Homeroom with Sal & Eduardo Cetlin - Wednesday, September 2

Hi everyone! Welcome to our homeroom live stream. Really excited about the conversation we're going to have in a few minutes with Eduardo Setlin from the Amgen Foundation. I encourage any of y'all who have questions to start putting them in the message board on YouTube and on Facebook. If you have questions about science education, the work of corporate philanthropy, even the biotech industry, careers in science, or careers in philanthropy.

But before we get to that, I will make a few of my standard announcements. First of all, a reminder that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exist through donations from folks like yourself. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate. Donations of all sizes make a very, very big difference.

I also want to give a special shout-out to several organizations that have stepped up, especially as we entered into the COVID period. We were already running at a deficit pre-COVID, and then you could imagine our server costs are two to three times normal. We are trying to accelerate a whole series of content and programmatic efforts to support parents, teachers, and students through the crisis. Special thanks to Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Bank of America, and Novartis. And also a very special thanks to the Amgen Foundation that has been working with us for many years now. We're going to talk a little bit more in depth about it with Eduardo, helping us bring great science content to millions of students around the world. Obviously, that was very relevant pre-COVID, and it's even more relevant as you can imagine as folks are even more dependent on this type of content.

Before we get to that conversation, I'm also going to bring in my colleague Dan, who has a few announcements.

I think, Sal, so we're wanting to announce a couple of webinars that we have this week. The first one is today, and it's targeted for teachers. Jeremy Shiffling, who's our teacher guru, is going to be walking through a demo of the classroom experience from a student perspective for teachers in order to build an understanding of the student experience by going through several processes, including how to register, what assignments look like when they receive them, and how to try out a course mastery goal. That is scheduled for today at 4 p.m. Pacific time, 7 p.m. Eastern time.

And the second webinar is tomorrow, and that one's targeted for parents of young learners ages two through seven. That one's titled "How to Keep Your Child Learning and Happy at Home." That one is going to be led by Renee Scott, who's the director for early education for education partners at Stanford, and Caroline Hu Flexor, who's the CEO and co-founder of Khan Academy Kids. They'll be sharing some ideas, discussing some easy ways to boost learning throughout the day at home for young learners. That one is tomorrow at 4 p.m. Pacific time and 7 p.m. Eastern.

Both webinars will be recorded and available online. We'll post those a little bit afterward, as all our webinars are.

Back to you, Sal.

Great! Thanks so much, Dan. Well, with that, and I encourage folks to check that out. We're going to be having even more webinars and programs to support folks through this very difficult back to school period. I'm excited to introduce our guest, Eduardo Setlin, head of the Amgen Foundation, and I'd also like to consider him as something of a friend.

Eduardo, thanks for joining us.

Hi Sal, hi everyone! It is a privilege and an honor to be with you today. Thanks for having me.

No, no, our honor! So maybe a good place to start is, I'm sure a lot of folks have heard of Amgen, but we have a lot of young people who maybe know, "Okay, they do something in biotech or something in pharma." What do they do, and what does the foundation do? So maybe that's a good place to start.

Sure! So the Amgen Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Amgen. We are a medical biotechnology firm. We just turned 40 this year, about 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles, and we are a large independent medical biotechnology company with a very powerful but simple mission, which is to serve patients. The core reason our company exists is to make the most of scientific discovery and scientific developments to help patients fighting very serious illnesses.

Through the Amgen Foundation, we have the mission of inspiring the next generation of innovators, the next generation of scientists, as well as investing in scientific literacy. As you think about what is the key input to what Amgen does as a company, it is human talent. We are firm believers in the power of each one to really bring their very best in the capacity to have an impact.

In the philanthropic investments we make, our focus is to build a pipeline of folks who can go into science, contribute to science, and develop a love for science. As I just mentioned, we've been long-time partners, and that partnership has only been growing. But what are the types of projects that you try to invest in, and how do you know if they're working?

Sure! When you think about the philanthropic space, there are millions of amazing organizations doing very good work throughout the country and throughout the world. Folks who are really putting all their energy towards improving the human condition. We took a very focused approach by inspiring the next generation of scientists and scientific literacy.

We started on a journey where it was really all about how do we create unique learning opportunities for students? How do we level the playing field so that every student has access to that kind of learning that will really trigger in their mind, "Hey, maybe there's something here for me. Maybe I could be a scientist," or maybe not, but I know enough about the scientific method to navigate the challenge of the modern world?

