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How to Research a Company: The Ultimate Guide

Good company research can take many forms. Depending on your research goals, you might want to look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a market, or drill down into key industry leaders and emerging players to unpack their successes.

If you want to beat the competition, you need to know their business as well (if not better) than your own. The more intel you have, the quicker you’ll be able to spot and leverage opportunities, respond to market changes, and grow.

Read on to discover how to research a company online, tear down its strategies, and take over its market share.

What is company research?

Company research gathers and analyzes information about a business and its customers. This means understanding its performance data and target audience so you can optimize your own strategy.

In today’s fiercely competitive markets, doing good company research is a game-changer. In fact, a 2022 report on competitive intelligence found that 98% of businesses believe researching their competitors is vital for success.

If you have the right tools to collect accurate competitive intelligence , you’ll be able to anticipate your competitors’ moves and emerging threats to stay ahead and succeed.

How to do company research in 8 steps

Researching a company is a bit like doing detective work. The deeper you go, the more questions you ask, and the more curious you are, the better the outcome will be.

Here are eight steps to steer you through the process of doing company research.

1. Track top competitors

You want to know exactly what your rivals are doing, where they’re going, and how the competitive landscape is changing. With this data, you can carefully plan your next move and take action when and where it’s needed most. Competitive tracking tools like Similarweb give you the ability to track what your rivals are up to. You can measure each competitor’s digital footprint, and identify any changes or growth over time.

Did someone experience a sudden uptick in website visits? Would you like to know why and how? Perhaps they launched a new feature or ad campaign, or maybe its social channel is driving growth.

With Similarweb Research Intelligence, you get alerts about changes so you can be sure you’ll never miss a beat.

Analyzing the top performers in your industry will give you new ideas and provide targets for what is achievable for you.

Similarweb’s Analyze Industry Leaders tool will tell you who is winning in your industry based on their website performance. A Market Quadrant Analysis graph, or competitive matrix , provides a visual snapshot of the websites in your industry and how they compare based on different metrics. The industry leaders may inspire you to try new things, while the weaker competitors in your industry can provide you with swift opportunities to chip into their market share.

Pro tip: Similarweb’s Similar Sites tool helps you uncover up to 40 domains that are similar to yours. Finding these domains can be infinitely useful when conducting a competitive content analysis . You can audit these domains to learn more about their content strategy and upgrade your own.

2. Benchmark

Now that you have a good view of the market, you need to drill down into your competitors’ performance. You want to understand their metrics and KPIs so you can benchmark them against your own.

A company research and analysis tool can help you understand your competitors’ digital reach and performance. You can look at multiple websites or domains owned by a single company to analyze their aggregated data or look at a specific market. This will give you a good idea of the business’ size and market share .

You’ll also want to look at their engagement metrics and any changes over time. If you see their metrics improving, they are probably investing in a digital strategy . You should look into this to see what has been working for them. We’ll show you how in the next section.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget to look at mobile app intelligence too. There are five key metrics you’ll want to track when benchmarking an app:

• Demographics

3. Compare traffic and engagement

These days, it’s no longer enough to consider website traffic and engagement metrics on their own. The complete digital perspective of any company includes mobile app intelligence, alongside traditional desktop and mobile web metrics. You need to see the full picture before you make any judgments or decisions.

Using Similarweb digital intelligence, I wanted to view the key players in the travel industry – specifically travel booking sites, like booking.com, Expedia, and Airbnb. First, I want my company research to focus on mobile web and desktop traffic alone.

Using Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence, I can see the overall benchmarks for traffic and engagement. This shows metrics like monthly visits, unique visitors, pages per visit, bounce rate, and visit duration. 

The top websites include booking.com , Airbnb , Expedia , Agoda , and Hotels.com . So, in essence, these are my industry leaders .

However, knowing how important apps are these days to consumers, I want to consider app intelligence in my company research too. When I add this data into the mix, things look a little different.

On both Android and iOS: Expedia, Airbnb, VRBO, booking.com, and Hopper are my top five.

Now, my view of industry leaders has changed . We’ve got three key players who are leading desktop, mobile web, and app platforms; and four others, who respectively dominate different channels.

Here, you can see a range of engagement metrics that apply to mobile apps on Android. Including active users, number of sessions, and session times; which shows engagement, upturns, downturns, and opportunities at a glance.

So, when you view traffic and engagement metrics, make sure you explore desktop, mobile web, and app intelligence to get an accurate picture of what’s really going on.

4. View audience interests

Understanding cross-browsing behavior tells you what other sites your users are interested in. Maybe they are looking at other products and solutions like yours!

This audience interests tool allows you to evaluate the browsing behavior of your target audience, helping you understand user intent and their purchasing process. You might even discover new markets or a specific niche audience , and come up with new audience acquisition strategies.

5. Pinpoint audience overlap

Who else holds your potential customer’s attention? With Similarweb’s Audience Overlap feature, you can analyze metrics and insights on the overlap of visitors across up to five websites for a selected time period and geographical region. You’ll be able to determine the size of your total addressable audience , evaluate what part of the audience is shared, and pinpoint your unreached audience potential.

This is also a good way to gauge audience loyalty . You’ll see the proportion of monthly active users who look at multiple sites in the same category or just one site.

6. Analyze specific pages

While a company may be your competitor, you may not be competing on every front. You might only want to look at a particular segment of a business when doing your company research. This ensures that your insights are specific and useful, and leave out less relevant information.

Similarweb’s Segment Analysis tool lets you slice the URL of a website to analyze just the parts that are relevant to you. You can deconstruct their website to look at a specific category, topic, brand, or whatever else interests you. This can help you benchmark a specific line of business or individual products.

This analysis is extremely powerful for marketing and sales managers, data analysts, and BI specialists who want to optimize their strategies for specific business segments. For example, if you are a clothing retailer looking to launch a line of kids’ clothes, you can use this tool to analyze your competitors’ kids’ clothing lines.

7. Reveal successful conversion strategies

What makes customers convert? The only way to know for sure is to analyze conversion data across your industry. You need to understand the conversion funnel, which keywords and marketing channels drive traffic, and which trends your potential customers are interested in.

You can get a unique view of your industry’s conversion data with Similarweb’s Conversion Analysis tool . Check out each company’s conversion efficiency and how they scale over time. You can identify efficient marketing channels , go-to-market strategies, and their ROI for marketing spending. You can also benchmark your metrics across the industry average.

Understanding conversion strategies also reveals opportunities for your own growth. You can examine category performance at top retailers such as Amazon, Walmart, and Target, and identify what consumers are searching for at the different retailers and what converts. When you understand the customer journey, you can better position yourself to guide them toward purchasing from you.

8. Research mobile app performance

When you research a business, you need to look at all customer touchpoints. Today, that means analyzing apps alongside web and mobile web traffic. You want to know how well your competitors’ apps rank so you can focus on your own app strategy. With rapid consumer adoption of mobile-first spending ( 46% of people now complete a full purchase via mobile ), app intelligence is a key consideration for any type of company research. In almost every industry, the digital landscape changes when you add app intelligence metrics.

If you’re looking at apps competitively, you want to consider:

• Monthly/ Daily Active Users
• No. of sessions/session time
• Sessions per user
• Overall rank
• Category rank
• User retention
• App demographics

Similarweb App Intelligence Premium now provides a few ways to help you view app rankings , downloads, engagement, and usage metrics across both Android and iOS. From benchmarking an app to unpacking the successes of those with apps in your market; good company research should include app analysis. By unifying digital insights, you see a truer picture of a company’s successes online.

How to research a company like an expert

Follow these eight steps and you’ll quickly be able to research any company in any niche like a pro. Uncover key insights that tell you more about a market, target audience, or competitors to shape your own strategy for success.

Ready to get growing? Grab a free trial of Similarweb today.

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Why do company research?

Your business doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You’re competing with other companies and operating in an industry that has its own norms and expectations. If you want to succeed, you need to research other companies in your industry to ensure your strategy is aligned, but also positioned to give you a competitive advantage . You won’t be able to do this without researching other companies.

What to look for when researching a company?

You want to review all their company metrics, including traffic and engagement metrics, and look at their strategy, focus, processes, and content. You should search for any interesting ideas and identify where the company excels. All the data you collect will be valuable for you to compete.

What can company research tell you?

Good company research shows you how a market, company, and its target audience’s interests change over time. It can help you develop your own strategy for growth, and shows trends and emerging threats to watch out for.

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How to Conduct Company Research for Investment?

Updated on April 5, 2024

Is a company worth the investment? To answer this question accessing high-quality, reliable data is not just a preference—it's a necessity. Yet, the path to uncovering actionable insights is often littered with obstacles: outdated financial statements, inconsistent metrics, and biased market analyses can cloud judgment, leading investors astray.

In this article, we will discuss the various types of data critical to comprehensive company research, its sourcing, and evaluating both opportunities and risks within potential investments.

Types of information needed for researching a company

Any investment analysis is built on information. Researching a company for investment involves leveraging various types of data.

• Firstly, there is, of course, firmographic information like the company’s location, industry, revenue, and size. This is where the company research kicks off
• Then another crucial piece is Information about the key employees of the company, and it ranges from contact and professional to leisure and interest data. 
• Further on we want to evaluate the growth trends and potential. For example, changes in online job postings or headcount data might indicate the firm’s growth or decline. Meanwhile, technographic data provides insight into how well the company adjusts to the fast-paced technological development.
• Finally, effective company and market research involves news data analysis. This includes company reviews and other direct mentions, as well as market events and industry trends that could affect the firm.

How to conduct effective company research?

1. identify the company.

The first step is, of course, identifying the object of our analysis. Thus, researching a company starts with finding out its defining features, for example, whether it is a public or private company. Public companies are easier to investigate as they are traceable by a ticker symbol and are required to disclose financial information. Other key identifiers of the company are its industry, market share, and where it is registered.

2. Clarify research questions

Research is effective when it has clearly defined goals. Think about what sort of questions need to be answered for you to be able to reach an investment decision about a specific company. Naturally, the main questions will revolve around the company’s products, services, sales, growth trends, management capabilities, and financial health.

3. Determine which sources are reliable and relevant

You are going to need a lot of data to answer the questions that you have raised. Thus, when choosing data sources, consider what information is relevant to your goals. If you seek to know more about company culture, for example, employer review sites are what you need.

The source should also be reliable. Financial data can come from the company’s annual reports and publicly available governmental sources. Meanwhile, market news should only be retrieved from trusted media outlets. Relevancy and reliability are the most important factors when choosing a third-party data provider.

4. Utilize data gathering and analysis tools

Finally, you will need to use the right tools to do the company analysis efficiently. While a manual google search or review of the company website might get you started, it won’t take you all the way. 

Aggregating business news and analyzing public sentiment will require considerable automation. Below you will find more information on the tools and resources to use when researching companies.

Essential tools and resources for gathering information

Public companies operating in the US are required to file accounting and other reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). You can use its Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval (EDGAR) tool to search SEC filings. 

EDGAR allows you to search for keywords in various documents describing everything from the company’s historical performance to current business operations and acquisitions. Thus, when it comes to traditional business data, EDGAR is certainly your friend.

Coresignal’s APIs

When it comes to public web data, Coresignal is the right place to be. Consider trying our APIs which allow searching for multiple data points and retrieve what you need immediately. The APIs will fetch you everything from general firmographics to in-depth information about the company’s employees .

Subscription resources

Library of congress provides multiple subscription-based tools that optimize company research for investment purposes. For example, Mergent Online archives past and present company information that can be searched by financial and textual criteria. 

Meanwhile, Factiva holds premium business publications in 26 languages and from 200 countries all over the world. The complete list of subscription tools as well as the complete guide on how to access and use them can be found on the Library’s website .

Linkedin and other social media websites

When considering investing in a business, you want to know what kind of person or persons are running it, what they are interested in, who they network with, and other information found on social media profiles might make you aware of red flags that would otherwise be missed.

Linkedin is the leading social network where prospects on a job search gather information about a potential employer. It might just as well be used to research a company for investment decision-making. In addition to people’s data, social media pages are sources for public company reviews.

How to apply the gathered information to investment decisions?

Using the analysis results for investment decisions is all about putting it in the context of market trends and the competitive landscape faced by the business. Thus, your findings should be leveraged against the knowledge acquired by deeper market research into similar products and services.

First, look at the detailed information about the company’s performance and financial stance. If everything seems to be good there, check for red flags. News about the company and reviews by employees and customers will be the most useful for this purpose. Information from the news and social media websites will also help when considering market trends that will affect the business in question. 

The final step of the analysis is scrutinizing every publicly available information about the key decision-makers in the company of interest. Insights from their online presence should supplement data on their department, role in the organization, and expertise.

The importance of company research

Investors need to research a company thoroughly before making their decision. Otherwise, they would have to pay not only the price of a bad investment but also that of a lost opportunity to invest in a better business. Only a deep analysis of the organization, its competitors, and industry conditions will give a good idea of its value. 

Additionally, researching a company for its business model and the people that are involved has potential long-term benefits. The knowledge acquired might be used in deciding upon future opportunities when the same people or a similar business is encountered.

Thus, researching businesses is the smart thing to do before arriving at any important investment decision.

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Envisioning Proteins: John Jumper, BS’07, uses AI to work on the “protein folding problem”

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It’s one thing to know what a protein looks like on paper—it’s another to know how it looks in real life.

The “protein folding problem” has been one of the most vexing in biology. Even if a scientist knows the DNA sequence for a protein, it’s virtually impossible to predict how the long chains of amino acids will interact and fold in upon themselves to create a three-dimensional model.

“The genome gives us the wrong view of proteins—it gives us a linear view,” John Jumper, BS’07, said at the Apex Lecture, a series sponsored by the Vanderbilt School of Medicine Basic Sciences this past August. You might see several mutations associated with cancer spread out along the chain “and then you look at the structure, and they are all right next to each other,” he said. Such particularities are essential in understanding how a protein functions and how it might be targeted. “It gives us a great tool for making hypotheses about how the cell works that we can ultimately test.”

Jumper is a senior staff research scientist for DeepMind, a London-based company that made a huge leap forward in solving the protein folding problem using artificial intelligence. It first released its prediction software, AlphaFold, in 2018, following it up with the even more accurate AlphaFold 2 in late 2020. The method has produced extremely accurate 3D models of all 200 million or so proteins known to science—all freely available on the cloud. In a competition, it outperformed all other methods of protein structure prediction, including those that are much more labor intensive and time-consuming. The work is so significant that Jumper was awarded the 2023 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, which is often considered a precursor prize to the Nobel.

