First,” she says, “I am very open with people I mentor, especially undergrads, about the things that matter. If you want to go into industry to work as a scientist or an engineer, research experience is very important. Your GPA is not what you should be optimizing for. Even if you are going for a PhD, while grades do matter, I always tell them that letters of recommendations matter much more.”

“Which, I guess, is why having a mentor is beneficial for them. What do you think your students like about you as a mentor?”      

“I think it’s because I see them as equals. I expect a lot from them but I am also always available to them, and I always make sure that they are working on something they are excited about instead of just giving them commands—it’s not beneficial for anyone if you are working on things you find boring. I want them to love their work because that’s when they do their best. I think I also give them space to fail, which I think is important. Having the willingness to fail early and having someone who allows you to do that is one of the best things for your career. That’s what teaches you how to troubleshoot and how to ask the right questions.”

Questions are what we have when we later get to Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station, just off I-25 and Colfax Avenue in downtown Denver. Of the five installations across the country, this is the company’s largest one yet and it’s supposed to represent a confluence of four worlds, joined in a “rare cosmic event,” where memories are collected and said to be “currency,” though it’s not fully clear what one is supposed to buy with said currency. Like other Meow Wolfs, Denver’s Convergence Station is an impressive feat of human ingenuity, one that makes little sense to a sober mind and that is therefore all the more entertaining.  

We spend two hours in this sensory overload, and only at the end do I notice the landline wall phones installed across the four worlds are not just visual props but can be used to dial one another. I go to a phone station across one of the frequently visited rooms, tell Ria to go to the room so that she can watch people’s reactions when they answer my call, and then I dial the room’s code. A few rings in, someone answers and I begin to sing a choppy, offkey rendition of Bad Romance. The girl who answered the phone laughs and gives the phone to her friends so they can hear my performance as well. Muffled sounds follow and I then hear Ria’s voice on the phone. 

“Are we feeling good about ourselves?” she says.

“Well, hello,” I reply. “Very proud of myself indeed.”

“I told her, ‘That’s my friend on the phone.’ She was so confused.” 

Ria is not as entertained by the telephone adventure and is instead adamant about seeing “the castle,” an alleged multicolor structure she saw from one of the viaducts. We eventually find this fairytale-like building, officially called “The Cathedral,” what seems to be in the parlance of Meow Wolf a testament to the Eemian society, who were once denizens of a world full of lush trees, a world that was once reigned by three suns. For reasons unknown, one of the suns got extinguished and Eemia plunged into ice age, which is when The Cathedral was constructed to commemorate the Eemian race. It’s a trippy and beautiful installation, resembling something from a universe in which the aesthetics of PicassoTiles, The Addams Family, and Sleeping Beauty converged. 

It’s also something that I am not surprised to see Ria mesmerized by. Beneath her tough outer shell, etched by years of change and perseverance, there is an untainted heart in Ria that believes in the existence of magic and fantasy, in the existence of unconditional goodness wherever she finds herself. It’s obvious in the small choices, like the tender stories she seeks in movies and theater—one of her favorite activities on the weekends—and her selection of favorite live shows: Aladdin, Lion King, Phantom of the Opera, Hamilton, Book of Mormon, and Parade.

Where it is even more apparent is in the way she spends her Saturday mornings: at Antioch Urban Ministries, a non-profit organization that provides housing and social services to people who are struggling with substance abuse or are homeless or low-income. Ria volunteers there from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and serves food to the public, working with other volunteers, some of whom are there because they have the need to help and some as part of court-ordered community service. 

“How did you decide to do this?” I ask her. 

“I think I’ve always wanted to do it,” Ria answers. “I like helping others. It gives me a sense of meaning that I don’t get in a job setting. There is something about volunteering on a continuous basis, something about giving your time to others without any expectation of anything in return. You let go of ego. Other volunteers are amazing as well, they make me feel loved.”

“Really? How so?”

A kaleidoscopic reflection of the candy-colored stained-glass panels glides across our faces when a ray of light from the mounted lamps seeps through The Cathedral. Ria smiles. 

“I couldn’t come one Saturday after a long stretch of volunteering every weekend,” she says. “When I came back the next time, the woman who runs the food bank told me she was wondering where I was last Saturday. She told me she prayed for me and that she prayed I would come back.”