Innovating Change: From STEM Research to Entrepreneurial Leadership

In this episode of the EDII Catalyst, Dr. Morgan Lehtinen (Executive Director, RXN HUB) joins us to discuss how her journey in STEM led her to pursue entrepreneurship.

Hosted by Dr. Emily Albright, this episode explores challenges in the transition from lab bench to commercial scale and how Dr. Lehtinen’s work has connected scientific innovation with real-world commercialization.

Transcript begins below video.

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The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Today, we’re very excited to have Dr. Morgan Lehtinen with us. She is currently the Executive Director of RXN (Reaction) HUB, a company here in Kingston, Ontario, designed to help innovators scale and deploy their technologies. She's also a Queen's University alumna! We always love when people from Queen's join the podcast.

C2MCI has been able to collaborate with RXN HUB a few times over the past couple of years, and it's always been great. To start off, could you to tell us about a little more about yourself; where you grew up, what got you interested in science (particularly chemistry), and how that led you to your current role?

I think, similar to many, I always knew from a young age that science was going to be what I was interested in. I was the kid out in the backyard making concoctions and ‘chemical soup’ with dirt and grass. I always loved trying to ask the question ‘why?’ (likely to my parents’ annoyance sometimes). I grew up just north of Toronto in Newmarket and in high school, I thought about pursuing medicine. In my high school, there was a very much a ‘you can become a medical doctor, or you become an engineer’ mindset. In my mind, engineers built bridges—I didn't really know what else was out there. I knew I wanted to go into science, so I thought a medical path was the path I wanted to take.

I came to Queen’s to go on a life sciences-type journey originally… and very quickly, I did not love that journey. Early on in my undergraduate degree, I was taking chemistry courses and found I loved the kind of scientific inquiry that took place. We were problem-solving from day one, and I loved that aspect of it. Over the years, going through my undergrad, I realized that chemistry is like a toolkit where you can pull all these different pieces together and ultimately make anything, and that’s really cool. I was constantly thinking, ‘what's the science behind this?’ It’s like a form of magic, and it was really fascinating to me to get to pull those pieces together.

Throughout my undergrad, it was definitely a little bumpy trying to figure out where I actually felt that I fit. For a while, I couldn't really find the thing that I thrived in. I just tried to do everything, tried to get involved as much as possible, and tried to think, ‘well, maybe if I learn some business skills or get involved in student councils or leadership programs, I'll find the thing.’ Ultimately, in my fourth-year project that we had to do, I joined a group and was working on a filtration technology to separate industrial stable oil water emulsions, and I absolutely loved it. I could see the connection between what I was making and its real-world application. I had a really great mentor and decided to stay along for grad school after that.

I loved research, but I was always surprised that there was a lack of conversation around commercialization and the processes happening behind the scenes. I’d see professors that had technologies they had licensed or had built startup companies, and I never really knew how or where you went to do that. I went on a little hyperfixation and tried to figure out and learn about that world. Ultimately, that led me down a path that we can chat more about afterwards: into the sort of innovation and entrepreneurial world of chemistry.

You mentioned growing up and seeing a big push towards medical and engineering pathways, and that seeing other paths was hard to grasp. Our listeners in grad school may also be familiar with the split towards becoming a professor or going into industry, and may be struggling with a lack of knowledge surrounding entry into industry.

You're technically in industry, but I feel like you’ve purused a different route than just going to industry and working behind the bench. That's an interesting option to talk about and bring up for people to hear about. It’s important for students who are completing their graduate degree to see various types of careers they can explore, and understand that there aren’t just a few set options they must pursue.

Absolutely. It's been getting better since we were in earlier phases of grad school; I think awareness of different types of careers is a conversation that's happening. I imagine if we ask our professors, they’ll say they've seen it change over the course of their careers as well. One of the stories I always like to share is when I was in completing my Master's and was on the student council, we were trying to develop new initiatives to raise awareness around different jobs. We did a bit of a survey and asked students, ‘who wants to go into industry?’ and ‘who here has gone and toured a chemical plant before?’ I think there was maybe one hand in the entire class and we were like, ‘wow, let's start doing this. Let's do plant tours and start to bring those ideas in.’