The implications of AlphaFold’s work are vast, allowing for quick, cost-effective predictions that let scientists custom-design drugs to target certain proteins involved in disease, design synthetic enzymes for chemical reactions, speed production of new vaccines and even personalize medical treatments. “AlphaFold represents a revolutionary advance in structural biology, one that has brought the holy grail of predictive protein folding into the toolkit of biochemistry and molecular biology,” said John Kuriyan, dean of the School of Medicine Basic Sciences, in announcing Jumper’s selection for the Apex Lecture, which focuses on breakthroughs in biomedical science. “The impact of these advances on drug discovery and, ultimately, on human health will be enormous.”

At the lecture, Jumper took a deep dive into how he and his fellow scientists trained a neural network on the Protein Database (PDB) to create the model that became AlphaFold. There was no magic bullet, he said. Rather, researchers painstakingly trained the model on pairs and sequences of amino acids using various techniques, knocked out particular genes to observe effects, and even asked the model to critique itself on the road to ever more accurate predictions. “We had many small effects that we were able to put together and many, many ways in which we got a little bit better,” Jumper said. “We found that everything mattered a bit, and nothing mattered a lot.”

— MICHAEL BLANDING

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John Burns Research and Consulting (JBREC) provides independent research and consulting services related to the US housing industry.

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The company hires its first of many team members, who we now call PALS (Passionate, Articulate, Likable, Smart).

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How i made it: john burns, real estate guru, joined the industry by 'accident', los angeles times, may 2017.

John Burns is chief executive of John Burns Real Estate Consulting, an Irvine company that provides research and business advice to home builders across the country. The firm has hundreds of clients nationwide.

Burns describes his job as running around and talking to a lot of “insanely smart people all the time.” He then takes knowledge gleaned from industry leaders, small contractors and economic data and figures out where the housing market is headed.

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Argus fundamental universe of coverage, daily spotlight, market watch {date:this.formatdateshort}, opportunities in clean energy.

The rise in global land and sea temperatures, the melting of Arctic Sea ice, and the frequency of extreme weather events provide evidence that climate change is underway. United in concern over greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) stemming from fossil fuel power plants and car and truck tailpipes, 194 member states of the United Nations signed the Paris Agreement in 2015. This legally binding international treaty on climate change seeks to limit global warming to well-below two, preferably 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. Concerns over the health of the planet and its inhabitants and a reluctance to be reliant on overseas fuel sources prompted governments around the globe to develop and deploy clean, renewable sources of energy. In the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 called for the investment of $391 billion in programs and incentives related to energy security and climate change, including over $120 billion for renewable energy and grid energy storage, tax credits for wind power, solar power, clean energy manufacturing, electric vehicle incentives, and other energy efficiency measures. We expect the IRA to kick clean energy into a higher gear. Already, wind power as a percentage of U.S. electricity generation has grown from less than 1% in 1990 to 10% by 2022. The global solar power market is also large and growing. It generated $235 billion in 2022 revenues, and is projected to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 7% to $293 billion in 2029. For more insights and ideas into the Clean Energy sector, see our latest Industry Review & Outlook for Clean Energy. ...  compared to pre-industrial levels. Concerns over the health of the planet and its inhabitants and a reluctance to be reliant on overseas fuel sources prompted governments around the globe to develop and deploy clean, renewable sources of energy. In the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 called for the investment of $391 billion in programs and incentives related to energy security and climate change, including over $120 billion for renewable energy and grid energy storage, tax credits for wind power, solar power, clean energy manufacturing, electric vehicle incentives, and other energy efficiency measures. We expect the IRA to kick clean energy into a higher gear. Already, wind power as a percentage of U.S. electricity generation has grown from less than 1% in 1990 to 10% by 2022. The global solar power market is also large and growing. It generated $235 billion in 2022 revenues, and is projected to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 7% to $293 billion in 2029. For more insights and ideas into the Clean Energy sector, see our latest Industry Review & Outlook for Clean Energy.    more

Market Podcast

Argus president john eade reviews his 8 fundamental forecasts for 2023, analyst quick notes, weekly stock list: companies raising guidance, weekly stock list: focus list changes, weekly stock list: innovative companies, our favorite energy stocks, leaning into higher rates, news & media.

Webinar - Financial Services: Opportunities in a Higher Rate Environment 5/09/2024

Webinar - Consumer Economy: Opportunities in a Mixed Environment 4/10/2024

Webinar - Semiconductors: Powering Digital Transformation 3/6/2024

New Portfolio Update

The United States economy is full of innovation. It has to be. Manufacturing industries that dominated the economy decades ago – textiles, televisions, even automobiles to a large degree – have moved overseas, where labor and materials costs are lower.     more

Yet the U.S. economy, even during the pandemic and the current period of high inflation, has expanded to record levels. If U.S. corporations weren’t innovating, creating new products (such as vaccines and AI) and services (such as Zoom calls) and moving into new markets, the domestic economy would not be growing, and capital would not be flooding into the country. The current high level of the U.S. dollar relative to currencies around the world attests to the confidence that global investors have in the durable and innovative U.S. economy.

Market View

Stocks gently higher midday monday.

At midday, the major benchmarks are modestly higher, with individual stocks moving on earnings news. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note is two basis points higher at 4.44%. Crude oil is up at $80 per barrel. Gold is also up, while Bitcoin is down.  ...   more

Turning to stocks, the power of raising guidance is evidenced today in stocks making big moves higher. Wix.com (WIX, up 21%) is up after the company beat earnings and increased its outlook. Norwegian Cruise (NCLH, up 8%) also boosted guidance and reported record bookings. On the flipside, Li Auto (LI, down 15%) is getting crushed after the Chinese EV-maker said profits fell by more than one-third. The stock star of the week is Nvidia (NVDA, up 2%) with earnings out on Wednesday. Ahead of that, the stock is getting attention. The AI darling has blown out earnings the last few quarters and AI fans are waiting to see if that’s going to happen again. Also, Nvidia is seen as a proxy for the overall state and pace of artificial intelligence. The S&P 500 is up 0.91%, the Dow is up 0.85%, the Nasdaq is up 1.51%, and the Russell 2000 is up 1.81%. Industries trading higher today include: Semiconductor & Semiconductor Equipment, Electronic Equipment, Instruments & Components , and Building Products. Industries trading lower today include: Automobiles, Energy Equipment & Services, and Specialty Retail. The VIX is up 0.26 at 12.25 after closing yesterday at 11.99. Options on At&T Inc (T) have appeared on the most-active list today with more than 20,961 contracts of the Jul. 19 18 call, changing hands. The put/call ratio is 1.17 (1,824,211)/(1,565,567). NYSE Adv/Dec (1,631/1,103). Nasdaq Adv/Dec (2,221/1,798). [Argus Research, various news and data sources]

Turning to stocks, the power of raising guidance is evidenced today in stocks making big moves higher. Wix.com (WIX, up 21%) is up after the company beat earnings and increased its outlook. Norwegian Cruise (NCLH, up 8%) also boosted guidance and reported record bookings. On the flipside, Li Auto (LI, down 15%) is getting crushed after the Chinese EV-maker said profits fell by more than one-third. The stock star of the week is Nvidia (NVDA, up 2%) with earnings out on Wednesday. Ahead of that, the stock is getting attention. The AI darling has blown out earnings the last few quarters and AI fans are waiting to see if that’s going to happen again. Also, Nvidia is seen as a proxy for the overall state and pace of artificial intelligence.

The S&P 500 is up 0.91%, the Dow is up 0.85%, the Nasdaq is up 1.51%, and the Russell 2000 is up 1.81%.

Industries trading higher today include: Semiconductor & Semiconductor Equipment, Electronic Equipment, Instruments & Components , and Building Products. Industries trading lower today include: Automobiles, Energy Equipment & Services, and Specialty Retail.

The VIX is up 0.26 at 12.25 after closing yesterday at 11.99. Options on At&T Inc (T) have appeared on the most-active list today with more than 20,961 contracts of the Jul. 19 18 call, changing hands. The put/call ratio is 1.17 (1,824,211)/(1,565,567). NYSE Adv/Dec (1,631/1,103). Nasdaq Adv/Dec (2,221/1,798).

[Argus Research, various news and data sources]   less

Weekly Economic Commentary

May recoups april losses, but inflation risks remain.

Not quite halfway through May, the stock market has largely recouped losses recorded during April. The recovery actually got underway in the final week of April, when investors decided that slower GDP growth (1.6% for 1Q24) might be positive for the long-term trajectory of inflation. Late-April momentum in stocks stepped up early in May when April nonfarm payrolls signaled some cooling in the jobs economy, along with an unemployment rate (3.9%) close to the Fed’s unofficial 4% target. ...   more

• How to Answer, “What Do You Know About Our Company?”
• The Lookingglass

Recruitment specialists or hiring managers tend to ask similar questions during job interviews. Some are the expected “tell us about yourself” and the standard “ why did you apply for this job ?” One other common interview question is about uncovering your knowledge about the company with the open opportunity.

A thoughtful and well-researched response to the common interview question, “What do you know about our company?” is crucial for making a positive impression on your potential employer. It’s a question that offers you an opportunity to demonstrate your interest in the company, your understanding of its industry, and how your skills and experiences align with its goals and values.

But how do you respond to it?

Tips to Answering What You Know About the Company

Research the company.

Is the business one of the top companies in the country ? Before your interview, dedicate time to thoroughly research the company. Visit their official website, read their mission statement, explore their products or services, and familiarize yourself with their history, key milestones, and recent news or developments. Additionally, check their social media profiles, press releases, and any articles or publications about the company.

Understand the Company Culture and Values

Look for information about the company’s culture, values, and workplace environment. Understand what sets them apart from competitors and what they prioritize in their operations. The insight will help you tailor your response to align with their culture and values .

Know the Industry

Gain a solid understanding of the industry in which the company operates. Research industry trends, challenges, and opportunities. Consider how the company positions itself within the industry and how it differentiates itself from competitors.

Identify Key Competitors

Be aware of the company’s main competitors and how they compare in terms of products, services, market share, and reputation. Highlight any unique strategies or offerings that set the company apart from its competitors.

Study Recent Achievements and Initiatives

Familiarize yourself with the company’s recent achievements, awards, or initiatives. The knowledge demonstrates that you’re up-to-date with their progress and invested in their success.

Connect Your Skills and Experiences

When discussing what you know about the company, find opportunities to connect your skills, experiences, and achievements with the company’s needs and objectives. For example, if the company values innovation, highlight any innovative projects you’ve worked on or your ability to adapt to new technologies.

Prepare Specific Examples

Back up your knowledge with specific examples or anecdotes related to the company. For instance, if the company recently launched a sustainability initiative, you could mention your passion for environmental sustainability and any relevant experiences you’ve had in that area.

Tailor Your Response

Customize your response based on the role you’re applying for and how it fits into the company’s objectives. Emphasize how your background and qualifications make you a good fit for the position and how you can contribute to the company’s success.

Be Authentic

It’s important to impress the interviewer with your knowledge, but be genuine in your response. Avoid exaggerating or providing information that you can’t substantiate. Interviewers appreciate authenticity and sincerity.

Practice Your Response

Rehearse your response to ensure clarity, conciseness, and confidence. Practice speaking naturally and avoid sounding rehearsed or scripted. Ask a friend or family member to listen to your response and provide feedback.

Sample Response to “What Do You Know About Our Company?”

“From my research, I’ve learned that your company is a leader in [industry/sector], known for its commitment to [specific value or initiative]. I’m particularly impressed by your recent efforts to [mention recent achievement or initiative], which aligns with my own passion for [relevant interest or skill]. I also noticed that your company emphasizes [specific aspect of company culture or values], which resonates with me because [provide a brief example]. As someone with experience in [relevant skill or field], I’m excited about the opportunity to contribute to your team and help further your mission of [mention company mission or goal].”

Why You Need to Give a Clear, Specific Answer

When answering the interview question, “What do you know about our company?” it’s crucial to provide a clear and specific response for several reasons:

Demonstrates Preparation and Interest

Offering a detailed understanding of the company showcases your preparation for the interview and your genuine interest in the organization. It indicates that you’ve taken the time to research the company thoroughly, signaling your commitment to the role.

Highlights Alignment with Company Values

A specific answer allows you to align your skills, experiences, and values with those of the company. By demonstrating an understanding of the company’s culture, mission, and values, you show that you’re a good fit for the organization and its objectives.

Differentiates You from Other Candidates

Providing specific examples and insights sets you apart from other candidates who may offer generic or superficial responses. It demonstrates your depth of knowledge and your ability to connect your background with the company’s needs and goals.

Facilitates a Meaningful Conversation

A clear and specific response opens the door for a more meaningful dialogue during the interview. It gives the interviewer an opportunity to delve deeper into your understanding of the company, allowing you to showcase your insights and engage in a constructive discussion.

Why Companies Ask This Question During Interviews

Assesses candidate’s research skills.

By asking about the candidate’s knowledge of the company, interviewers can evaluate the candidate’s research skills and initiative. Candidates who have taken the time to learn about the company are more likely to be proactive and engaged employees.

Evaluates Cultural Fit

Understanding the company’s culture, values, and mission is essential for assessing cultural fit. Companies want to ensure that candidates share their values and will thrive in their work environment.

Tests Motivation and Interest

Candidates who demonstrate a genuine interest in the company are more likely to be motivated and committed employees. By asking about the candidate’s knowledge of the company, interviewers can gauge the candidate’s level of enthusiasm for the role and the organization.

Provides Insight into Candidate’s Preparedness

The question serves as an initial screening tool to assess the candidate’s level of preparation for the interview. Candidates who provide a well-researched and thoughtful response are more likely to be prepared for the demands of the role.

Secure that Job Offer

Job interviews offer a good opportunity to pitch yourself as the best candidate from a pool of applicants. When you come prepared, you have a good chance of getting a favorable outcome. Fortunately, many interview questions are common and standard, like “what do you know about our company?” By following these guidelines and tailoring your response to the specific company and role, you’ll be well-prepared to impress the interviewer with your knowledge and enthusiasm for the opportunity.

Ready for those job interviews?   Talk to us today about professional opportunities you want to explore.

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• The Lookingglass Editorial Team

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• Bio-Integrated Microsystems: Electronic, Optoelectronic, Microfluidic, MEMS
• Unusual Format Electronics: Large Area, Flexible and Stretchable
• Optofluidics, Liquid Crystals, Plasmonics, Metamaterials and Photonic Crystals
• Unconventional Techniques for Nanofabrication
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Rogers Research Group

Linkedin: john rogers, x: @profjohnarogers.

