Life at Nautilus interview with Lisen Wang – Senior Staff Engineer
Tyler Ford
June 12, 2025
Lisen Wang, Senior Staff Engineer at Nautilus, likes to get hands-on with problems and leverage his engineering know-how to solve them as expediently and thoroughly as possible. On a personal level, he maintains his health through a dedication to athleticism. At home, he leverages his vast stores of engineering knowledge to handle anything from car mechanics to plumbing or drywall repair and is a big fan of YouTube handyman channels. At Nautilus, he makes sure our platform works as designed, flags any deficiencies, and provides first-hand feedback for design improvement to alleviate pain points for internal users.
As you’ll learn below, he and his team work together to enable us to efficiently iterate as we develop the NautilusTM Proteome Analysis Platform. With his tenacious efforts, we aim to create a product that effectively bridges biology and engineering to revolutionize proteomics.
Why did you choose to work at the interface of engineering and biology?
Creating devices that accurately report on biology happening at the molecular level has always fascinated me. The idea that, as an engineer, I can help create something that provides a window through which we can observe and learn from life is just cool, and I also like the challenge.
In mechanical engineering, there are many opportunities to make systems incrementally better. While that’s not necessarily easy, it can feel safe, and I’m excited by the potential of doing something entirely new. People have talked about the potential use of microfluidics to more effectively measure biology at the cellular and molecular levels for decades now. Although progress has been slower than expected, there are still many biological applications where microfluidics provides unique advantages. Now, and this is particularly true at Nautilus, we have enough knowledge to create devices that produce truly impactful results.
What does your work at the interface of biology and engineering look like on day-to-day basis?
Very broadly, I can break my daily efforts into two areas:
- Optimizing our platform by testing and applying long-term configuration changes.
For instance, this might involve testing a new kind of surface chemistry, making sure all reagents interact with the system properly, and verifying that nothing goes wrong with imaging and downstream analytical processes
- Relieving user pain points.
It’s perhaps underappreciated outside of Nautilus, but scientists here are constantly working with our platform and generating important data. If our instruments ever fail or there’s a consistent issue that needs troubleshooting, I work directly with the scientists and the rest of the engineering team to find the root cause and come up with solutions. Of course, we must prioritize the biggest problems and spend resources as efficiently as possible, but I’m always working to help others on the team and am driven to make it easier for them to do their experiments.
What makes working at Nautilus special for you?
As I said earlier, I really like working at the interface of biology and engineering because it’s challenging but fun. That’s part of why I like working at Nautilus. We’re taking on one of the biggest challenges in biology – comprehensively and efficiently measuring the proteome despite the immense heterogeneity in proteins and their chemical properties. Taking on truly difficult challenges like this is how science advances.
On top of that, people here are really engaged with the challenge of measuring the proteome at scale. Whenever I take on an issue with one of our instruments, the whole engineering team is willing to help and is just as motivated as I am. We solve problems efficiently because we leverage our combined expertise and keep product development moving. We are very focused on working together toward a common goal.
MORE ARTICLES