We take an approach to be focused for the long term, to really be driven by results. For a very long time, we have two main programs: something called Amgen Scholars and something called Amgen Biotech Experience. Let me touch on the two to get to this moment where we're living now and how our work has evolved.

For Amgen Scholars, we invest in 24 different universities that host 15 students each summer for an intense summer research experience. The idea is that these students are having the opportunity to live the life of a scientist for an entire summer. Each of the universities oversees their own application process, and we encourage undergraduate students from around the world to apply to this program.

We provide the financial resources for them to get to one of these universities, and we also do annual symposia that bring the students together. I'll tell you more about how we're dealing with that in the world of COVID in a second.

Then, the separate program is something called the Amgen Biotech Experience, which started 30 years ago right here in the Thousand Oaks neighborhood where we are in Southern California. A local Amgen scientist partnered with a biology teacher to say, "How can we leverage some of the techniques that we do in our company to help students see themselves in the role of that scientist?"

So that program provides the curriculum, it provides professional-grade equipment, and it provides ongoing support and training for teachers to provide these opportunities for students. Throughout this two to three-week curriculum, the students have the opportunity to transform a bacterial cell into a protein factory. We use a red fluorescent protein, which can be seen with the naked eye. So it's really applying some of the same mechanisms that our company used to make medicines such as erythropoietin and other biopharmaceutical companies used to make medicines like insulin, but putting it in the hands of students so that they can live the life of a scientist.

This program saw it took us about 15 years to get to 50,000 students primarily in the United States. Today, we're reaching 90,000 students all over the world on an annual basis. We have 1,500 teachers engaged in the initiative, and they are the ones who really create this transformative moment within their classrooms, leveraging the curriculum and creating a unique opportunity for their students.

For a very long time, those programs were the core of what we did. The challenge with those programs was how do we scale up and increase our reach? We're very proud again to go from 50,000 over 15 years to 90,000 a year, but the question of significantly large growth would not be possible to do so with a hands-on platform. That's what triggered our early conversations with you back in 2015.

Now, if I were to read between the lines of all of the amazing work that y'all have been doing, it sounds like there's a pattern. A lot of students don't, even though they might be interested in science. I mean, I argue how can you not be interested in science? It's trying to explain the universe that we're in, and pretty much everything that we have at our disposal that defines modern civilization is based on science.

But it sounds like a lot of kids, for whatever reason, they watch movies or there are stereotypes that develop where they say, "Oh, well, those scientists look different than me. Maybe I'm not meant to be a scientist." You all are doing really amazing work that kids actually realize that no, you are going to be, you can be a scientist. It's especially important if you don't look like some of the people you might see on the TV screen that you go into science because you might be able to bring a unique perspective and a unique creativity to it.

And then, if I'm hearing another dimension, how do you give access to really cutting-edge work? Because sometimes the science that you do in school can be a little bit more, let's call it old-school, and kids might have trouble connecting that to the modern frontiers of what might go on in the labs at Amgen, which is powerful. And obviously, our work with y'all is how do we scale that even further? How do we get even more kids comfortable and feel like they deeply understand science?

Yes, absolutely! It's a multi-pronged issue. I think there are the challenges of stereotypes, the question of who can become a scientist, but also the sense that you can't be what you can't see. Even the possibilities of how do we bring that closer to students to see, "Hey, maybe this could be me."

I add to that the complexity of the educational system. In a lot of ways, I was rereading your book recently, Sal, in the final chapters, the analysis of if you think about the way classroom learning is typically organized in a pre-COVID world. Now, you know, I'll talk about my little girl, who's eight now. When she went from preschool to kindergarten, she went from an environment where she could move around, she could decide on what she was going to play with, to an environment, a traditional school where all the desks were organized cemetery style, and she was expected to be quiet and pay attention and absorb the content.

That was the given. I think that when you fast forward and compound that not only into the elementary, middle, high school, and sometimes even at the university level with the lecture-driven lessons, you lose a lot of the power to engage the students.

One of my favorite books, "Most Likely to Succeed," talks about if you were going to teach students how to ride a bike, you would spend a couple of weeks on the history of the bicycle. Then, we would talk about all the different parts of the bicycle. If you're going to a very good school, we'll talk about the physics of balance. At the end of it, we would give you a test with a lot of hard questions, and independently, if you're doing really well or just okay, there's this expectation that you leave the school and you're able to ride your bike.

Not only is it far less exhilarating, but it's not like the real practice of the skill. So we think about programs like Amgen Scholars and the Amgen Biotech Experience in allowing the students to see really what the scientific process is all about.

