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Robert Plenge

Robert Plenge

Robert Plenge, MD, PhD, is Executive Vice President and Chief Research Officer at Bristol Myers Squibb.

Sep 24, 2026

0:36
Robert, to kick us off and to set the stage here, I'd love if you could talk us through how you got interested in the life sciences broadly and the path of your journey and how you got to where you are today.
0:48
All right.
0:48
I'll go back to high school, but then I'm gonna go pretty quickly, so I promise not to, like, spend, you know, ten or fifteen minutes on high school.
0:54
But played basketball in high school, wasn't very good, always getting hurt, so I got interested in medicine and primarily sports medicine.
1:00
So when I went to college, I, uh, was pre-med thinking I'd become an orthopedic surgeon and then went to medical school pre-med, thinking again I'd be an orthopedic surgeon.
1:11
I decided to take a year off in medical school to really go more deeply into research, and I picked a genetics lab.
1:17
And over the course of the next twelve months, I totally changed direction.

33 MINS LATER

34:04
I'd love if you could talk to us from your vantage point about where AI is particularly useful right now and its potential impact on R&D productivity.

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