We seek to understand and exploit interesting characteristics of 'soft' materials, such as polymers, liquid crystals, and biological tissues, and hybrid combinations of them with unusual classes of inorganic micro/nanomaterials -- ribbons, wires, membranes, tubes or related. Our aim is to control and induce novel electronic and photonic responses in these materials, and to develop new 'soft lithographic' and biomimetic approaches for patterning them and guiding their growth. This work combines fundamental studies with forward-looking engineering efforts in a way that promotes positive feedback between the two. Our current research focuses on soft materials for conformal electronics, nanophotonic structures, microfluidic devices, and microelectromechanical systems, all lately with an emphasis on bio-inspired and bio-integrated technologies. These efforts are highly multidisciplinary, and combine expertise from nearly every traditional field of technical study.

Professor John A. Rogers

From 2003-2016, he was on the faculty at University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, where he held a Swanlund Chair, the highest chaired position at the university, with a primary appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and joint appointments in the Departments of Chemistry, Bioengineering, Mechanical Science and Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering.  He served as the Director of a Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center on nanomanufacturing, funded by the National Science Foundation, from 2009-2012 and as Director of the Seitz Materials Research Laboratory from 2012 to 2016.

In September of 2016, he joined Northwestern University as the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Chemistry and Neurological Surgery, where he is also the founding Director of the newly endowed Center on Bio-Integrated Electronics, recently elevated to the status of the Querrey-Simpson Institute of Bioelectronics.

Rogers’ research includes fundamental and applied aspects of nano and molecular scale fabrication as well as materials and patterning techniques for unusual electronic and photonic devices, with an emphasis on bio-integrated and bio-inspired systems.  He has published more than 800 papers, and is an inventor on over 100 patents and patent applications, more than 70 of which are licensed or in active use by large companies and startups that he has co-founded. 

His research has been recognized with many awards including, most recently, the Sigma Xi William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement (2023), the 2024 IEEE Biomedical Engineering Award (2023), the James Prize in Science and Technology Integration from the National Academy of Sciences (2022), the Washington Award (2022), the Sigma Xi Monie Ferst Award (2021), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), the Nano Research Award from the Springer/Nature journal Nano Research (2020), Nancy DeLoye Fitzroy and Roland V. Fitzroy Medal of the ASME (2020), the Herbert Pardes Clinical Research Excellence Award (2020), the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute (2019), the MRS Medal from the Materials Research Society (2018), the Samuel R. Natelson Award from the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (2018), the Nadai Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2017), the IEEE EMBS Trailblazer Award (2016), the ETH Zurich Chemical Engineering Medal (2015), the A.C. Eringen Medal from the Society for Engineering Science (2014), the Smithsonian Award for American Ingenuity in the Physical Sciences (2013), the Robert Henry Thurston Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2013), the Mid-Career Researcher Award from the Materials Research Society (2013), the Lemelson-MIT Prize (2011), a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2009), the George Smith Award from the IEEE (2009), the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship from the Department of Defense (2008), the Daniel Drucker Eminent Faculty Award from the University of Illinois (2007) and the Leo Hendrick Baekeland Award from the American Chemical Society (2007).  Rogers is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE; 2011), the National Academy of Sciences (NAS; 2015), the National Academy of Medicine (NAM; 2019) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS; 2014), a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE; 2009), the American Physical Society (APS; 2006), the Materials Research Society (MRS; 2007), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; 2008) and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI; 2013). He received an Honoris Causa Doctorate from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from the University of Houston, a Doctor of Science, Honoris Causa, from the University of Missouri at Columbia, and holds Honorary Professorships at Fudan University, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Zhejiang University. Rogers was elected as a Laureate of the Order of Lincoln, the highest award bestowed on an individual by the state of Illinois, in 2021 (fewer than 400 laureates have been elected since the program started in 1964).

Rogers has also been named to many distinguished lectureships, including:

Dr R A Mashelkar Endowment Lecture, CSIR-NCL, 2015.

IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, 2015.

SNU-Dongjin Lectureship, Seoul National University, 2015.

Claritas Distinguished Speaker in Science, Susquehanna University, 2015.

Weissberger/Williams/Farid Lectureship, Kodak Research Labs, 2015.

Fowler Distinguished Lecture, Texas A&M University, 2015.

Inaugural Lecturer for the Institute for Materials Science, Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2015.

'Science at the Edge' Lecturer at Michigan State University, 2015.

College of Engineering Distinguished Lecturer at University Georgia, 2015.

Etter Memorial Lectureship at University of Minnesota, 2015.

Laufer Lectureship at University of Southern California, 2014.

Presidential Lectureship at Northeastern University, 2014.

College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker at University of Texas at Arlington, 2014.

Plenary Lecture, Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2014.

Kavli Foundation Innovations in Chemistry Lecture, American Chemical Society, 2014.

Xingda Lectureship at Peking University, 2013.

Adams Lectureship at Purdue University, 2013.

Presidents Distinguished Lectureship at KAUST, 2013.

Bircher Lectureship at Vanderbilt University, 2013.

Deans Distinguished Lectureship at Northwestern University, 2013.

ET Distinguished Speaker at Applied Materials, 2012.

Wulff Lectureship at M.I.T., 2012.

DB Robinson Distinguished Speaker at University of Alberta, 2012.

GT-COPE Lectureship at Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012.

Nyquist Lectureship at Yale University, 2011.

Judd Distinguished Lecturer at University of Utah, 2011.

ASU Distinguished Scholar and Lecturer at Arizona State University, 2011.

Rohsenow Lectureship at M.I.T., 2011.

Eastman Lectureship in Polymer Science, University of Akron, 2011.

Deans Distinguished Lectureship at Columbia University, 2010.

Nakamura Lectureship at University of California at Santa Barbara, 2010.

Chapman Lectureship (inaugural) at Rice University, 2009.

Zhongguancun Forum Lectureship, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2007.

Dorn Lectureship at Northwestern University, 2007.

Xerox Distinguished Lectureship at Xerox Corporation, 2006.

Robert B. Woodward Scholar and Lectureship at Harvard University, 2001.

Highlights from 2023/2024 include the first:

• multi-point acousto-mechanical sensing of lung and GI health
• battery-free wireless systems for physiological montoring of small animals
• bioresorbable ultrasound 'tags' for monitoring deep tissue homeostasis
• wireless implants for early detection of kidney failure

Highlights from 2022/2023 include the first:

• responsive materials for safety in bioelectronic systems
• wireless, optoelectronically controlled biobots
• dynamic, shape programmable mechanical metasurfaces
• high performance bio/ecoresobable primary batteries
• passive microfliers for environmental monitoring

Highlights from 2021/2022 include the first:

• soft, bioresorbable coolers for reversible block of pain
• submillimeter-scale, remote controlled multimaterial terrestrial robots
• transient closed-loop wireless body-networked systems for programmed electrotherapy
• eco/bioresorbable microelectromechanical systems
• photocurable bioresorbable adhesives for bioelectronic devices

Highlights from 2020/2021 include the first:

• wireless, skin-interfaced biosensors for cerebral hemodynamic monitoring in pediatric care
• 3D frameworks as multifunctional neural interfaces to cortical spheroids and as frameworks for forming engineered assembloids
• advanced sweat microfluidic systems for real-time tracking of sweat rate/loss for monitoring nutrition and for screening for cystic fibrosis
• wireless, bioresorbable devices as temporary pacemakers
• wirelessly programmable, implantable optoelectronic probes for studies of the neuroscience of social interactions in small animal models

Highlights from 2019/2020 include the first:

• epidermal haptic interfaces for virtual and augmented reality
• physiological sensor systems for the suprasternal notch, from sleep studies to COVID19 monitoring
• advanced wireless devices for neonatal/fetal health, with scaled deployments into Africa
• kiloscale flexible devices for chronic electrocorticography, with demonstrations in non-human primates
• flexible, wireless, fully implantable optoelectronic/fluidic probes as interfaces to the brain, spinal cord and peripheral nerves

Highlights from 2018/2019 include the first:

• bioresorbable electronic medicines for accelerated nerve healing
• closed-loop bio-optoelectronic systems for peripheral neuromodulation
• skin-interfaced platforms for non-invasive monitoring of flow through cerebrospinal shunts
• skin-like wireless devices for clinical grade monitoring of vital signs in neonates
• full brain-scale flexible electronic platforms for high resolution electrocorticography

Highlights from 2017/2018 include the first:

• injectable, optoelectronic filaments for measuring brain activity, in vivo
• hair-like modulus sensors for targeted biopsies
• wireless epidermal sensors for full-body pressure and temperature mapping
• two dimensional semiconductors for bioresorbable electronics
• two dimensional materials for three dimensional cameras

Highlights from 2016/2017 include the first:

• wireless, battery-free fingernail electronics for blood oximetry and PPG
• fully implantable, NFC light emitting probes for optogenetics
• capacitive, active matrix techniques for high resolution electrophysiology
• capillary bursting valves for chrono-sampling and pressure measurements of sweating
• self-assembled 3D coil interconnects in functional electronic systems

Highlights from 2015/2016 include the first:

• thin film encapsulation strategies for chronic, flexible electronic implants
• soft, skin-like microfluidic systems for capture, storage and analysis of sweat
• wireless power harvesting systems and optical sensors for epidermal electronics
• epidermal mechano-acoustic sensing electronics for cardiovascular diagnostics
• bioresorbable silicon electronic sensors for the brain

Highlights from 2014/2015 include the first:

• mechanically driven self-assembly of 3D micro/nanostructures in device-grade silicon
• wireless, injectable optofluidic needles for in vivo pharmacology and optogenetics
• epidermal piezoelectric systems for characterization of soft tissue biomechanics
• auricle-mounted electrodes for persistent brain-computer interfaces
• silk-based resorbable electronics for wireless infection abatement

Highlights from 2013/2014 include the first:

• soft, microfluidic assemblies of sensors, circuits and radios for the skin
• flexible devices for harvesting and storing electrical power from motions of the heart, lung and diaphragm
• 3D electronic integumentary membranes for sensing, actuating across the entire epicardium
• quadruple junction solar cells and modules with world record efficiencies
• biodegradable batteries

Highlights from 2012/2013 include the first:

• physically transient forms of silicon electronics
• injectable, cellular-scale optoelectronics
• compound apposition, 'bug-eye' cameras
• strechable lithium ion batteries
• scalable routes to arrays of semiconducting carbon nanotubes

Highlights from 2011/2012 include the first:

• flexible electronics for high resolution mapping of brain function
• 3D cavity-coupled plasmonic crystals
• electronically 'instrumented' sutures and surgical gloves
• wireless, implantable LEDs and sensors
• stretchable photovoltaics

Highlights from 2010/2011 include the first:

• 'epidermal' electronics
• electronic 'eyeball' cameras with continuously adjustable zoom magnification
• microcell luminescent concentrator photovoltaics
• 'cloak-scale' negative index metamaterials
• multi-functional electronic balloon catheters for interventional cardiology

Highlights from 2009/2010 include the first:

• multilayer, releasable epitaxy for photovoltaics, RF electronics and imaging
• first principles theory for aligned growth of carbon nanotube arrays
• bio-integrated electronics for high resolution cardiac EP mapping
• bio-resorbable devices for neural electrocorticography
• geometrically controlled adhesion in elastomers and use in deterministic assembly

Highlights from 2008/2009 include the first:

• printed microLED lighting systems and displays
• silicon-on-silk electronics for bioresorbable implants
• curvilinear electronics and paraboloid eye cameras
• high resolution, jet printed patterns of charge
• rubber-like silicon CMOS

Highlights from 2007/2008 include the first:

• electronic eye cameras
• stretchable silicon CMOS integrated circuits
• flexible, semi-transparent solar modules based on monocrystalline silicon
• flexible digital logic circuits based on SWNT thin films
• chemically synthesized, 2D carbon nanomaterials

Highlights from 2006/2007 include the first:

• observation and analysis of buckling mechanics in SWNTs
• quasi-3D plasmonics crystals for biosensing and imaging
• SWNT-based RF analog electronics, including the first all-nanotube transistor radios
• methods for electrohydrodynamic jet printing with sub-micron resolution
• routes to multilayer superstructures of aligned SWNTs

Highlights from 2005/2006 include the first:

• stretchable form of single crystal silicon
• GHz flexible transistors on plastic substrates
• single-step two photon 3D nanofabrication technique
• lithographic method with molecular scale (~1 nm) resolution
• printing approach for 3D, heterogeneous integration
• method for growing high density, horizontally aligned SWNTs

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Research: What Companies Don’t Know About How Workers Use AI

• Jeremie Brecheisen

Three Gallup studies shed light on when and why AI is being used at work — and how employees and customers really feel about it.

Leaders who are exploring how AI might fit into their business operations must not only navigate a vast and ever-changing landscape of tools, but they must also facilitate a significant cultural shift within their organizations. But research shows that leaders do not fully understand their employees’ use of, and readiness for, AI. In addition, a significant number of Americans do not trust business’ use of AI. This article offers three recommendations for leaders to find the right balance of control and trust around AI, including measuring how their employees currently use AI, cultivating trust by empowering managers, and adopting a purpose-led AI strategy that is driven by the company’s purpose instead of a rules-heavy strategy that is driven by fear.

If you’re a leader who wants to shift your workforce toward using AI, you need to do more than manage the implementation of new technologies. You need to initiate a profound cultural shift. At the heart of this cultural shift is trust. Whether the use case for AI is brief and experimental or sweeping and significant, a level of trust must exist between leaders and employees for the initiative to have any hope of success.

• Jeremie Brecheisen is a partner and managing director of The Gallup CHRO Roundtable.

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McKinsey Global Private Markets Review 2024: Private markets in a slower era

At a glance, macroeconomic challenges continued.

McKinsey Global Private Markets Review 2024: Private markets: A slower era

If 2022 was a tale of two halves, with robust fundraising and deal activity in the first six months followed by a slowdown in the second half, then 2023 might be considered a tale of one whole. Macroeconomic headwinds persisted throughout the year, with rising financing costs, and an uncertain growth outlook taking a toll on private markets. Full-year fundraising continued to decline from 2021’s lofty peak, weighed down by the “denominator effect” that persisted in part due to a less active deal market. Managers largely held onto assets to avoid selling in a lower-multiple environment, fueling an activity-dampening cycle in which distribution-starved limited partners (LPs) reined in new commitments.

About the authors

This article is a summary of a larger report, available as a PDF, that is a collaborative effort by Fredrik Dahlqvist , Alastair Green , Paul Maia, Alexandra Nee , David Quigley , Aditya Sanghvi , Connor Mangan, John Spivey, Rahel Schneider, and Brian Vickery , representing views from McKinsey’s Private Equity & Principal Investors Practice.