We did some research with high school students primarily in the United States, but replicated it across the world, and students love science. They really struggle with the science class and the way the science is taught. People can go at this in many different ways, but we see actually that science teachers are the biggest ally we have. They are enormously committed to providing the best possible education for their students. But they need the tools, they need the assistance, and they need the resources to create those kinds of opportunities for those students.

We have a question here related to that from Facebook. Lynn Bradley, a 6th-grade science teacher, asks, "She teaches at a Title 1 school. Most kids don't have supplies for experiments at home. Curious about ideas that are cheap and free. Do we have any ideas?"

I have a few, Eduardo. Any thoughts for Lynn?

Um, DonorsChoose is a terrific platform to socialize the potential needs you have, and they attract donors from all over the country to support local issues and local efforts.

And then, Sal, I'm happy for you to add more.

Yeah, and I could just give you samples. We could go through the entire 6th-grade curriculum, and you know some of the things—I'm not sure exactly on the 6th-grade standards—but these are the exact things. You know, kitchen chemistry! You can do a lot! So I encourage any teachers to do web searches for just kitchen chemistry.

Obviously, you can do acid-base work. Do vinegar and baking soda. You can do—I just made a whole series of videos on distillation, which I think you can create ad-hoc distillation setups at home where maybe you want to distill water and separate pure water from saltwater, or distill a mixture of whatever's in their kitchen.

I think these things can be done with a stove, a pot, and some contraptions maybe made out of plastic and cardboard that you cut up. Physics-type things, you know, if kids have springs, if they have, you know, honestly just a ball and a stopwatch, go outside! Say why, you know, how high is something going based on how long it's in the air? Measuring air resistance.

So there's a lot that can be done. I highly recommend home science or kitchen chemistry-type projects to see what's available.

So Eduardo, you know, we've talked a lot about kids entering careers in science, but we have a lot of young people who watch this. One thing I always try to ask as many guests as possible because there's no major in college to do what you do. I mean, there are not a lot of majors to do exactly what a lot of folks do.

But I think people—when I was young, and I would see an Eduardo Setlin who runs a foundation, I was like, "How do you end up there?" What's the background? So I'd love for folks to learn a little bit about your personal journey. How did you end up as the president of the Amgen Foundation?

Sure, sure! So, you know, I was born and raised in Brazil in a city called Belo Horizonte. It's up in the mountains; it's not on the coast. So people think Brazil, they think the beaches. No, that's not where I grew up.

It was very clear to me that as I went through my education, mostly in Belo but also had the opportunity to spend almost two years in Canada. My dad's a professor, and he went to continue his studies there. It helped me learn the English that I can speak quite fluently as my second language.

But I think back to the pursuit of the college degree for me. It was very clear that that was the path to achieve my independence. I say, you know, my dad's family came to Brazil from Poland, running away at the time of the Second World War. The Jewish ethic of study hard, really over-preparing was very important for me—learning as much as I could at any point in time.

The other side of that that gets to this moment where I'm living now is, so we have preparation on one side, and I had inspiration on the other. You know, my mom is from a small town about four hours from Belo. It's called Manual, which means big river in the local indigenous language there called Tupi.

A large family, you know, she's one of 10 kids, and my grandmother was such a strong force in my life around showing how much it is critical for us to do for our neighbors, how much is important to engage with our community. And with my mom, the sense of dreaming, you know, what's possible? How do you achieve your dreams?

My journey in what I'll tell you about how that evolved from the college degree is really a mix of that preparation and the inspiration. I was very lucky to have had both.

When I finished college, I joined General Electric. I did what's called the finance management program—it's a two-year rotational program. I did a year and a half in Brazil, and then was very lucky to be invited to come to the United States for a six-month assignment in a city called Erie, northwest Pennsylvania, working in finance.

People typically don’t think about local; I was in the locomotive factory. You know, in the best year GE made a thousand locomotives—think about that—20 a week. That was my introduction to what corporate America can really do in the power to bring progress across our society.

After being a trainee, I did a job in systems and finance. Finance people thought I was in information systems, and information systems people thought I was in finance. I did a job there and had a very fancy title called "e-finance six sigma black belt." That's probably the coolest title I’ve ever had.

Then a colleague told me about an opportunity to come to Amgen. So I came across the country—nice weather—and really a promise of an industry. The company was about $7 billion in revenues back then; it's about 25 today. It's a huge opportunity for growth, and the job was to be an internal consultant. I came to that for about a year and a half.

