Christalyn Rhodes

Biotech Executive, AI Founder Redefining Human Performance & Medicine

Christalyn Rhodes

Biotech Executive, AI Founder Redefining Human Performance & Medicine

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Biography

Dr. Christalyn Rhodes is a biotech executive and founder operating at the intersection of genetic medicine, AI, and human performance. She earned her PhD from Harvard University and MBA from MIT, currently a Sloan Fellow at MIT Sloan School of Management. She began her industry career at Flagship Pioneering, where she helped incubate novel therapeutic platforms and later co-founded an RNA editing company focused on precision genetic interventions. She went on to serve as Associate Vice President of Genetic Medicine at Eli Lilly, leading external innovation and partnerships to accelerate next-generation RNA and gene-based therapies.

Dr. Rhodes was Head of Academic Partnerships and Expert-in-Residence at the Harvard Innovation Labs, advising startups at the interface of science, healthcare, and technology and building pipelines between academic founders and industry. She is currently the Founder and CEO of Harmonie Health, an AI biotechnology startup leveraging advanced machine learning to understand the progression of the aging and stress axis and its role in illness manifestation and progress of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. The company applies these insights to develop a modality-agnostic therapeutic platform, integrating data across biological, behavioral, and digital domains to inform personalized interventions.

Across roles, Dr. Rhodes has built a reputation as a strategic connector of disciplines, translating complex biology into scalable platforms and partnering models that serve patients, clinicians, and innovators alike.

Speaker Videos

Accidental Entrepreneur

Harvard Horizons Symposium: Cold Migration

Speech Topics

Perseverance, Not Perfection: Raising Leaders While Building at the Edge of Uncertainty

This talk brings together leadership, parenting, and high performance. Dr. Christalyn Rhodes shares her experience raising three children into top tier institutions, including Princeton and USC (failing at first, applying again, and gaining US ambassador recommendations with tenacity), while simultaneously accelerating her own career into executive leadership. Dr. Rhodes breaks down the systems used across environments that were not always designed for us and shows how consistency, expectations, and resilience translate across both family and career. The audience leaves with a practical framework for developing excellence in themselves and others without relying on perfect conditions.

The Unseen Architecture of Biotech: Power, Drift, and the Future of Innovation

Dr. Christalyn Rhodes traces how a quiet migration of postdocs out of academia built billion-dollar biotech companies, concentrated power, and shaped the current system constraints we see today. The goal of this talk is change management. It helps leaders understand where we are, how we got here, and how to move forward differently.

What If Is Not the Problem: Lessons from a Young Leader in an AI World

AI is accelerating an employment shift and democratizing access to knowledge, creating a new generation of young leaders. In this talk, Dr. Christalyn Rhodes explores how we prepare for that shift. Drawing on her own leadership journey and reflections from literature like The Secret Sharer, she argues that many of the struggles we attribute to circumstance are in fact timeless human patterns. The opportunity is to recognize them and lead anyway.

Testimonials

"I just wanted to thank you for speaking at our Coffee Hour event this week. Our conversation with you was incredibly impactful and student feedback from the event so far has been positive all around. So many students felt heard and understood from your words, and your advice echoed empowerment across the board. It was wonderful to host you, thank you again for taking the time to speak with us. Thank you again for sharing your experience and empowering us in the process!"

- USC