Performance in most private asset classes remained below historical averages for a second consecutive year. Decade-long tailwinds from low and falling interest rates and consistently expanding multiples seem to be things of the past. As private market managers look to boost performance in this new era of investing, a deeper focus on revenue growth and margin expansion will be needed now more than ever.

Perspectives on a slower era in private markets

Global fundraising contracted.

Fundraising fell 22 percent across private market asset classes globally to just over $1 trillion, as of year-end reported data—the lowest total since 2017. Fundraising in North America, a rare bright spot in 2022, declined in line with global totals, while in Europe, fundraising proved most resilient, falling just 3 percent. In Asia, fundraising fell precipitously and now sits 72 percent below the region’s 2018 peak.

Despite difficult fundraising conditions, headwinds did not affect all strategies or managers equally. Private equity (PE) buyout strategies posted their best fundraising year ever, and larger managers and vehicles also fared well, continuing the prior year’s trend toward greater fundraising concentration.

The numerator effect persisted

Despite a marked recovery in the denominator—the 1,000 largest US retirement funds grew 7 percent in the year ending September 2023, after falling 14 percent the prior year, for example 1 “U.S. retirement plans recover half of 2022 losses amid no-show recession,” Pensions and Investments , February 12, 2024. —many LPs remain overexposed to private markets relative to their target allocations. LPs started 2023 overweight: according to analysis from CEM Benchmarking, average allocations across PE, infrastructure, and real estate were at or above target allocations as of the beginning of the year. And the numerator grew throughout the year, as a lack of exits and rebounding valuations drove net asset values (NAVs) higher. While not all LPs strictly follow asset allocation targets, our analysis in partnership with global private markets firm StepStone Group suggests that an overallocation of just one percentage point can reduce planned commitments by as much as 10 to 12 percent per year for five years or more.

Despite these headwinds, recent surveys indicate that LPs remain broadly committed to private markets. In fact, the majority plan to maintain or increase allocations over the medium to long term.

Investors fled to known names and larger funds

Fundraising concentration reached its highest level in over a decade, as investors continued to shift new commitments in favor of the largest fund managers. The 25 most successful fundraisers collected 41 percent of aggregate commitments to closed-end funds (with the top five managers accounting for nearly half that total). Closed-end fundraising totals may understate the extent of concentration in the industry overall, as the largest managers also tend to be more successful in raising non-institutional capital.

While the largest funds grew even larger—the largest vehicles on record were raised in buyout, real estate, infrastructure, and private debt in 2023—smaller and newer funds struggled. Fewer than 1,700 funds of less than $1 billion were closed during the year, half as many as closed in 2022 and the fewest of any year since 2012. New manager formation also fell to the lowest level since 2012, with just 651 new firms launched in 2023.

Whether recent fundraising concentration and a spate of M&A activity signals the beginning of oft-rumored consolidation in the private markets remains uncertain, as a similar pattern developed in each of the last two fundraising downturns before giving way to renewed entrepreneurialism among general partners (GPs) and commitment diversification among LPs. Compared with how things played out in the last two downturns, perhaps this movie really is different, or perhaps we’re watching a trilogy reusing a familiar plotline.

Dry powder inventory spiked (again)

Private markets assets under management totaled $13.1 trillion as of June 30, 2023, and have grown nearly 20 percent per annum since 2018. Dry powder reserves—the amount of capital committed but not yet deployed—increased to $3.7 trillion, marking the ninth consecutive year of growth. Dry powder inventory—the amount of capital available to GPs expressed as a multiple of annual deployment—increased for the second consecutive year in PE, as new commitments continued to outpace deal activity. Inventory sat at 1.6 years in 2023, up markedly from the 0.9 years recorded at the end of 2021 but still within the historical range. NAV grew as well, largely driven by the reluctance of managers to exit positions and crystallize returns in a depressed multiple environment.

Private equity strategies diverged

Buyout and venture capital, the two largest PE sub-asset classes, charted wildly different courses over the past 18 months. Buyout notched its highest fundraising year ever in 2023, and its performance improved, with funds posting a (still paltry) 5 percent net internal rate of return through September 30. And although buyout deal volumes declined by 19 percent, 2023 was still the third-most-active year on record. In contrast, venture capital (VC) fundraising declined by nearly 60 percent, equaling its lowest total since 2015, and deal volume fell by 36 percent to the lowest level since 2019. VC funds returned –3 percent through September, posting negative returns for seven consecutive quarters. VC was the fastest-growing—as well as the highest-performing—PE strategy by a significant margin from 2010 to 2022, but investors appear to be reevaluating their approach in the current environment.

Private equity entry multiples contracted

PE buyout entry multiples declined by roughly one turn from 11.9 to 11.0 times EBITDA, slightly outpacing the decline in public market multiples (down from 12.1 to 11.3 times EBITDA), through the first nine months of 2023. For nearly a decade leading up to 2022, managers consistently sold assets into a higher-multiple environment than that in which they had bought those assets, providing a substantial performance tailwind for the industry. Nowhere has this been truer than in technology. After experiencing more than eight turns of multiple expansion from 2009 to 2021 (the most of any sector), technology multiples have declined by nearly three turns in the past two years, 50 percent more than in any other sector. Overall, roughly two-thirds of the total return for buyout deals that were entered in 2010 or later and exited in 2021 or before can be attributed to market multiple expansion and leverage. Now, with falling multiples and higher financing costs, revenue growth and margin expansion are taking center stage for GPs.

Real estate receded

Demand uncertainty, slowing rent growth, and elevated financing costs drove cap rates higher and made price discovery challenging, all of which weighed on deal volume, fundraising, and investment performance. Global closed-end fundraising declined 34 percent year over year, and funds returned −4 percent in the first nine months of the year, losing money for the first time since the 2007–08 global financial crisis. Capital shifted away from core and core-plus strategies as investors sought liquidity via redemptions in open-end vehicles, from which net outflows reached their highest level in at least two decades. Opportunistic strategies benefited from this shift, with investors focusing on capital appreciation over income generation in a market where alternative sources of yield have grown more attractive. Rising interest rates widened bid–ask spreads and impaired deal volume across food groups, including in what were formerly hot sectors: multifamily and industrial.

Private debt pays dividends

Debt again proved to be the most resilient private asset class against a turbulent market backdrop. Fundraising declined just 13 percent, largely driven by lower commitments to direct lending strategies, for which a slower PE deal environment has made capital deployment challenging. The asset class also posted the highest returns among all private asset classes through September 30. Many private debt securities are tied to floating rates, which enhance returns in a rising-rate environment. Thus far, managers appear to have successfully navigated the rising incidence of default and distress exhibited across the broader leveraged-lending market. Although direct lending deal volume declined from 2022, private lenders financed an all-time high 59 percent of leveraged buyout transactions last year and are now expanding into additional strategies to drive the next era of growth.

Infrastructure took a detour

After several years of robust growth and strong performance, infrastructure and natural resources fundraising declined by 53 percent to the lowest total since 2013. Supply-side timing is partially to blame: five of the seven largest infrastructure managers closed a flagship vehicle in 2021 or 2022, and none of those five held a final close last year. As in real estate, investors shied away from core and core-plus investments in a higher-yield environment. Yet there are reasons to believe infrastructure’s growth will bounce back. Limited partners (LPs) surveyed by McKinsey remain bullish on their deployment to the asset class, and at least a dozen vehicles targeting more than $10 billion were actively fundraising as of the end of 2023. Multiple recent acquisitions of large infrastructure GPs by global multi-asset-class managers also indicate marketwide conviction in the asset class’s potential.

Private markets still have work to do on diversity

Private markets firms are slowly improving their representation of females (up two percentage points over the prior year) and ethnic and racial minorities (up one percentage point). On some diversity metrics, including entry-level representation of women, private markets now compare favorably with corporate America. Yet broad-based parity remains elusive and too slow in the making. Ethnic, racial, and gender imbalances are particularly stark across more influential investing roles and senior positions. In fact, McKinsey’s research  reveals that at the current pace, it would take several decades for private markets firms to reach gender parity at senior levels. Increasing representation across all levels will require managers to take fresh approaches to hiring, retention, and promotion.

Artificial intelligence generating excitement

The transformative potential of generative AI was perhaps 2023’s hottest topic (beyond Taylor Swift). Private markets players are excited about the potential for the technology to optimize their approach to thesis generation, deal sourcing, investment due diligence, and portfolio performance, among other areas. While the technology is still nascent and few GPs can boast scaled implementations, pilot programs are already in flight across the industry, particularly within portfolio companies. Adoption seems nearly certain to accelerate throughout 2024.

Private markets in a slower era

If private markets investors entered 2023 hoping for a return to the heady days of 2021, they likely left the year disappointed. Many of the headwinds that emerged in the latter half of 2022 persisted throughout the year, pressuring fundraising, dealmaking, and performance. Inflation moderated somewhat over the course of the year but remained stubbornly elevated by recent historical standards. Interest rates started high and rose higher, increasing the cost of financing. A reinvigorated public equity market recovered most of 2022’s losses but did little to resolve the valuation uncertainty private market investors have faced for the past 18 months.

Within private markets, the denominator effect remained in play, despite the public market recovery, as the numerator continued to expand. An activity-dampening cycle emerged: higher cost of capital and lower multiples limited the ability or willingness of general partners (GPs) to exit positions; fewer exits, coupled with continuing capital calls, pushed LP allocations higher, thereby limiting their ability or willingness to make new commitments. These conditions weighed on managers’ ability to fundraise. Based on data reported as of year-end 2023, private markets fundraising fell 22 percent from the prior year to just over $1 trillion, the largest such drop since 2009 (Exhibit 1).

The impact of the fundraising environment was not felt equally among GPs. Continuing a trend that emerged in 2022, and consistent with prior downturns in fundraising, LPs favored larger vehicles and the scaled GPs that typically manage them. Smaller and newer managers struggled, and the number of sub–$1 billion vehicles and new firm launches each declined to its lowest level in more than a decade.

Despite the decline in fundraising, private markets assets under management (AUM) continued to grow, increasing 12 percent to $13.1 trillion as of June 30, 2023. 2023 fundraising was still the sixth-highest annual haul on record, pushing dry powder higher, while the slowdown in deal making limited distributions.

Investment performance across private market asset classes fell short of historical averages. Private equity (PE) got back in the black but generated the lowest annual performance in the past 15 years, excluding 2022. Closed-end real estate produced negative returns for the first time since 2009, as capitalization (cap) rates expanded across sectors and rent growth dissipated in formerly hot sectors, including multifamily and industrial. The performance of infrastructure funds was less than half of its long-term average and even further below the double-digit returns generated in 2021 and 2022. Private debt was the standout performer (if there was one), outperforming all other private asset classes and illustrating the asset class’s countercyclical appeal.

Private equity down but not out

Higher financing costs, lower multiples, and an uncertain macroeconomic environment created a challenging backdrop for private equity managers in 2023. Fundraising declined for the second year in a row, falling 15 percent to $649 billion, as LPs grappled with the denominator effect and a slowdown in distributions. Managers were on the fundraising trail longer to raise this capital: funds that closed in 2023 were open for a record-high average of 20.1 months, notably longer than 18.7 months in 2022 and 14.1 months in 2018. VC and growth equity strategies led the decline, dropping to their lowest level of cumulative capital raised since 2015. Fundraising in Asia fell for the fourth year of the last five, with the greatest decline in China.

Despite the difficult fundraising context, a subset of strategies and managers prevailed. Buyout managers collectively had their best fundraising year on record, raising more than $400 billion. Fundraising in Europe surged by more than 50 percent, resulting in the region’s biggest haul ever. The largest managers raised an outsized share of the total for a second consecutive year, making 2023 the most concentrated fundraising year of the last decade (Exhibit 2).

Despite the drop in aggregate fundraising, PE assets under management increased 8 percent to $8.2 trillion. Only a small part of this growth was performance driven: PE funds produced a net IRR of just 2.5 percent through September 30, 2023. Buyouts and growth equity generated positive returns, while VC lost money. PE performance, dating back to the beginning of 2022, remains negative, highlighting the difficulty of generating attractive investment returns in a higher interest rate and lower multiple environment. As PE managers devise value creation strategies to improve performance, their focus includes ensuring operating efficiency and profitability of their portfolio companies.

Deal activity volume and count fell sharply, by 21 percent and 24 percent, respectively, which continued the slower pace set in the second half of 2022. Sponsors largely opted to hold assets longer rather than lock in underwhelming returns. While higher financing costs and valuation mismatches weighed on overall deal activity, certain types of M&A gained share. Add-on deals, for example, accounted for a record 46 percent of total buyout deal volume last year.

Real estate recedes

For real estate, 2023 was a year of transition, characterized by a litany of new and familiar challenges. Pandemic-driven demand issues continued, while elevated financing costs, expanding cap rates, and valuation uncertainty weighed on commercial real estate deal volumes, fundraising, and investment performance.

Managers faced one of the toughest fundraising environments in many years. Global closed-end fundraising declined 34 percent to $125 billion. While fundraising challenges were widespread, they were not ubiquitous across strategies. Dollars continued to shift to large, multi-asset class platforms, with the top five managers accounting for 37 percent of aggregate closed-end real estate fundraising. In April, the largest real estate fund ever raised closed on a record $30 billion.

Capital shifted away from core and core-plus strategies as investors sought liquidity through redemptions in open-end vehicles and reduced gross contributions to the lowest level since 2009. Opportunistic strategies benefited from this shift, as investors turned their attention toward capital appreciation over income generation in a market where alternative sources of yield have grown more attractive.

In the United States, for instance, open-end funds, as represented by the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries Fund Index—Open-End Equity (NFI-OE), recorded $13 billion in net outflows in 2023, reversing the trend of positive net inflows throughout the 2010s. The negative flows mainly reflected $9 billion in core outflows, with core-plus funds accounting for the remaining outflows, which reversed a 20-year run of net inflows.

As a result, the NAV in US open-end funds fell roughly 16 percent year over year. Meanwhile, global assets under management in closed-end funds reached a new peak of $1.7 trillion as of June 2023, growing 14 percent between June 2022 and June 2023.

Real estate underperformed historical averages in 2023, as previously high-performing multifamily and industrial sectors joined office in producing negative returns caused by slowing demand growth and cap rate expansion. Closed-end funds generated a pooled net IRR of −3.5 percent in the first nine months of 2023, losing money for the first time since the global financial crisis. The lone bright spot among major sectors was hospitality, which—thanks to a rush of postpandemic travel—returned 10.3 percent in 2023. 2 Based on NCREIFs NPI index. Hotels represent 1 percent of total properties in the index. As a whole, the average pooled lifetime net IRRs for closed-end real estate funds from 2011–20 vintages remained around historical levels (9.8 percent).

