The first member of her family to attend college, Yalonda Howze, chief legal officer of Codiak BioSciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, grew up in East Detroit. During that time, she watched many communities become ravaged during the war on drugs. Witnessing this at an early age sparked her desire to find a way to help people that were suffering.

“Mine was a desperate neighborhood, at the time, a working-class neighborhood that had fallen, due to a raging crack epidemic that decimated families and communities,” she said. She compared that time to the pandemic that we’re suffering through now. “There are various kinds of epidemics that hit us,” she observed.