VIRTUAL EVENT
WedNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2026
"Breakthrough" Leadership Lessons: A Fireside with William Pao
Join us for an online conversation with William Pao, former Chief Development Officer at Pfizer and now CEO of Revelio Therapeutics.
Based on stories from his acclaimed book Breakthrough: The Quest for Life-Changing Medicines, William will describe the mindsets that carry leaders through uncertainty and share insights about risk-taking, failure, and building teams that endure.
He'll speak with Jonathan Yu, Chief Operating Officer at Disc Medicine.
Breakthrough offers a behind-the-scenes look at how transformative drugs are discovered and has been praised by The Guardian, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Art Levinson, the former CEO of Genentech. The book is coming to the U.S. in paperback on January 13, has been published in the U.K., and has a Chinese-language edition published in Taiwan.
About the speakers
William Pao is a physician-scientist whose career has spanned academia, industry and biotech. Motivated by his father’s death from cancer when he was 13, he started his career as a thoracic oncologist, lab researcher and clinical investigator at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer in New York and then Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he also served as the Division Chief of Haematology/Oncology. Previously Chief Development Officer for Pfizer, and prior to that, Head of the Roche Pharma Research & Early Development unit, he oversaw the discovery and development of portfolios of new molecular entities, many of which have been approved to treat a variety of diseases, from cancer to rare blood disorders. He has advised numerous professional associations, served on the editorial boards of prestigious medical research journals, and received multiple awards and recognitions. He is currently CEO and co-founder of a cancer biotechnology company, Revelio Therapeutics.
William was born in Washington, DC and grew up in the DC area. His parents were originally from Shanghai; his mom came to the US in 1946 as a teenager, and his dad in 1949 as a medical intern. His mother was naturalized as a US citizen in 1956 under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, and his father was naturalized in 1954 under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. In the 1950s, there were less than 120,000 people of Chinese origin living in the US. His maternal grandparents studied at NYU and Columbia University, respectively, from 1935-1936.
Jonathan Yu is the Chief Operating Officer at Disc Medicine and oversees corporate strategy, business development, portfolio management and corporate communications. Previously, he was a co-founder of Qpex Biopharma (acquired by Shionogi) and the Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Finance and Operations, where he led all business functions including the spin-out of the company’s core assets. Before Qpex, Jonathan served in various leadership roles at The Medicines Company (acquired by Novartis), most recently as Vice President of Strategic Planning and Corporate Development. Jonathan has also held a variety of roles at Acceleron Pharma and Johnson & Johnson spanning commercial planning, business development and finance. He holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an AB in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College.
Jonathan was born and raised in Kansas City, where his parents individually moved to and eventually met in a local singing group for young Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants seeking community. They came during the early 70s, when there were very few Asians living in the Midwest — graduate school brought Jonathan's father to the area, while his mother moved during high school to join her own father, who was building a small church to support the growing community of young Chinese students and professionals there.