Global deal volume declined 47 percent in 2023 to reach a ten-year low of $650 billion, driven by widening bid–ask spreads amid valuation uncertainty and higher costs of financing (Exhibit 3). 3 CBRE, Real Capital Analytics Deal flow in the office sector remained depressed, partly as a result of continued uncertainty in the demand for space in a hybrid working world.

During a turbulent year for private markets, private debt was a relative bright spot, topping private markets asset classes in terms of fundraising growth, AUM growth, and performance.

Fundraising for private debt declined just 13 percent year over year, nearly ten percentage points less than the private markets overall. Despite the decline in fundraising, AUM surged 27 percent to $1.7 trillion. And private debt posted the highest investment returns of any private asset class through the first three quarters of 2023.

Private debt’s risk/return characteristics are well suited to the current environment. With interest rates at their highest in more than a decade, current yields in the asset class have grown more attractive on both an absolute and relative basis, particularly if higher rates sustain and put downward pressure on equity returns (Exhibit 4). The built-in security derived from debt’s privileged position in the capital structure, moreover, appeals to investors that are wary of market volatility and valuation uncertainty.

Direct lending continued to be the largest strategy in 2023, with fundraising for the mostly-senior-debt strategy accounting for almost half of the asset class’s total haul (despite declining from the previous year). Separately, mezzanine debt fundraising hit a new high, thanks to the closings of three of the largest funds ever raised in the strategy.

Over the longer term, growth in private debt has largely been driven by institutional investors rotating out of traditional fixed income in favor of private alternatives. Despite this growth in commitments, LPs remain underweight in this asset class relative to their targets. In fact, the allocation gap has only grown wider in recent years, a sharp contrast to other private asset classes, for which LPs’ current allocations exceed their targets on average. According to data from CEM Benchmarking, the private debt allocation gap now stands at 1.4 percent, which means that, in aggregate, investors must commit hundreds of billions in net new capital to the asset class just to reach current targets.

Private debt was not completely immune to the macroeconomic conditions last year, however. Fundraising declined for the second consecutive year and now sits 23 percent below 2021’s peak. Furthermore, though private lenders took share in 2023 from other capital sources, overall deal volumes also declined for the second year in a row. The drop was largely driven by a less active PE deal environment: private debt is predominantly used to finance PE-backed companies, though managers are increasingly diversifying their origination capabilities to include a broad new range of companies and asset types.

Infrastructure and natural resources take a detour

For infrastructure and natural resources fundraising, 2023 was an exceptionally challenging year. Aggregate capital raised declined 53 percent year over year to $82 billion, the lowest annual total since 2013. The size of the drop is particularly surprising in light of infrastructure’s recent momentum. The asset class had set fundraising records in four of the previous five years, and infrastructure is often considered an attractive investment in uncertain markets.

While there is little doubt that the broader fundraising headwinds discussed elsewhere in this report affected infrastructure and natural resources fundraising last year, dynamics specific to the asset class were at play as well. One issue was supply-side timing: nine of the ten largest infrastructure GPs did not close a flagship fund in 2023. Second was the migration of investor dollars away from core and core-plus investments, which have historically accounted for the bulk of infrastructure fundraising, in a higher rate environment.

The asset class had some notable bright spots last year. Fundraising for higher-returning opportunistic strategies more than doubled the prior year’s total (Exhibit 5). AUM grew 18 percent, reaching a new high of $1.5 trillion. Infrastructure funds returned a net IRR of 3.4 percent in 2023; this was below historical averages but still the second-best return among private asset classes. And as was the case in other asset classes, investors concentrated commitments in larger funds and managers in 2023, including in the largest infrastructure fund ever raised.

The outlook for the asset class, moreover, remains positive. Funds targeting a record amount of capital were in the market at year-end, providing a robust foundation for fundraising in 2024 and 2025. A recent spate of infrastructure GP acquisitions signal multi-asset managers’ long-term conviction in the asset class, despite short-term headwinds. Global megatrends like decarbonization and digitization, as well as revolutions in energy and mobility, have spurred new infrastructure investment opportunities around the world, particularly for value-oriented investors that are willing to take on more risk.

Private markets make measured progress in DEI

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has become an important part of the fundraising, talent, and investing landscape for private market participants. Encouragingly, incremental progress has been made in recent years, including more diverse talent being brought to entry-level positions, investing roles, and investment committees. The scope of DEI metrics provided to institutional investors during fundraising has also increased in recent years: more than half of PE firms now provide data across investing teams, portfolio company boards, and portfolio company management (versus investment team data only). 4 “ The state of diversity in global private markets: 2023 ,” McKinsey, August 22, 2023.

In 2023, McKinsey surveyed 66 global private markets firms that collectively employ more than 60,000 people for the second annual State of diversity in global private markets report. 5 “ The state of diversity in global private markets: 2023 ,” McKinsey, August 22, 2023. The research offers insight into the representation of women and ethnic and racial minorities in private investing as of year-end 2022. In this chapter, we discuss where the numbers stand and how firms can bring a more diverse set of perspectives to the table.

The statistics indicate signs of modest advancement. Overall representation of women in private markets increased two percentage points to 35 percent, and ethnic and racial minorities increased one percentage point to 30 percent (Exhibit 6). Entry-level positions have nearly reached gender parity, with female representation at 48 percent. The share of women holding C-suite roles globally increased 3 percentage points, while the share of people from ethnic and racial minorities in investment committees increased 9 percentage points. There is growing evidence that external hiring is gradually helping close the diversity gap, especially at senior levels. For example, 33 percent of external hires at the managing director level were ethnic or racial minorities, higher than their existing representation level (19 percent).

Yet, the scope of the challenge remains substantial. Women and minorities continue to be underrepresented in senior positions and investing roles. They also experience uneven rates of progress due to lower promotion and higher attrition rates, particularly at smaller firms. Firms are also navigating an increasingly polarized workplace today, with additional scrutiny and a growing number of lawsuits against corporate diversity and inclusion programs, particularly in the US, which threatens to impact the industry’s pace of progress.

Fredrik Dahlqvist is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Stockholm office; Alastair Green  is a senior partner in the Washington, DC, office, where Paul Maia and Alexandra Nee  are partners; David Quigley  is a senior partner in the New York office, where Connor Mangan is an associate partner and Aditya Sanghvi  is a senior partner; Rahel Schneider is an associate partner in the Bay Area office; John Spivey is a partner in the Charlotte office; and Brian Vickery  is a partner in the Boston office.

The authors wish to thank Jonathan Christy, Louis Dufau, Vaibhav Gujral, Graham Healy-Day, Laura Johnson, Ryan Luby, Tripp Norton, Alastair Rami, Henri Torbey, and Alex Wolkomir for their contributions

The authors would also like to thank CEM Benchmarking and the StepStone Group for their partnership in this year's report.

This article was edited by Arshiya Khullar, an editor in the Gurugram office.

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• 08 May 2024

Major AlphaFold upgrade offers boost for drug discovery

• Ewen Callaway

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An AlphaFold3 model of a bacterial enzyme bound to a chemical. Credit: Isomorphic Labs

Since the powerhouse artificial intelligence (AI) tool AlphaFold2 was released in 2021, scientists have used the protein-structure-prediction model to map one of our cells’ biggest machines, discover drugs and chart the universe of every known protein.

Despite such successes, John Jumper — who leads AlphaFold’s development at Google DeepMind in London — is regularly asked whether the tool can do more. Requests include the ability to predict the shape of proteins that contain function-altering modifications, or their structure alongside those of DNA, RNA and other cellular players that are crucial to a protein’s duties. “I would say ‘no, you can’t put that into AlphaFold’,” Jumper says. “I would rather solve their problems.”

What’s next for AlphaFold and the AI protein-folding revolution

The latest version of AlphaFold, described on 8 May in Nature 1 , aims to do just that — by giving scientists the ability to predict the structures of proteins during interactions with other molecules. But whereas DeepMind made the 2021 version of the tool freely available to researchers without restriction, AlphaFold3 is limited to non-commercial use through a DeepMind website.

Frank Uhlmann, a biochemist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who gained early access to AlphaFold3, has been impressed with its capabilities. “This is just revolutionary,” he says. “It’s going to democratize structural-biology research.”

Another revolution

“Revolutionary” is how many scientists have described the impact of AlphaFold2 on biology since it was unleashed 2 ( the first version 3 , released in 2020, was good, but not game-changing, Jumper has said). The AI predicts a protein’s structures from its amino-acid sequence, often with startling accuracy that is on par with that of experimental methods.

A freely available AlphaFold database holds the predicted structure of nearly every known protein. The availability of the AlphaFold2 code has also allowed other researchers to easily build on it: an early hack enabled the prediction of interactions between multiple proteins, a capability included in an update to AlphaFold2.

Jumper’s ennui over explaining AlphaFold’s inability to predict other aspects of a protein’s ecosystem stems from their importance: protein modifications, such as the addition of a phosphate molecule, can allow cells to respond to external cues, an infection, for instance, and set off a chain of events in response. Interactions with DNA, RNA and other chemicals are essential to many proteins’ duties.

Real-world examples of these interactions are readily available in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), a repository of experimentally determined structures that is the foundation of AlphaFold’s capabilities. An ideal tool would be able to predict structures of a protein alongside its accessories, says Jumper. “We want to solve the whole PDB.”

Major upgrade

To create AlphaFold3, Jumper, DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis and their colleagues made large changes to its predecessor: the latest version depends less on information about proteins related to a target sequence, for instance. AlphaFold3 also uses a type of machine-learning network — called a diffusion model — that is used by image-generating AIs such as Midjourney. “It’s a pretty substantial change,” says Jumper.

AlphaFold’s new rival? Meta AI predicts shape of 600 million proteins

AlphaFold3, the researchers found, substantially outperforms existing software tools at predicting the structure of proteins and their partners. For instance, scientists — especially those interested in finding new drugs — have conventionally used ‘docking’ software to physically model how well chemicals bind to proteins (usually with help from the proteins’ experimentally determined structures). AlphaFold3 proved superior to two docking programs, as well as to another AI-based tool called RoseTTAFold All-Atom 4 .

Uhlmann’s team has used AlphaFold3 to predict the structure of DNA-interacting proteins involved in copying the genome, a step that is essential to cell division. Experiments in which proteins are mutated to alter such interactions suggest that the predictions were usually spot on, Uhlmann says. “It’s an amazing discovery tool,” he adds.

“The structure-prediction performance of AlphaFold3 is very impressive,” says David Baker, a computational biophysicist at the University of Washington in Seattle. It’s better than RoseTTAFold All-Atom, which his team developed 4 , he adds.

Restricted access

Unlike RoseTTAFold and AlphaFold2, scientists will not be able to run their own version of AlphaFold3, nor will the code underlying AlphaFold3 or other information obtained after training the model be made public. Instead, researchers will have access to an ‘AlphaFold3 server’, on which they can input their protein sequence of choice, alongside a selection of accessory molecules.

How AlphaFold can realize AI’s full potential in structural biology

Uhlmann likes what he has so far seen of the server, which he says is simpler and quicker than the version of AlphaFold2 that he has access to at his institute. “You upload it and 10 minutes later, you’ve got the structures,” he says. For most scientists, “the server is really going to smash it. Everybody can do it.”

Access to the AlphaFold3 server, however, is limited. Scientists are currently restricted to 10 predictions a day, and it is not possible to obtain structures of proteins bound to possible drugs.

Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spin-off company in London, is using AlphaFold3 to develop drugs, both through its own pipeline and with other pharmaceutical companies. “We have to strike a balance between making sure that this is accessible and has the impact in the scientific community as well as not compromising Isomorphic’s ability to pursue commercial drug discovery,” says Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind’s head of AI science and a study co-author.

Because of the restriction on modelling protein interactions with possible drugs, “I can’t see it having the impact AlphaFold2 had”, says Brian Shoichet, a pharmaceutical chemist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has been using AlphaFold structures to hunt for therapeutic candidates.

Sergey Ovchinnikov, an evolutionary biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, had hoped to develop a web version of AlphaFold3, as he and his colleagues have done for AlphaFold2 shortly after its code was released. But based on the ample information provided in the latest Nature paper, it shouldn’t take long for other teams to create their own versions, he says. “I would expect open-source solutions before the end of the year.”

Nature 629 , 509-510 (2024)

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Students and Faculty Mentors Celebrated at Student Research Day

Student research day scientific poster session, student research day, shelli farhadian, md, phd, and john k. forrest, md, peter aronson, md, c.n.h. long professor of medicine (nephrology) and professor of cellular and molecular physiology.

On May 7, 2024, students and faculty mentors were celebrated at Yale School of Medicine’s (YSM) Student Research Day (SRD), an annual tradition at YSM since 1988. Five medical students (Chinye Ijile, Amanda Lieberman, Kingson Lin, Victoria Marks, and Jamieson O’Marr) made thesis presentations, and over 75 students, from across Yale’s health profession schools, displayed scientific posters and engaged with attendees during the poster session.

“Today we’re showcasing a diverse range of mentored research—spanning from fundamental basic science, to implementation science—performed by student investigators from across the health professions schools,” Associate Dean for Student Research Sarwat Chaudhry, MD, professor of medicine (general medicine), said in opening remarks. Associate Dean for Student Research Erica Herzog, MD, PhD, John Slade Ely Professor of Medicine (pulmonary) and professor of pathology, added, “We take immense pride in Yale’s deep-rooted tradition of embedding research within medical education. For our students, experience in scientific investigation isn't merely a stepping stone towards a successful residency match or a career in academic research; it's foundational training for their lifelong commitment to medicine.”

Farr Lecture

The Lee E. Farr MD Endowed Lectureship and the presentation of the Dr. John N. Forrest, Jr., Mentorship Award, which bookended the student thesis presentations, honored YSM faculty for their outstanding mentorship. In introducing Peter Aronson, MD, C.N.H. Long Professor of Medicine (Nephrology) and professor of cellular and molecular physiology, as the Farr lecturer, Nancy J. Brown, MD, Jean and David W. Wallace Dean and C.N.H. Long Professor of Internal Medicine, explained that the lecture aims to stimulate thinking and to inspire students to strive to achieve more effective leadership and educational roles in society. Brown said that Aronson, who has been at YSM for 50 years since joining as a nephrology fellow in 1974, “epitomizes these qualities as a physician-scientist, educator, mentor, and colleague. As such, there is no one more fitting to speak at today’s event.”

