Evan Loh, AB 1981 MD 1985

I’m the firstborn son of parents who immigrated out of China in the mid 1950s. They took a not uncommon path of leaving Shanghai in the Spring of 1949 and spent several years in Taiwan. My mother was a student here in the U.S. after securing a scholarship to the Yale School of Nursing, and my father was a physician who was able to secure a rotating internship in Denver, Colorado. They met in Taiwan and landed here in 1955 with no money and could not speak English. After finishing her degree program at Yale and my father finishing his residency, they got married, and I was born here, growing up in a pretty traditional Chinese home. My parents were very quick to realize, for them, the importance of assimilation, and they did not really understand then what the effects of assimilation would ultimately have on me. It was aimed towards surviving and being successful here. Even though my first language was Mandarin, it was important to my parents that I didn’t have an accent when I spoke English, and so we basically spoke English at home once I started in kindergarten. I grew up, and I didn’t have Mandarin as a language component of my ethnic heritage.

When I came to Harvard as a freshman, I noticed that so many Chinese students were bilingual and had a much broader sense of their ethnicity and were proud of their Chinese heritage. In a search to reacquaint myself to my Chinese heritage, sophomore through senior year, I took three years of intensive Mandarin (it met Monday through Friday, at 8 am, even through reading period). It was a lot of work, but it created an anchor for me to take a lot of East Asian study courses in addition to my pre-med requirements. It set the stage for me to reclaim my Chinese heritage and be proud of it.

Chinese culture is thousands of years old and rich with history. There’s so much anti-Asian and anti-Chinese sentiment out there in the press today: take the anti-Asian rhetoric calling COVID the China virus, for example. It’s so personally insulting and speaks to the fact that we as ethnic Chinese and Asian Americans really need to commit to having a voice and to being out front as leaders.

We need to show the world that we know who we are, we know we are important, and we have a voice. Our voice is independent of what the perceptions are in terms of the color of our skin or where we might come from.

One big problem is that there’s still a big assimilation message from my parents to be quiet and turn the other cheek. My mother always said to me, you have to be twice as good to be considered as good as someone who is white because you have yellow skin. She wasn’t emotional about it. She was simply stating her view of America’s “meritocracy” as she experienced it as a first generation immigrant to the U.S. Today, however, we must try and work towards changing that perception and being successful on a level playing field.

The business world can be different from the academic world. I spent almost two decades in academia, and you get a lot of credit there just for your scientific prowess and how widely published you are in the academic circles. There’s somewhat of a battle there to make sure that you’re on the right committees and invited to the right conferences, programs, and seminars, so there’s certainly some self advocacy there that is important. Importantly, academia definitely trained me to work hard. I was a busy clinician running the fifth largest volume heart transplantation program in the country, getting up at five in the morning to do morning rounds, see patients in the clinic, see consults at night, writing papers at night, and conducting ongoing basic and clinical research.  People talk about the eight hour day, and I’ve never known what an eight hour work day is. So when I went into pharma and didn’t carry a beeper around anymore, I had to determine how to spend my own time. Largely because of my medical training, it wasn’t hard to show them that you could work harder than anybody else out there. Of course, a lot of help also comes from great mentors - mentors who are willing to give you advice you need and stand behind you.

My leadership model has definitely been about empowering people. It’s not about my success, it’s about your success and the company’s success. As the CEO, I feel that I work for my employees. This really connects to how I feel that the fit into the pharma world remains consistent with why I chose a career in medicine - to help cure and improve the lives and outcomes of those afflicted with diseases.

I always say that the products we make have to be good enough that you would give it to your mother, father, brother, sister, grandmother, or grandfather. You wouldn’t give them a product you don’t believe in, that you think is not safe, so you need to maintain that safety and efficacy threshold. I actually prescribed my father NUZYRA last winter, a drug that we had developed, last winter for his pneumonia. You have to believe in your product.

If you take that attitude and apply it to all of your decisions, you will always ultimately make the right choice. In this current climate with Black Lives Matter and other movements, I also have a unique position as a biotech CEO with only about 100 employees.  I’ve been having lunches with everybody in the company. We don’t talk business - it’s just a chance for us all to get to know each other under an open door policy. I also created a lunch forum for people of color in my company to meet with me, and as a person of color myself, we can talk about how we’re feeling together. I guarantee to them that this is a safe space, and I can hear their personal stories. They’re heartbreaking. Absolutely heartbreaking. It’s 2020, 2021, and you have black men in suburbia today who are teaching their sons and daughters to put their hands up on the steering wheel when they are pulled over for a simple traffic violation. These are the stories you don’t normally hear as a CEO, but these are the stories that we need to have in our conversations.

I was having a successful academic career for many years, so why did I pull the ripcord and jump? I think it was a complex decision, but one that has afforded me the opportunity to learn new things. I wanted to be continually challenged, and going to pharma was a chance for me to learn even more. There’s a tremendous lack of appreciation for how complex the pharma and biotech world can be and what challenges exist. I left Pfizer in 2012, and Pfizer’s a big company with steady revenue - thus, you never have to worry about your paycheck or future financial struggles that are more often the storyline in biotech. But I jumped and naively thought I could lead and finance a privately held biotech company. And for the past seven and a half years, I have had the privilege and honor to lead and build Paratek Pharma into a NASDAQ-listed company with an ~ $300M market cap.

What really helped was building a great team of leaders who left big companies and real earnings to take a chance on this company. It’s about finding the best people possible to ensure that the company is successful. It’s also about finding great mentors and keeping them close. I have a few friends who I refer to as my own personal Board of Directors. The best mentors are the ones who you want to have them basically dump their brain into your head. Those are the ones I look for, the ones who are smarter and have been on this journey before.

Evan Loh MD

AB 1981 | Biology 

MD 1985

CEO at Paratek Pharmaceuticals Inc

Interviewed and Compiled by Felicia Ho