To your question on how my journey got into a different side of industry, and how that happened: I'd been really interested in learning more about commercialization and the process of commercializing a technology. By commercialization, I mean the process of bringing in an invention (in other words, what you create in the lab and perhaps file a patent for) and turning that into an innovation. I like the definition of innovation as a distinct idea: taking an invention of value—an invention capable of making an impact, either socially, environmentally, economically—and putting it into practice, getting it out in the world doing what it's meant to do, and then bringing in a variety of stakeholders, different jobs, people, organizations. I like bringing in stakeholders that can get that invention and turn it into an innovation, like taking a molecule and turning it into a drug, depending on what the process looks like. I always found that really interesting.

The filtration technology that we were working on received a lot of industry interest. I imagine many of you in the C2MCI community may have industry partners expressing interest in your work. I never thought an entrepreneurial path was what I wanted to pursue, but I let my professor know I was interested and asked to join in on meetings to see what the commercialization process might look like. My professor offered to let me lead some of them if I wanted. She was also new to the process and had never really done something like that before, so we went through that process together.

When COVID hit, we couldn't be in the lab. Kingston had just invested funds to set up women in entrepreneurship programs. I figured if I couldn’t be in the lab, why not take some of these programs and try out different experiences? When we still couldn’t go back in the lab, I saw it as a chance to start a company. I didn't know what that path would look like. But I had a really interesting few years going through programs all over the world to learn business-side skills. I just jumped in and focused on, ‘what will it really take to get a technology out of the lab and into the world?’ Through that journey, I learned that the path to do that is not clear; it’s not laid out or taught anywhere.

We're all comfortable in working in the fume hood, but what happens when you need to make something one hundred times the scale of what's in your fume hood? What about the infrastructure—specifically, the facilities that help you get to the next scale past the lab? Where do you do that? It was that idea that made me go, ‘I could continue developing my technology. Or, I could build an organization that could try and work on solving the system so that more technologies have an easier path to get to market.’ And that was that.

Alongside my team and business partner, as well as a variety of other organizations within the Kingston and broader provincial and federal region, we came together and said, ‘this is a problem not just in Kingston. This is a problem all over the country. Let's do something about it.’ And that was the stemming of RXN HUB.

That's really interesting—when I did my Master's, we were looking at organic molecules for electronic devices and things like that. I always felt like, ‘I'm at such an experimental stage of this. I can't even imagine how it then gets to being in a TV,’ for example. It is a huge jump from there. After learning more about RXN HUB over the past couple of years and seeing you go through this process, it really does show that you are filling a gap in the process that was missing.

You touched on some opportunities that led you towards entrepreneurship. What did you find was the toughest challenge that you faced going from the bench scale up to commercial scale?

I'll split my answer between technical systems challenges that everyone's going to experience—and that's where I can share a little bit about what not just RXN HUB, but a lot of organizations are doing to solve that—and then I'll discuss personal challenges, because these are both important aspects.

From a technical side, the biggest challenges around getting a technology out of the lab and into the real world are firstly, that every piece of equipment that need is very expensive. Think about how much something as simple as an average-sized round bottom flask costs, and then imagine when you need them one hundred times the size, right? We call this equipment CapEx, or capital expenses. Capital expenses are very high for chemistry-based companies or scaling technologies.

The process itself also takes a long time. There's a lot of technology within your research groups that has been perfected through generations of graduate students who have been developing these technologies. And that's just the first step before it gets to the next scale, if ever into a company.

So commercialization takes a lot of money, a lot of time, and finally: a lot of expertise. The expertise that's required at every stage of the technology readiness level scale. From early technology readiness level one—this research is happening in the lab and it's an idea—up to nine—when it's in the market—requires really different skill sets. Being able to navigate and being able to pull the right people together is a real challenge. It was those three problems that RXN HUB was set up to solve.