As chief of the Section of Nephrology from 1987-2002, Brown said, Aronson nurtured the development of numerous physician-scientists, both as faculty and fellows, many of whom became recognized leaders—and many of whom remain at Yale and were present on SRD. “It goes without saying” Brown concluded, “that Dr. Aronson’s stewardship is one reason for the enduring strength of Yale’s 200-year tradition of medical student research,” noting he had been part of the tradition for one quarter of the 200 years. (In comments after Aronson spoke, Herzog noted several of his student evaluations simply said GOAT: “Greatest Of All Time.”)

Using his own experiences as examples in his lecture titled From Sugar to Salt to Stones: Serendipitous Journey as Mentee and Mentor, Aronson noted the importance of chance events and serendipitous research findings in determining the course of his academic development and research career. ( This article describes his remarks in detail .) In closing, Aronson honored the late John N. Forrest, Jr., professor emeritus of medicine and the founding director of YSM’s Office of Student Research (OSR). Forrest, he said, “exemplified extraordinary commitment to the process of education and mentorship,” adding “we should all be inspired by his example of what is most gratifying in academic medicine.”

Dr. John N. Forrest, Jr., Mentorship Award

Chaudhry similarly honored John N. Forrest, Jr. in introducing the mentorship award established to recognize his legacy. “As many of you know, Dr. Forrest died earlier this year, and so this year’s Forrest Prize holds special meaning.” OSR “was his pride and joy,” Chaudhry said, adding that since starting their roles as associate deans of student research in 2020, “Dr. Herzog and I have continually been impressed by Dr. Forrest’s care and foresight in establishing the Office of Student Research. Dr. Forrest’s legacy lives on in the enduring strength of YSM’s medical student research program.”

Before Forrest’s son, John K. Forrest, MD, associate professor of medicine (cardiovascular medicine), announced the award recipient— Shelli Farhadian, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine (infectious diseases); assistant professor, epidemiology of microbial diseases —he shared, “My family and I are grateful to the numerous people who reached out after our father’s passing. Some of the most touching correspondence we received were from medical students, residents, and fellows whom he had mentored while at Yale. There is no greater evidence of the lasting impact that mentorship plays in the lives of young physicians that the words contained in those letters.”

Turning to the awardee, Forrest said, “Dr. Farhadian is an exemplary mentor,” and pointed to her role “in shaping the careers of her mentees, many of whom have garnered multiple awards and recognition, and published first author manuscripts under her tutelage.”

He then shared what a student wrote about Farhadian: “Dr. Farhadian is such a fantastic mentor and person. As my mentor she encouraged me to apply for grants and submit to conferences and journals and has always made herself available to answer any questions that I have. She also facilitates an environment in which her mentees feel comfortable coming to her with questions and offers help in connecting me with doctors in my fields of interest. Beyond my research with Dr. Farhadian, she has also proved to be an invaluable resource in terms of developing as a student and a future doctor. She is an inspiring woman in medicine, and I hope to become as caring and capable as a doctor and mentor as she models.”

Upon receiving the award, Farhadian said, “It means a great deal for me to receive this award in Dr. Forrest’s name. I was lucky to cross paths with Dr. Forrest when I was an intern, and I will always remember how kind he was to everyone in the hospital, no matter how small their role.” Farhadian added, “I feel very lucky to have had my own exceptional research mentors along the way, and I have tried to emulate them when mentoring my own trainees.”

Student Thesis Presentations

Chinye Ijile

Medicaid Coverage for Undocumented Children in Connecticut: A Political History

Faculty mentor: Naomi Rogers, PhD, professor in the history of medicine and of history; acting chair, Spring 2024, History of Medicine

Amanda Lieberman

Multilevel Barriers to Methadone for HIV Prevention Among People Who Inject Drugs in Kazakhstan

Faculty mentor: Frederick Altice, MD, MA, professor of medicine (infectious diseases) and of epidemiology (microbial diseases)

Kingson Lin, MD-PhD

Design, Synthesis, and Characterization of Novel MGMT-Dependent, MMR-Independent Agents for the Treatment of Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM)

Faculty mentors: Ranjit Bindra, MD, PhD, Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor of Therapeutic Radiology and professor of pathology; and Seth Herzon, PhD, Milton Harris ’29 Ph.D. Professor of Chemistry

• Victoria Marks

Association between Medical Insurance, Access to Care, and Clinical Outcomes for Patients with Uveal Melanoma in the United States

Faculty mentor: Michael Leapman, MD, MHS, associate professor of urology; assistant professor, chronic disease epidemiology

Jamieson O’Marr

Ballistic and Explosive Orthopaedic Trauma Epidemiology and Outcomes in a Global Population

Faculty mentor: Brianna Fram, MD, assistant professor of orthopaedics & rehabilitation

Featured in this article

• Frederick Lewis Altice, MD, MA
• Peter S. Aronson, MD
• Ranjit S. Bindra, MD, PhD
• Nancy J. Brown, MD
• Sarwat Chaudhry, MD
• Shelli Farhadian, MD, PhD
• John K Forrest, MD, FACC, FSCAI
• Brianna R. Fram, MD
• Erica Herzog, MD, PhD
• Seth Herzon, PhD
• Chinye Ijeli
• Michael S. Leapman, MD, MHS
• Amanda Liberman
• Kingson Lin
• Jamieson O'Marr, MS
• Naomi Rogers, PhD

Related Links

• Student Research Day Program

Which SWFL company is among the latest attacked by a cyber gang? How much does Medusa want?

N o patron information was compromised in a recent ransomware attack against John R. Wood  Christie's International Real Estate by a cyber gang known as Medusa, according to the company .

"All John R. Wood customer data is located in third-party solutions," President Corey McCloskey said. "We had an internal security event, which does not include any customer data."

Here's what to know.

What does Medusa claim in ransomware attack made in Naples, Florida?

Medusa announced the attack on its site, claiming it had stolen more than 1 terabyte of Wood data. The gang demanded $2 million from the real estate group in exchange for deleting the stolen data or else it planned to sell the information on the dark web.

That's according to researchers at Comparitech, a site covering cybersecurity topics since 2015.

"They're quite a successful ransomware gang," said Rebecca Moody, head of research at Comparitech.

Where have similar ransomware attacks occurred in the state of Florida?

The attack is bringing to light an increasingly common threat to companies and agencies with online business operations .

In 2019, the city of Riviera Beach in Palm Beach County agreed to pay a $600,000 ransom to retain access to its data which had been compromised in an attack. In 2023, St. Lucie County tax collector had its computer system shut down in another attack. The Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections made public a 2016 ransomware attack in 2020.  Five years, the city of Naples was scammed out of $700,000 in a spearphishing cyber-attack.

Does the Collier County sheriff's office investigate ransomware cases?

The Collier County sheriff's office does not investigate ransomware cases but has shared tips from The Federal Trade Commission with the community on the best way to prevent these types of cyber crimes.

The FTC warns against clicking links from individuals you don't know, which can download viruses onto your computer. Companies should also ensure they have anti-malware and anti-virus software and that they keep said software up to date.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation suggests coming up with a plan in case your business is attacked, and backing up your data regularly to ensure continued access in the event of an attack.

How long has Medusa been preying on companies and governments?

Moody said Medusa first came on the scene in 2019 and has claimed responsibility for at least nine confirmed ransomware attacks this past year on entities including a Michigan school district, an Indiana credit union and a national health care provider offering dialysis.

The group infiltrates entities through weaknesses in their security software, or else hacks their systems through phishing emails to employees.

"They'll get in, loiter around for a while, then launch the attack," Moody said.

What is a ransomware attack? How does the crime usually operate?

Once the cyber gang announces its presence and makes its demands, the clock starts. From there, targets have a specified amount of time to pay the ransom in order to avoid publication or sale of its stolen data.

"By the time they're on the site that tends to be the end of the game, they've been hacked," Moody said. "(The data) will often go on the dark web, and we don't really follow it any farther."

What's 'almost taboo' when it comes to ransomware attacks?

Moody said targeted groups don't often publicly share details of the attacks and whether they've made ransom payments, fearing it opens them up to repeat attacks.

"It's almost taboo," she said. "A lot of times companies will do everything they can to not admit to have suffered a ransomware attack."

How much data does Medusa claim it stole from Collier County firm?

Medusa claimed last month to have stolen 1.07 terabytes of data. According to DropBox, a terabyte can hold up to 6.5 million document pages, 500 hours of HD video or 250,000 photos.

McCloskey declined comment on the type of data that was compromised in the attack. She did not say whether the group had paid and if it had reported the breach to authorities. But she added it was following the "specific laws in Florida."

What does Florida law require when there's a cyber attack?

Florida law requires that companies notify the state attorney general's office within 30 days of a cyber attack, with the potential for extensions on doing so. The same statutes outline requirements for notifying customers publicly.

"As you can probably imagine, this is sort of (an) internal event that we're still dealing with," McCloskey said, "If you would please respect our privacy while we're trying to work through it, that would be greatly appreciated, but I just really want to stress that no customer data at all has been affected."

Chase Sizemore, the Attorney General's press secretary, said Thursday the office had received notification on the incident.

Shopping: What are Kohl's and Five Below plans for SW Florida expansion? What other stores are opening?

How can property owners sign up for 'risk alert notifications?'

In general, there's a rise in real estate scams, in particular the fraudulent transfer of deeds or a criminal pretending to be a buyer or seller and convincing victims to wire money for a deposit, according to the Collier County Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller office.

The Clerk's office has a fraud alert system to monitor legally recorded documents, like real estate deeds. While it concedes this won't stop the scammer, it can help someone learn about the incident and file a complaint faster, reducing this impact.

Only about 5,000 have signed up, and the agency has been trying to get the word out on the program that can be found at collierclerk.com by clicking on the "risk alert notifications" button.

Resort: Great Wolf Lodge: How many millions of pounds of steel and concrete in Naples? How big?

What tips does the FBI recommend when it comes to cybersecurity?

• Keep operating systems, software, and applications current and up to date.
• Make sure anti-virus and anti-malware solutions are set to automatically update and run regular scans.
• Back up data regularly and double-check that those backups were completed.
• Secure your backups. Make sure they are not connected to the computers and networks they are backing up.
• Create a continuity plan in case your business or organization is the victim of a ransomware attack.

Phil Fernandez of the USA TODAY Network contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: Which SWFL company is among the latest attacked by a cyber gang? How much does Medusa want?

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How 3M Discovered, Then Concealed, the Dangers of Forever Chemicals

By Sharon Lerner

This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica .

Kris Hansen had worked as a chemist at the 3M Corporation for about a year when her boss, an affable senior scientist named Jim Johnson, gave her a strange assignment. 3M had invented Scotch Tape and Post-it notes; it sold everything from sandpaper to kitchen sponges. But on this day, in 1997, Johnson wanted Hansen to test human blood for chemical contamination.

Several of 3M’s most successful products contained man-made compounds called fluorochemicals. In a spray called Scotchgard, fluorochemicals protected leather and fabric from stains. In a coating known as Scotchban, they prevented food packaging from getting soggy. In a soapy foam used by firefighters, they helped extinguish jet-fuel fires. Johnson explained to Hansen that one of the company’s fluorochemicals, PFOS—short for perfluorooctanesulfonic acid—often found its way into the bodies of 3M factory workers. Although he said that they were unharmed, he had recently hired an outside lab to measure the levels in their blood. The lab had just reported something odd, however. For the sake of comparison, it had tested blood samples from the American Red Cross, which came from the general population and should have been free of fluorochemicals. Instead, it kept finding a contaminant in the blood.

Johnson asked Hansen to figure out whether the lab had made a mistake. Detecting trace levels of chemicals was her specialty: she had recently written a doctoral dissertation about tiny particles in the atmosphere. Hansen’s team of lab technicians and junior scientists fetched a blood sample from a lab-supply company and prepped it for analysis. Then Hansen switched on an oven-size box known as a mass spectrometer, which weighs molecules so that scientists can identify them.

As the lab equipment hummed around her, Hansen loaded a sample into the machine. A graph appeared on the mass spectrometer’s display; it suggested that there was a compound in the blood that could be PFOS. That’s weird, Hansen thought. Why would a chemical produced by 3M show up in people who had never worked for the company?

Hansen didn’t want to share her results until she was certain that they were correct, so she and her team spent several weeks analyzing more blood, often in time-consuming overnight tests. All the samples appeared to be contaminated. When Hansen used a more precise method, liquid chromatography, the results left little doubt that the chemical in the Red Cross blood was PFOS.

Hansen now felt obligated to update her boss. Johnson was a towering, bearded man, and she liked him: he seemed to trust her expertise, and he found something to laugh about in most conversations. But, when she shared her findings, his response was cryptic. “This changes everything,” he said. Before she could ask him what he meant, he went into his office and closed the door.

This was not the first time that Hansen had found a chemical where it didn’t belong. A wiry woman who grew up skiing competitively, Hansen had always liked to spend time outdoors; for her chemistry thesis at Williams College, she had kayaked around the former site of an electric company on the Hoosic River, collecting crayfish and testing them for industrial pollutants called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Her research, which showed that a drainage ditch at the site was leaking the chemicals, prompted a news story and contributed to a cleanup effort overseen by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. At 3M, Hansen assumed that her bosses would respond to her findings with the same kind of diligence and care.

Hansen stayed near Johnson’s office for the rest of the day, anxiously waiting for him to react to her research. He never did. In the days that followed, Hansen sensed that Johnson had notified some of his superiors. She remembers his boss, Dale Bacon, a paunchy fellow with gray hair, stopping by her desk and suggesting that she had made a mistake. “I don’t think so,” she told him. In subsequent weeks, Hansen and her team ordered fresh blood samples from every supplier that 3M worked with. Each of the samples tested positive for PFOS.

In the middle of this testing, Johnson suddenly announced that he would be taking early retirement. After he packed up his office and left, Hansen felt adrift. She was so new to corporate life that her office clothes—pleated pants and dress shirts—still felt like a costume. Johnson had always guided her research, and he hadn’t told Hansen what she should do next. She reminded herself of what he had said—that the chemical wasn’t harmful in factory workers. But she couldn’t be sure that it was harm less . She knew that PCBs, for example, were mass-produced for years before studies showed that they accumulate in the food chain and cause a range of health issues, including damage to the brain. The most reliable way to gauge the safety of chemicals is to study them over time, in animals and, if possible, in humans.