Then I hit a bit of a snag in my life in the sense of I had just applied to start an MBA and was accepted to it, but I didn't feel that the work I was doing was meaningful enough. I felt, listen, it's just my wife and I here in the United States. I need to do something that I truly believe in.

Very fortuitous timing: the person who was running the Amgen Foundation then was building up a team. I was extremely lucky that she gave me a shot and brought me into her team. I think about those five years at GE and at Amgen; they were absolutely critical to make me eligible to be considered for that role.

But that only got me in the door. The question then was performance to succeed in this new path. You know, you talk about a company like Amgen—there are about 20,000 to 22,000 staff around the world. The entire Amgen Foundation team is about five people, so it's a small team.

What really ensued in the many coming years—I’ve been at Amgen now for 17 years—is the steepest learning curve I could ever have imagined. The focus on all the years I had invested in finance and the investment in pedagogical skills—how do you make the best possible science education reality?

I am a very studious person. I've been learning a lot and have the privilege and the honor to work with amazing people in my team and across the enterprise towards this really mission-driven work to help patients and, through the foundation, to help the next generation of innovators.

So it's a long-winded way to go, but I think it's a way of saying for me that what I do is as important as the why I do.

No, that's fascinating. Actually, you know, we've known each other for several years now, and I didn't know all of that background. And it is fascinating because, you know, it's definitely, if I were to sample you at any point, you know, when you're right out of college, I don't think you would have predicted where you would have ended up.

But it sounded like you had a nice balance between, you know, the business sense, the finance side of things, but also the technical side—whether it's, you know, information sciences or the science side. From your point of view, what do you think were the traits that you brought to the table that you either developed or maybe were just kind of a mindset you brought that allowed you to succeed in these pretty diverse roles that you've had over your career?

Hard work, determination, being a very studious person, and being willing to say, "I don't know," and doing the study, and being very curious to continue learning more. Luck, I think luck is the kind of thing that is underappreciated in our society. That's so worried about meritocracy. Opportunities came to me at a time when I could take advantage of them.

But I'll say that, you know, if I had charted out a path to say I want to become the president of the Amgen Foundation, I don’t know if the steps I took would have been the same. I think the sense of at each step of my career that I gave all I had—I’ve always been an all-in kind of person—to really focus and do the absolutely best that I could.

So what I would say is that those first five years in GE and the beginning at Amgen, the hard skills, the focus on finance, the ability—I worked in accounting, I worked in financial planning and analysis, I worked in process improvements—in the financial organization. So at that point, I was on a path to become a finance professional, and that was what I thought was possible. Then even the image of maybe there is something like a philanthropic foundation that might be engaged in the future, it only came much later, about five years of experience that I had.

I would also add the sense of the opportunities that come to us at different points in our life are sometimes it's harder to—it's very hard to realize what of all the things you're doing are going to be the ones that are going to open more doors or the ones that will close doors.

So, the more you can apply yourself in paths that keep as many doors open, I think the better. The blend for me that I think was instrumental in going into the philanthropic space was the human side of things. You know, you talk about hard skills and soft skills; you talk about the importance. We're so focused on investing in STEM, but the humanities have a huge role to play here, of course.

You know, the teacher who asked the question— that teacher has a lot of different challenges in her hand. She has a curriculum to follow. She has a lot of expectations around what her students will leave the class learning. But she also has the human side of talking to those students who are, you know, 6th grade—that's the same as my oldest daughter. These kids who are, you know, going back to school in all virtual spaces, and their how they feel about the friendships that they are not making.

How much do they really know the kid across the screen? Is that going to be a real long-term friend or not? So I think that as I think about young students paving their paths forward, I think my best advice is to nurture both your mind and your heart.

If you—there are great resources around applying to college; there are great resources around financing the college experience. Google has just come up with some new credentialing courses. So even though the world of higher education is rapidly evolving, my sense is follow your dreams, but not in the platitude "If you can do anything you put your mind to." Because I think that that's often a very unfair thing that is said to young students.

We all face constraints, we all face limitations, but take advantage of the resources that are available to you. And Sal, I think this is a place where the relationship that the foundation developed with Khan Academy is critical. What drove you to start the Khan Academy? And you know, I read your letter to yourself 10 years ago when you had no idea how big this thing was going to get. To think about it now, where you have learners across the entire world saying, "Irrespective of my family condition, if I have access to the internet, I have access to a world-class education for free."

I think that holds so much promise. For kids today, that's a resource that's available that wasn't available when I was a kid. So again, those different doors that become available—take advantage of free resources. You know, we've also started something with Harvard called Lab Exchange, which is a partnership with Khan Academy as well, where they are creating a lot of virtual laboratory and ways for teachers to develop and bring their own curriculum.