With this challenge comes an opportunity. I strongly believe that throughout that scale up process, having a technical understanding first is critical. You can then build up other skills to be able to help in different phases. Within our team we have a variety of PhD chemists and chemical engineers that understand what it means to turn molecule A into molecule B and all the intricacies that go into that. But RXN HUB has also worked to teach them the business side, so that now they can communicate those technical specifications to others in the world: investors, government, etc. Being a translator in that phase is a very lucrative place to be. I always tell students, if you're interested in learning little bits about the business, you can absolutely do that. You can't teach chemistry to business folk, but you can teach business to chemistry folk.

On the personal side—and I think grad school teaches this to you to an extent—you need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. If you ever decide to take an entrepreneurial path, you’ll find that every day is something new. Every day you're learning a new idea, and it can be exhausting and you might feel imposter syndrome. One day I might need to act as accountant for our business and I might not know what I'm doing, but I tell myself, ‘okay, let's go ask for help and figure that out.’  You need to learn to push through that. You’ll figure it out and surround yourself with the right people, but I would still say that grad school sets you up well for these types of situations. You know what you know—dig deep and remember that because sometimes it's easy to forget.

These are great points; there can be so many hurdles to getting into entrepreneurship, and mindset and financials can both be major parts of that struggle.

Could you tell us more about whether RXN HUB is what you first envisioned it would be and or whether it has evolved over the years since it was established?

I'll start with the highest-level overview: RXN HUB is a not-for-profit organization that supports the scale up of chemistry-based technologies. We do that in two main ways: we have a facility that's housed within an over-200,000-square-foot building at 945 Princess Street in Kingston. The building was originally owned by Queen's University (Innovation Park), so it’s had a really cool chemistry history. Within that building, we have about 35,000 square feet of scale-up space.

Think of a co-working model where you can go in and access a desk and then you add on amenities and services; we operate in the same model, but for piloting infrastructure. So, larger scale pieces of equipment, things that you can no longer fit at your bench at Queen's as you're moving up to the next scale. We offer our services in flexible ways. Without RXN HUB, the current alternative for innovators or companies is that they would have to go out and rent their own warehouse and project, manage a construction project and build it all up to spec. We've done that already so that you can come in and essentially plug and play and be able to access that space flexibly. We then supplement that offering with consulting services strategy around getting their technology into market. This is where that translation piece I mentioned earlier really comes into play.

The sort of ‘secret sauce’ with all of this is that we've built RXN HUB with collaboration as the fundamental value. Before RXN HUB even started, multiple organizations from across the country came together and thought about their biggest challenges and potential solutions. We've kept that mindset as our foundation; we’re really listening to the experts around us and then building something that can solve whatever challenges they have.

Regarding whether we’ve shifted from our original vision: I think when we started, we had a big vision for what we could achieve. But I think some of the opportunities that have come to fruition in the last couple of years were things that I didn’t expect at this point in my career, or different things that have been really cool to watch the pieces come together. We just had our first company get fully set up and operational in the space; they're a geological chemistry-based company that has a mineral that they process that can then be used as a fertilizer and to store carbon. I never expected to be supporting a company in a field like that, knowing my background.

Other things we didn’t expect: in a couple of weeks, I’ll be heading to India. I was invited to come and speak about RXN HUB and about our model. All these things are outside of my wildest dreams. Sometimes I feel like, ‘why are you asking me? I just built this thing that was a problem in a previous life and now we’re trying to solve it.’ I think I would say, to anyone out there: create and cast the biggest vision you can and then just keep running towards it, because you'll never know what will come up along the way.

That's a great message to leave with everyone: if you're facing a problem (and this could be anything chemistry-related or EDII-related), you're probably not the only person experiencing that problem. It’s really important to know that you can go for it and try to find a way to fix it, and that might not only help you, but others as well.

You mentioned that RXN HUB is based around collaboration, and I know you've been a huge advocate for inclusivity as well. Is there anything in particular that you're doing at RXN HUB to support collaboration and an inclusive environment?