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What Hansen didn’t know was that 3M had already conducted animal studies—two decades earlier. They had shown PFOS to be toxic, yet the results remained secret, even to many at the company. In one early experiment, conducted in the late seventies, a group of 3M scientists fed PFOS to rats on a daily basis. Starting at the second-lowest dose that the scientists tested, about ten milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, the rats showed signs of possible harm to their livers, and half of them died. At higher doses, every rat died. Soon afterward, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose, 4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, could kill a monkey within weeks. (Based on this result, the chemical would currently fall into the highest of five toxicity levels recognized by the United Nations.) This daily dose of PFOS was orders of magnitude greater than the amount that the average person would ingest, but it was still relatively low—roughly comparable to the dose of aspirin in a standard tablet.

In 1979, an internal company report deemed PFOS “certainly more toxic than anticipated” and recommended longer-term studies. That year, 3M executives flew to San Francisco to consult Harold Hodge, a respected toxicologist. They told Hodge only part of what they knew: that PFOS had sickened and even killed laboratory animals, and had caused liver abnormalities in factory workers. According to a 3M document that was marked “ Confidential ,” Hodge urged the executives to study whether the company’s fluorochemicals caused reproductive issues or cancer. After reviewing more data, he told one of them to find out whether the chemicals were present “in man,” and he added, “If the levels are high and widespread and the half-life is long, we could have a serious problem.” Yet Hodge’s warning was omitted from official meeting notes, and the company’s fluorochemical production increased over time.

Hansen’s bosses never told her that PFOS was toxic. In the weeks after Johnson left 3M, however, she felt that she was under a new level of scrutiny. One of her superiors suggested that her equipment might be contaminated, so she cleaned the mass spectrometer and then the entire lab. Her results didn’t change. Another encouraged her to repeatedly analyze her syringes, bags, and test tubes, in case they had tainted the blood. (They had not.) Her managers were less concerned about PFOS, it seemed to Hansen, than about the chance that she was wrong.

Sometimes Hansen doubted herself. She was twenty-eight and had only recently earned her Ph.D. But she continued her experiments, if only to respond to the questions of her managers. 3M bought three additional mass spectrometers, which each cost more than a car, and Hansen used them to test more blood samples. In late 1997, her new boss, Bacon, even had her fly out to the company that manufactured the machines, so that she could repeat her tests there. She studied the blood of hundreds of people, from more than a dozen blood banks in various states. Each sample contained PFOS. The chemical seemed to be everywhere.

When 3M was founded, in 1902, it was known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. After its mining operations flopped, the company pivoted to sandpaper, and then to a series of clever inventions aimed at improving everyday life. An early employee noticed that autoworkers were struggling to paint two-tone cars, which were popular at the time; he eventually invented masking tape, using crêpe paper and cabinetmaker’s glue. Another 3M employee created Post-it notes, to help him bookmark passages in his church hymnal. An official history of 3M, published for the company’s hundredth anniversary, celebrated its “tolerance for tinkerers.”

Fluorochemicals had their origins in the American effort to build the atomic bomb. During the Second World War, scientists for the Manhattan Project developed one of the first safe processes for bonding carbon to fluorine, a dangerously reactive element that experts had nicknamed “the wildest hellcat” of chemistry. After the war, 3M hired some Manhattan Project chemists and began mass-producing chains of carbon atoms bonded to fluorine atoms. The resulting chemicals proved to be astonishingly versatile, in part because they resist oil, water, and heat. They are also incredibly long-lasting, earning them the moniker “forever chemicals.”

In the early fifties, 3M began selling one of its fluorochemicals, PFOA, to the chemical company DuPont, for use in Teflon. Then, a couple of years later, a dollop of fluorochemical goo landed on a 3M employee’s tennis shoe, where it proved impervious to stains and impossible to wipe off. 3M now had the idea for Scotchgard and Scotchban. By the time Hansen was in elementary school, in the seventies, both products were ubiquitous. Restaurants served French fries in Scotchban-treated packaging. Hansen’s mother sprayed Scotchgard on the living-room couch.

Hansen grew up in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, not far from 3M’s headquarters. Her father was one of the company’s star engineers and was even inducted into its hall of fame, in 1979; he had helped to create Scotch-Brite scouring pads and Coban wrap, a soft alternative to sticky bandages. Once, he molded some fibres into cups, thinking that they might make a good bra. They turned out to be miserably uncomfortable, so he and his colleagues placed them over their mouths, giving the company the inspiration for its signature N95 mask.

Hansen never intended to follow her father to the company. She spent her childhood summers catching turtles and leopard frogs at the lake and hoped to have a career in environmental conservation. Her first job after earning her chemistry Ph.D. was on a boat, which took her to remote parts of the Pacific Ocean. But the voyage left her so seasick that she lost twenty pounds, and she soon retreated to Minnesota. In 1996, at her father’s suggestion, Hansen applied for a position in 3M’s environmental lab.

After Hansen started her PFOS research, her relationships with some colleagues seemed to deteriorate. One afternoon in 1998, a trim 3M epidemiologist named Geary Olsen arrived with several vials of blood and asked her to test them. The next morning, she read the results to him and several colleagues—positive for PFOS. As Hansen remembers it, Olsen looked triumphant. “Those samples came from my horse,” he said—and his horse certainly wasn’t eating at McDonald’s or trotting on Scotchgarded carpets. Hansen felt that he was trying to humiliate her. (Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.) What Hansen wanted to know was how PFOS was making its way into animals.

She found an answer in data from lab rats, which also appeared to have fluorochemicals in their blood. Rats that had more fish meal in their diets, she discovered, tended to have higher levels of PFOS, suggesting that the chemical had spread through the food chain, and perhaps through water. In male lab rats, PFOS levels rose with age, indicating that the chemical accumulated in the body. But, curiously, in female rats the levels sometimes fell. Hansen was unsettled when toxicology reports indicated why: mother rats seemed to be off-loading the chemical to their pups. Exposure to PFOS could begin before birth.

Another study confirmed that Scotchban and Scotchgard were sources of the chemical. PFOS wasn’t an official ingredient in either product, but both contained other fluorochemicals that, the study showed, broke down into PFOS in the bodies of lab rats. Hansen and her team ultimately found PFOS in eagles, chickens, rabbits, cows, pigs, and other animals. They also found fourteen additional fluorochemicals in human blood, including several produced by 3M. Some were present in wastewater from a 3M factory.

At one point, Hansen told her father, Paul, that she was frustrated by the way senior colleagues kept questioning her work. Paul had recently retired, but he had confidence in 3M’s top executives, and he suggested that she take her findings directly to them. But as a relatively new employee—and one of the few women scientists at a company of about seventy-five thousand people—Hansen found the idea preposterous. When Paul offered to talk to some of 3M’s executives himself, she was mortified at the idea of her father interceding.

Hansen knew that if she could find a blood sample that didn’t contain PFOS then she might be able to convince her colleagues that the other samples did. She and her team began to study historical blood from the early decades of PFOS production. They soon found the chemical in blood from a 1969-71 Michigan breast-cancer study. Then they ran an overnight test on blood that had been collected in rural China during the eighties and nineties. If any place were PFOS-free, she figured, it would be somewhere remote, where 3M products weren’t in widespread use.

The next morning, anxious to see the results, Hansen arrived at the lab before anyone else. For the first time since she had begun testing blood, some of the samples showed no trace of PFOS. She was so struck that she called her husband. There was nothing wrong with her equipment or methodology; PFOS, a man-made chemical produced by her employer, really was in human blood, practically everywhere. Hansen’s team found it in Swedish blood samples from 1957 and 1971. After that, her lab analyzed blood that had been collected before 3M created PFOS. It tested negative. Apparently, fluorochemicals had entered human blood after the company started selling products that contained them. They had leached out of 3M’s sprays, coatings, and factories—and into all of us.

That summer, an in-house librarian at 3M delivered a surprising article to Hansen’s office mailbox. It had been written in 1981, by 3M scientists, and it described a method for measuring fluorine in blood, indicating that even back then the company was testing for fluorochemicals. One scientist mentioned in the article, Richard Newmark, still worked for 3M, in a low-lying structure nicknamed the “nerdy building.” Hansen arranged to meet with him there.

Newmark, a collegial man with a compact build, told Hansen that, more than twenty years before, two academic scientists, Donald Taves and Warren Guy, had discovered a fluorochemical in human blood. They had wondered whether Scotchgard might be its source, so they approached 3M. Newmark told her that his subsequent experiments had confirmed their suspicions—the chemical was PFOS—but 3M lawyers had urged his lab not to admit it.

As Hansen wrote all this down in a notebook, she felt anger rising inside her. Why had so many colleagues doubted the soundness of her results if earlier 3M experiments had already proved the same thing? After the meeting, she hurried back to the lab to find Bacon. “He knew!” she told him.

Bacon’s face remained expressionless. He told Hansen to type up her notes for him. She remembers him telling her not to e-mail them. (In response to questions about Hansen’s account, Bacon said that he didn’t remember specifics. When I called Newmark, he told me that he could not remember her or anything about PFOS. “It’s been a very long time, and I’m in my mid-eighties, and just do not remember stuff that well,” he said.)

A few months later, in early 1999, Bacon invited Hansen to an extraordinary meeting: she would have the chance to present her findings to 3M’s C.E.O., Livio D. DeSimone. Hansen spent several days rehearsing while driving and making dinner. On the day of the meeting, she took an elevator up to the executive suite; her stomach turned as a secretary pointed her to a conference room. Men in suits sat around a long table. Her boss, Bacon, was there. DeSimone, a portly man with white hair, sat at the head of the table.

Almost as soon as Hansen placed her first transparency on the projector, the attendees began interrogating her: Why did she do this research? Who directed her to do it? Whom did she inform of the results? The executives seemed to view her diligence as a betrayal: her data could be damaging to the company. She remembers defending herself, mentioning Newmark’s similar work in the seventies, and trying, unsuccessfully, to direct the conversation back to her research. While the executives talked over her, Hansen noticed that DeSimone’s eyes had closed and that his chin was resting on his dress shirt. The C.E.O. appeared to have fallen asleep. (DeSimone died in 2017. A company spokesperson did not answer my questions about the meeting.)

After that meeting, Hansen remembers learning from Bacon that her job would be changing. She would only be allowed to do experiments that a supervisor had specifically requested, and she was to share her data with only that person. She would spend most of her time analyzing samples for studies that other employees were conducting, and she should not ask questions about what the results meant. Several members of her team were also being reassigned. Bacon explained that a different scientist at 3M would lead research into PFOS going forward. Hansen felt that she was being punished and struggled not to cry.

Even as Hansen was being sidelined, the results of her research were quietly making their way into the files of the Environmental Protection Agency. Since the seventies, federal law has required that companies tell the E.P.A. about any evidence indicating that a company’s products present “a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment.” In May, 1998, 3M officials notified the agency, without informing Hansen, that the company had measured PFOS in blood samples from around the U.S.—a clear reference to Hansen’s work. It did not mention its animal research from the seventies, and it said that the chemical caused “no adverse effects” at the levels the company had measured in its workers. A year later, 3M sent the E.P.A. another letter, again without telling Hansen. This time, it informed the agency about the fourteen other fluorochemicals, several of them made by 3M, that Hansen’s team had detected in human blood. The company reiterated that it did not believe that its products presented a substantial risk to human health.

Hansen recalls that in the summer of 1999, at an annual picnic that her parents hosted for 3M scientists, she was grilling corn when one of the creators of Scotchgard, a gray-haired man in glasses, confronted her. He accused her of trying to tear down the work of her colleagues. Did it make her feel powerful ruining other people’s careers? he asked. Hansen didn’t know how to respond, and he walked away.

Several of Hansen’s superiors had stopped greeting her in the hallways. When she presented a poster of her research at a 3M event, nobody asked her about it. She lost her appetite, and her pleated pants grew baggy. She started to worry that an angry co-worker might confront or even harm her in the company’s dark parking lot. She got into the habit of calling her husband before walking to her car.

A year after Hansen’s meeting with the C.E.O., 3M, under pressure from the E.P.A., made a very costly decision: it was going to discontinue its entire portfolio of PFOS-related chemicals. In May, 2000, for the first time, 3M officials revealed to the press that it had detected the chemical in blood banks. One executive claimed that the discovery was a “complete surprise.” The company’s medical director told the New York Times , “This isn’t a health issue now, and it won’t be a health issue.” But the newspaper also quoted a professor of toxicology. “The real issue is this stuff accumulates,” the professor said. “No chemical is totally innocuous, and it seems inconceivable that anything that accumulates would not eventually become toxic.”

Hansen was now pregnant with twins. Although she was heartened by 3M’s announcement—she saw it as evidence that her work had forced the company to act—she was also ready to leave the environmental lab, where she felt marginalized. After giving birth, she joined 3M’s medical-devices team. But, first, she decided to have one last blood sample tested for PFOS: her own. The results showed one of the lowest readings she’d seen in human blood. Immediately, she thought of the rats that had passed the chemical on to their pups.

Hansen told me that, for the next nineteen years, she avoided the subject of fluorochemicals with the same intensity with which she had once pursued it. She focussed on raising her kids and coaching a cross-country ski team; she worked a variety of jobs at 3M, none related to fluorochemicals. In 2002, when 3M announced that it would be replacing PFOS with another fluorochemical, PFBS, Hansen knew that it, too, would remain in the environment indefinitely. Still, she decided not to involve herself. She skipped over articles about the chemicals in scientific journals and newspapers, where they were starting to be linked to possible developmental, immune-system, and liver problems. (In 2006, after the E.P.A. accused 3M of violating the Toxic Substances Control Act, in part by repeatedly failing to disclose the harms of fluorochemicals promptly, the company agreed to pay a small penalty of $1.5 million, without admitting wrongdoing.)

During that time, forever chemicals gained a new scientific name—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, an acronym that is vexingly similar to the specific fluorochemical PFOS. A swath of a hundred and fifty square miles around 3M’s headquarters was found to be polluted with PFAS; scientists discovered PFOS and PFBS in local fish, and various fluorochemicals in water that roughly a hundred and twenty-five thousand Minnesotans drank. Hansen’s husband, Peter, told me that, when friends asked Hansen about PFAS, she would change the subject. Still, she repeatedly told him—and herself—that the chemicals were safe.

