He built a mass spectrometer from scratch and reinvented it in the process!

Bearing a smile, Mazdak “Maz” Taghioskoui says he immigrated to the United States from Iran for a good education and same-day shipping, two key features that have supported his focus on building – from scratch – a sophisticated next-generation analytical tool: the Trace Matters SPion mass spectrometer.

Maz is the Founder and CEO/CTO of Trace Matters, and we sat down with him for show-and-tell to discuss how he and his company is reinventing the mass spectrometer to save lives here on Earth and to advance our scientific understanding of the cosmos beyond our planet.

Show Notes

• Episode page, transcript, and podcast listening links: https://toughtechtoday.com/bootstrapping-mass-spectrometry/
• Mazdak on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mazdakoskui/
• Trace Matters (company): https://www.tracematters.com/
• Greentown Labs (workspace): https://greentownlabs.com/
• Harvard’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx): https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr2022263
• Subscribe with your favorite podcast service: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1169378/5983345
• Watch this show on Youtube: https://youtu.be/2wsX9bWqTj4

Topic Timecodes

00:54 A lesson in high school chemistry

03:44 History and benefits of mass spectrometry for space and medical applications

04:53 Screening newborn babies’ blood for disease mitigation

06:18 Instrumentation Startup: A tiny company in a world of corporates

07:15 Creating a mass spectrometer… from scratch

08:56 The fallacy of“if your system is complex and it’s working, you don’t change it”

10:11 How I built this

12:16 A case study in the 10,000 Hour Rule and brute force science

13:38 Seeing years of work finally come to fruition

17:24 Seeing SPion and the frog

18:53 Expediting mass spectrometry-assisted brain surgery

23:36 Show-and-tell in Maz’s lab

24:48 Inventing a lab-scale fabrication process

28:20 Following a vision or a wandering path?

30:08 Getting addicted to solving challenges

32:01 Immigrating to the United States for a great education and… quick shipping

33:26 The resources at Massachusetts’ Greentown Labs

34:37 Bootstrapping a scientific instrument company

37:32 A shift in how we build instruments?

39:36 Who could be first to benefit from next-generation mass spectrometry?

40:52 Integrating learnings into a tech roadmap

41:23 The Harvard Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) program and COVID-19

42:12 Advice to a younger self: persistence, love, and remembering to eat

Tags

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