These are values that we've had from the beginning. Sebastian, who is the other individual that I started RXN HUB with, along with myself have grown the team from the two of us. At the beginning of 2025, we were at four team members and now we're at ten. We've been growing quite quickly, which is really exciting. But it’s been really important to us that we create as much of a safe space as possible—for each individual, but also for different learning styles and working styles. We have neurodivergent team members and we always like to ask, ‘what is the best way for us to set up so that you as an individual can be successful?’

For an individual within our team with non-visible disabilities, we ask ourselves, ‘how can we make sure that everyone can be successful to the best of their ability, especially in a team where we're growing fast and we're all working really hard?’

We make sure to check in often and let our team members know that burning out isn’t good for anyone—if you burn out this week, that means that next week we're down some energy. It's a marathon and not a sprint. We’re trying to build a culture of checking in and protecting each other both from our own mental, emotional and physical states.

We also have some skills development and upskilling initiatives in the pipeline. They're not announced yet; there are still things that are in progress, but the goal is to get teachings and chemistry-related initiatives scaled up to a broader community. That's something that we're trying to focus on: how do we make sure that those programs give the most opportunities to all, no matter their location or their ability to access them? We’re taking those kinds of things into account to make sure that these types of learnings are available to everyone.

What advice would you give to graduate students or entrepreneurs who are unsure of what comes next? If they’re interested in moving to industry from academia, how can they get into this space?

I think it's a little challenging right now because it’s a tough job market. It's quite sad that we're in such a growing field, but the market is so competitive. I think a lot of that has to do with everyone pausing right now, waiting for the federal budget to come out. This next quarter will be really interesting.

If you’re a grad student who isn’t one hundred percent sure where you want to go, but know you might want to leave academia and go into industry: don’t get discouraged. Coming out of grad school, you’re surrounded by so many smart people, so many PhDs, and you can forget (and I know I did) that your knowledge is very highly specialized and you are an expert in your field. If you're going into a role that's a little bit different than what you studied, remember that you’re still an expert. Be able to keep that and internalize that.

If you’re a grad student or if you want to go into entrepreneurship, people always say you should network. But I think the key point is to build relationships and connect with people that are interesting to you. You never know where the relationships and insights you gain will come up years later.

The first time I ever went to a CSC conference, I went to the industry panel and sat beside an individual. I chatted with him and found out he, at the time, worked at a research institute called XRCC out of Mississauga. We just sat and introduced ourselves. Now over ten years later, he’s a VP for a startup that we're working with. It was a whole full circle moment; I had no idea where that connection would come in, but now we're working together years later. So build those relationships and foster them, because you never know where they'll come back.

That's really awesome. Building those relationships and taking opportunities to attend conferences and similar events where you can build those networks is really important.

If anyone is ever interested in reaching out, LinkedIn is the easiest way to get in touch with me. RXN HUB tries quarterly or so to do open house tours of the space where you can actually come meet the team. Within the operations that we have, we're always looking for experts that can join the team and support us in consulting projects or grow into other roles.

We like to do these open houses to see who would be interested in learning more about this world, checking out the space, and meeting some new folks. Keep your eye out for that in the future!

We always like to end on a fun question: what is your favorite chemical element or molecule and why?

This is such a hard question. I was going back through my research and I was thinking about whether anything really stood out. I was working in polymers and sometimes they're kind of boring, there’s nothing too crazy in there. In the past, there was an unfortunate misuse of chemistry because of changing circumstances. There's been things like the forever chemicals. Unfortunately, there were reasons for using them and we now have to change our mechanism; I believe it’s going to be the use/reuse of sustainable chemistry that's going to get us out of the climate mess.

I'm really interested right in the potential of CO2 right now. It’s such a challenge, but such an opportunity. We have so many companies that are using CO2 in cool and different products that are allowing us to remove something harmful and turn it into something powerful. I really like that. I think it’s important to think critically about what you're using and how you can turn that into an opportunity to create something impactful.

That wraps our session up for today. Thank you to everyone who joined our live audience and watched today’s episode. As Dr. Lehtinen mentioned, if you would like to get in contact, please reach out to her on LinkedIn. Thank you everybody.