Peter Lassota's scientific career began on the sidewalks of Warsaw, Poland. At the urging of a grammar school teacher, the preteen Lassota entered a mathematics competition and trained for the contest with the help of his hometown's pedestrian infrastructure. "I remember we walked with our colleagues through the streets of Warsaw with a piece of chalk in our hands and a piece of paper with the problem to solve," Lassota says, "and when we had a solution, we just wrote it down on the sidewalk."
The Polish youngster advanced all the way to the national finals of that competition. His sidewalk education and resulting success launched Lassota on a trajectory that took him through academia and into the biotech industry by opening up opportunities that were not necessarily afforded his peers growing up in Communist Poland.
Lassota, now 51, is divisional vice president of imaging biology and oncology at Caliper ...