Technology is moving, I think, in a not only a fast way but in a way now that is empowering the learning. It's not tech for tech’s sake, and that’s the other part of what I love about your world; it's about learning. I don't care how fancy the technology is and 3D goggles and all of that. That's all secondary.

The important thing is that the student learns. And I'll close this piece with a comment: Earlier today, my youngest daughter—she is in third grade and her teacher, Mrs. Arnot, is really a big fan of Khan Academy, and she's been doing a lot of it. So she came in and said, "Well, you know, yesterday I leveled down four skills, but today I've leveled up 12 skills!" That opportunity where she sees that she is struggling and over-investing her time; she can overcome and she can learn the content that the teacher expects her is the kind of dynamic that is brand new.

So now she is able to realize, "Yes, I have a full understanding of that content thanks to Sal Khan."

Oh no, I always love hearing stories like that. Maybe one last question from YouTube. Flora Star says, "What is Amgen's future plan to support students?" I'll expand that question a little bit. You know, Eduardo, if we fast forward 10, 20 years into the future, what do you hope to be the legacy of your work and the foundation?

So I stand on the shoulders of giants who really took a tiny foundation and said, "Hey, maybe it is possible to level the playing field for learners around the world through hands-on learning." I hope my legacy is that I'm really able to work with our amazing board of directors, who challenge me and my team on a regular basis, as well as our CEO, to say, "Have we done enough? How do we reach everyone that might be interested in how to create the opportunities for everyone to live up to their potential?"

I'm very hopeful that I'm able to look back and see Khan Academy much larger than it already is—to see the Lab Exchange platform evolving and that students are able to connect the world of their classroom with the world of work. That we're more effective at connecting those two so that learning happens, of course, as you're going through the beginnings of your career but even after you're in a full-time job.

You know, technology is here to stay and changes are ever-present. How do you upskill yourself if you are a 50-year-old individual who just lost his or her job, and now you're thinking about how do you continue providing for your family? There are resources such as Khan Academy that provide specific knowledge around subjects and how do we invent resources to equip individuals to build upon what they already know and complement them to do what is needed from a work perspective today.

So my sense is we're just beginning. Our company has huge ambition as to how we can go about serving patients, and that means that citizens are better informed, that citizens are better able to ask questions when they go to the doctor.

Say, "Clinical trials, you know, if you get to the end of a standard of care for a cancer patient, what happens then? The only opportunity you have is our clinical trials." Seventy percent of Americans are willing to participate in the clinical trial. Yet, less than one in 20 patients are part of a cancer clinical trial. If you look at the African American population, 13% of the U.S. population, 5% of trial participants. For Latinos, better said, only 1% or 2% of participants.

So we live, Sal, in a moment where everything we do through the foundation and the possibilities of becoming literate in navigating the world we all live in connects directly with the ability to succeed in this environment. Learning ongoing, asking good questions, and avoiding—I carry this magazine with me, "The War on Science." Climate change does not exist. Evolution never happened. The moon landing was fake. How is it possible that questions like that are asked today when we carry supercomputers in our pockets, when we can harness the immune system to fight cancer?

I look forward and say in partnership such as what Amgen Foundation and all of your other funders have with you, Sal, that we can start creating a world that is fair and that every student has access to the opportunities that they deserve.

Well, I look forward to going on this adventure with all of you because I couldn't agree more that the world, more than ever, needs this. And if we're able to do it, we can do so much for humanity. Eduardo, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today, but also for this partnership that we've had for many years, and hopefully will empower many tens of millions of folks—families, teachers, and students—over the decades to come.

Thank you!

Thank you, Sal! Really appreciate the opportunity and look forward to continuing our journey.

Well, thanks everyone for joining. As always, a really interesting conversation about the importance of science and the importance that corporations and corporate foundations can have in helping empower folks.

Obviously, helping us do the work we do, but well beyond that. I want to remind everyone for tomorrow's homeroom; it's going to be at 12:30. It's going to be with Chancellor Robert Jones of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and that's going to be really interesting because they are, I would say, more proactive about testing and contact tracing around COVID than any university that I'm aware of and maybe anywhere in the country right now.

It's going to be a really interesting conversation about this intersection between keeping the virus from spreading on a campus where kids are there and trying to get back to school as normal. They've actually developed their own tests. It’s going to be a really interesting conversation—30 minutes later than our normal time. So I look forward to seeing everyone then!