This is the 98th article in Bears Doing Big Things, a weekly column celebrating the stories of notable M-A alumni.
“When I took AP Biology, I remember the specific day we learned how action potentials are fired down a neuron,” Hallee Foster ’11 said. “From that moment on, I was infatuated with neuroscience.” Foster works in business development at the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, where she evaluates new drugs from startup companies to determine whether the company should buy them.
At M-A, Foster was on the swim team all four years, including two years on varsity. When she lived in Colorado after college, Foster spent four years competing in triathlons. “It all started in the M-A pool,” she said. “My mom was an Olympic swimmer and my dad was a competitive triathlete, so it was bound to happen.”
Foster also rode horses throughout high school. “I’ve been riding horses since I was four years old, and it’s a great balance to intense school-work, work, and everything,” she said. She continued riding competitively in college and still rides for fun today.
During her senior year at M-A, Foster was one of the few women in the M-A 6th Man Club, a student group that promotes school spirit at basketball games. “It was really easy to make friends because of the 6th Man Club,” she said. “Some of my best friends in the world now are my high school friends.”
Foster discovered her love for neuroscience in her junior year of high school. Sparked by an interest in AP Biology, she set her sights on becoming a brain surgeon. “I was a very ambitious teen and I thought, ‘What’s the most intense thing I can do?’” she said.
After graduating from M-A, Foster attended Brown University, mainly because it was the only Ivy League school with both a neuroscience program and an equestrian team. She majored in neuroscience and was initially on the pre-med track. “I did all the prerequisites for medical school, and then I got to my junior year of college and realized I didn’t want to spend the next however-many decades of my life as a neurosurgeon,” she said.
“As I got older, I learned other career options that were available to me, and I’ve been picking different paths along the way that have gotten me closer to working with science, but in a business capacity,” Foster explained.
Following college, Foster moved to New York and spent two years in management consulting, helping companies improve their operations and strategy. She worked closely with healthcare companies, advising them on everything from which cancer drugs to develop to how to launch new medical devices. Foster then joined Aisling Capital, a biotech investment firm, where she worked as an analyst to evaluate potential drug treatments and decide whether the firm should invest in them.
However, Foster knew she wanted to be more directly involved in a company. “Investing and consulting were both a bit at arm’s length. Yes, the science is super interesting, but you’re not at the company making decisions,” she said. “I wanted that sort of skin in the game.”
Soon after, Foster joined Eli Lilly, where she has worked in business development ever since. Currently, she works as the head of external innovation at Eli Lilly, evaluating outside companies and their drugs to determine whether the company should acquire them.
“For four years I was doing this for cancer drugs,” she said. “Now I’m doing this for neuroscience drugs—looking at depression, anxiety, and PTSP, a lot of which haven’t had new treatments in 30 years. It feels very full circle.”
Foster’s advice to current M-A students: “If you have an inclination to leave the Bay Area, this is the time to do it. There’s a lot outside of this area.”
To those interested in neuroscience and business: “If you like science and feel that being a doctor is the job you need to do, then I would give you my career and life as a counterexample that you don’t have to do that. There are tons of other jobs for people who like science but don’t necessarily want to be doing experiments or treating patients.”