In the 2016 book “Secrecy at Work,” two management theorists, Jana Costas and Christopher Grey, argue that there is nothing inherently wrong or harmful about keeping secrets. Trade secrets, for example, are protected by federal and state law, on the ground that they promote innovation and contribute to the economy. The authors draw on a large body of sociological research to illustrate the many ways that information can be concealed. An organization can compartmentalize a secret by slicing it into smaller components, preventing any one person from piecing together the whole. Managers who don’t want to disclose sensitive information may employ “stone-faced silence.” Secret-keepers can form a kind of tribe, dependent on one another’s continued discretion; in this way, even the existence of a secret can be kept secret. Such techniques become pernicious, Costas and Grey write, when a company keeps a dark secret, a secret about wrongdoing.

Certain unpredictable events—a leak, a lawsuit, a news story—can start to unspool a secret. In the case of forever chemicals, the unspooling began on a cattle farm. In 1998, a West Virginia farmer told a lawyer, Robert Bilott, that wastewater from a DuPont site seemed to be poisoning his cows: they had started to foam at the mouth, their teeth grew black, and more than a hundred eventually fell over and died. Bilott sued and obtained tens of thousands of internal documents, which helped push forever chemicals into the public consciousness. The documents revealed that the farm’s water contained PFOA, the fluorochemical that DuPont had bought from 3M, and that both companies had long understood it to be toxic. (The lawsuit, which ended in a settlement, was dramatized in the film “Dark Waters,” starring Mark Ruffalo as Bilott.) Bilott later sued 3M over contamination in Minnesota, but the judge prohibited discussion of health repercussions; a jury ultimately decided in 3M’s favor. Finally, in 2010, the Minnesota attorney general’s office filed its own suit, alleging that 3M had harmed the environment and polluted drinking water. The company paid eight hundred and fifty million dollars in a settlement, without an admission of fault or liability. The A.G. also released thousands more internal 3M records to the public.

The A.G.’s records helped me report a series of stories for the Intercept about forever chemicals. Much of my reporting, which started in 2015, focussed on what 3M and DuPont knew, even as they continued to produce PFAS. But, as I reported on the coverup, I wondered what it meant for a sprawling multinational company to know that its products were dangerous. Who knew? How much, exactly, did they know? And how had the company kept its secret? For many years, no one inside 3M would agree to speak with me.

Then, in 2021, John Oliver did a segment on his comedy news show, “Last Week Tonight,” about forever chemicals. The segment, which mentioned my reporting, said that they could cause cancer, immune-system issues, and other problems. “The world is basically soaked in the Devil’s piss right now,” Oliver said. “And not in a remotely hot way.” One of Hansen’s former professors sent her the segment, and Hansen watched it at her kitchen table—a moment that would eventually lead her to me.

“This actually made me sad as there are so many inaccuracies,” Hansen wrote to her professor, in response. But, when the professor asked her what was incorrect, Hansen didn’t know what to say. For the first time, she Googled the health effects of PFOS.

Hansen was deeply troubled by what she read. One paper, published in 2012 in the Journal of the American Medical Association , found that, in children, as PFOS levels rose so did the chance that vaccines were ineffective. Children with high levels of PFOS and other fluorochemicals were more likely to experience fevers, according to a 2016 study. Other research linked the chemicals to increased rates of infectious diseases, food allergies, and asthma in children. Dozens of scientific papers had found that, in adults, even very low levels of PFOS could interfere with hormones, fertility, liver and thyroid function, cholesterol levels, and fetal development. Even PFBS, the chemical that 3M chose as a replacement for PFOS, caused developmental and reproductive irregularities in animals, according to the Minnesota Department of Health.

Reading these studies, Hansen felt a paradoxical kind of relief: as bad as PFOS seemed to be, at least independent scientists were studying it. But she also felt enraged at the company, and at herself. For years, she had repeated the company’s claim that PFOS was not harmful. “I’m not proud of that,” she told me. She felt “dirty” for ever collecting a 3M paycheck. When she read the documents released by the Minnesota A.G., she was horrified by how much the company had known, and how little it had told her. She found records of studies that she had conducted, as well as the typed notes from her meeting with Newmark.

In October, 2022, after Hansen had been at 3M for twenty-six years, her job was eliminated, and she chose not to apply for a new one. Three months later, she wrote me an e-mail, offering to speak about what she had witnessed inside the company. “If you’d be interested in talking further, please let me know,” she wrote. The next day, we had the first of dozens of conversations.

When Hansen first told me about her experiences, I felt conflicted. Her work seemed to have helped force 3M to stop making a number of toxic chemicals, but I kept thinking about the twenty years in which she had kept quiet. During my first visit to Hansen’s home, in February, 2023, we sat in her kitchen, eating bread that her husband had just baked. She showed me pictures of her father and shared a color-coded time line of 3M’s history with forever chemicals. On a bitterly cold walk in a local park, we tried to figure out if any of her colleagues, besides Newmark, had known that PFOS was in everyone’s blood. She often sprinkled her stories with such Midwesternisms as “holy buckets!”

During my second trip, this past August, I asked her why, as a scientist who was trained to ask questions, she hadn’t been more skeptical of claims that PFOS was harmless. In the awkward silence that followed, I looked out the window at some hummingbirds.

Hansen’s superiors had given her the same explanation that they gave journalists, she finally said—that factory workers were fine, so people with lower levels would be, too. Her specialty was the detection of chemicals, not their harms. “You’ve got literally the medical director of 3M saying, ‘We studied this, there are no effects,’ ” she told me. “I wasn’t about to challenge that.” Her income had helped to support a family of five. Perhaps, I wondered aloud, she hadn’t really wanted to know whether her company was poisoning the public.

To my surprise, Hansen readily agreed. “It almost would have been too much to bear at the time,” she told me. 3M had successfully compartmentalized its secret; Hansen had only seen one slice. (When I sent the company detailed questions about Hansen’s account, a spokesperson responded without answering most of them or mentioning Hansen by name.)

Recently, I thought back on Taves and Guy, the academic scientists who, in the seventies, came so close to proving that 3M’s chemicals were accumulating in humans. Taves is ninety-seven, but when I called him he told me that he still remembers clearly when company representatives visited his lab at the University of Rochester. “They wanted to know everything about what we were doing,” he told me. But the exchange was not reciprocal. “I soon found out that they weren’t going to tell me anything.” 3M never confirmed to Taves or Guy, who was a postdoctoral student at the time, that its fluorochemicals were in human blood. “I’m sort of kicking myself for not having followed up on this more, but I didn’t have any research money,” Guy told me. He eventually became a dentist to support his wife and family. (He died this year, at eighty-one.) Taves, too, left the field, to become a psychiatrist, and the trail ended there.

Last year, while reading about the thousands of PFAS-related lawsuits that 3M was facing, I was intrigued to learn that one of them, filed by cities and towns with polluted water, had produced a new set of internal 3M documents. When I requested several from the plaintiff’s legal team, I saw two names that I recognized. In a document from 1991, a 3M scientist talked about using a mass spectrometer—the same tool that Hansen would use years later—to devise a technique for measuring PFOS in biological fluid. The author was Jim Johnson—and he had sent the report to his boss, Dale Bacon.

This revelation made me gasp. Johnson had been Hansen’s first boss and had instigated her research into PFOS. Bacon had questioned her findings and ultimately told her to stop her work. (In a sworn deposition, Bacon said that by the eighties he had heard, during a water-cooler chat with a colleague, that Taves and Guy had found PFOS in human blood.) What I couldn’t understand was why Johnson would ask Hansen to investigate something that he had already studied himself—and then act surprised by the results.

Jim Johnson, who is now an eighty-one-year-old widower, lives with several dogs in a pale-yellow house in North Dakota. When I first called him, he said that he had begun researching PFOS in the seventies. “I did a lot of the very original work on it,” he told me. He said that when he saw the chemical’s structure he understood “within twenty minutes” that it would not break down in nature. Shortly thereafter, one of his experiments revealed that PFOS was binding to proteins in the body, causing the chemical to accumulate over time. He told me that he also looked for PFOS in an informal test of blood from the general population, around the late seventies, and was not surprised when he found it there.

Johnson initially cited “four hundred and eighty pounds of dog” as a reason that I shouldn’t visit him, but he later relented. When I arrived, on a chilly day in November, we spent a few minutes standing outside his house, watching Snozzle, Sadie, and Junkyard press their slobbery snouts against his living-room window. Then we decamped to the nearest IHOP . Johnson, who was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, was so tall that he couldn’t comfortably fit into a booth. We sat at a table and ordered two bottomless coffees.

In an experiment in the early eighties, Johnson fed a component of Scotchban to rats and found that PFOS accumulated in their livers, a result that suggested how the chemical would behave in humans. When I asked why that mattered to the company, he took a sip of coffee and said, “It meant they were screwed.”

At the time, Johnson said, he didn’t think PFOS caused significant health problems. Still, he told me, “it was obviously bad,” because man-made compounds from household products didn’t belong in the human body. He said that he argued against using fluorochemicals in toothpaste and diapers. Contractors working for 3M had shaved rabbits, he said, and smeared them with the company’s fluorochemicals to see if PFOS showed up in their bodies. “They’d send me the livers and, yup, there it was,” he told me. “I killed a lot of rabbits.” But he considered his efforts largely futile. “These idiots were already putting it in food packaging,” he said.

Johnson told me, with seeming pride, that one reason he didn’t do more was that he was a “loyal soldier,” committed to protecting 3M from liability. Some of his assignments had come directly from company lawyers, he added, and he couldn’t discuss them with me. “I didn’t even report it to my boss, or anybody,” he said. “There are some things you take to your grave.” At one point, he also told me that, if he were asked to testify in a PFOS-related lawsuit, he would probably be of little help. “I’m an old man, and so I think they would find that I got extremely forgetful all of a sudden,” he said, and chuckled.

Out the windows of IHOP, I watched a light dusting of snow fall on the parking lot. In Johnson’s telling, a tacit rule prevailed at 3M: not all questions needed to be asked, or answered. His realization that PFOS was in the general public’s blood “wasn’t something anyone cared to hear,” he said. He wasn’t, for instance, putting his research on posters and expecting a warm reception. Over the years, he tried to convince several executives to stop making PFOS altogether, he told me, but they had good reason not to. “These people were selling fluorochemicals,” he said. He retired as the second-highest-ranked scientist in his division, but he claimed that important business decisions were out of his control. “It wasn’t for me to jump up and start saying, ‘This is bullshit!’ ” he said, and he was “not really too interested in getting my butt fired.” And so his portion of 3M’s secret stayed in a compartment, both known and not known.

Johnson said that he eventually tired of arguing with the few colleagues with whom he could speak openly about PFOS. “It was time,” he said. So he hired an outside lab to look for the chemical in the blood of 3M workers, knowing that it would also test blood-bank samples, for comparison—the first domino in a chain that would ultimately take the compound off the market. Oddly, he compared the head of the lab to a vending machine. “He gave me what I paid for,” Johnson said. “I knew what would happen.” Then Johnson tasked Hansen with something that he had long avoided: going beyond his initial experiments and meticulously documenting the chemical’s ubiquity. While Hansen took the heat, he took early retirement.

Johnson described Hansen as though she were a vending machine, too. “She did what she was supposed to do with the tools I left her,” he said.

I pointed out that Hansen had suffered professionally and personally, and that she now feels those experiences tainted her career. “I didn’t say I was a nice guy,” Johnson replied, and laughed. After four hours, we were nearing the bottom of our bottomless coffees.

Johnson has strayed from evidence-based science in recent years. He now believes, for instance, that the theory of evolution is wrong, and that COVID -19 vaccines cause “turbo-cancers.” But his account of what happened at 3M closely matched Hansen’s, and when I asked him about meetings and experiments described in court documents he remembered them clearly.

When I called Hansen about my conversation with Johnson, she grew angrier than I’d ever heard her. “He knew the whole time!” she said. Then she had to get off the phone for an appointment. “So glad I’m going to see my therapist,” she added, and hung up.

I once thought of secrets as discrete, explosive truths that a heroic person could suddenly reveal. In the 1983 film “Silkwood,” which is based on real events, Karen Silkwood, a worker at a plutonium plant, assembles a thick folder documenting her employer’s shoddy safety practices; while driving to share them with a reporter, she dies in a mysterious one-car crash. In another adaptation of a true story, the 2015 film “Spotlight,” a source delivers a box of critical documents to the Boston Globe , helping the paper to publish an investigation into child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Talking to Hansen and Johnson, though, I saw that the truth can come out piecemeal over many years, and that the same people who keep secrets can help divulge them. Some slices of 3M’s secret are only now coming to light, and others may never come out.

Between 1951 and 2000, 3M produced at least a hundred million pounds of PFOS and chemicals that degrade into PFOS. This is roughly the weight of the Titanic. After the late seventies, when 3M scientists established that the chemical was toxic in animals and was accumulating in humans, it produced millions of pounds per year. Scientists are still struggling to grasp all the biological consequences. They have learned, just as Johnson did decades ago, that proteins in the body bind to PFOS. It enters our cells and organs, where even tiny amounts can cause stress and interfere with basic biological functions. It contributes to diseases that take many years to develop; at the time of a diagnosis, one’s PFOS level may have fallen, making it difficult to establish causation with any certainty.

The other day, I called Brad Creacey, who became an Air Force firefighter in the seventies, at the age of eighteen. He told me that several times a year, for practice, he and his comrades put on rubber boots and heavy silver uniforms that looked like spacesuits. Then a “torch man,” holding a stick tipped with a burning rag, ignited jet fuel that had been poured into an open-air pit. To extinguish the hundred-foot-tall flames, Creacey and his colleagues sprayed them with aqueous film-forming foam, or A.F.F.F. 3M manufactured it from several forever chemicals, including PFOS.

Creacey remembers that A.F.F.F. felt slick and sudsy, almost like soap, and dried out the skin on his hands until it cracked. To celebrate his last day on a military base in Germany, his friends dumped a ceremonial bucket on him. Only later, after working with firefighting foam at an airport in Monterey, California, did he start to wonder if a string of ailments—cysts on his liver, a nodule near his thyroid—were connected to the foam. He had high cholesterol, which diet and exercise were unable to change. Then he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. “It makes me feel like I was a lab rat, like we were all disposable,” Creacey told me. “I’ve lost faith in human beings.”

It may be tempting to think of Creacey and his peers as unwitting research subjects; indeed, recent studies show that PFOS is associated with an increased risk of thyroid cancer and, in Air Force servicemen, an elevated risk of testicular cancer. But it is probably more accurate to say that we are all part of the experiment. Average levels of PFOS are falling, but nearly all people have at least one forever chemical in their blood, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “When you have a contaminated site, you can clean it up,” Elsie Sunderland, an environmental chemist at Harvard University, told me. “When you ubiquitously introduce a toxicant at a global scale, so that it’s detectable in everyone . . . we’re reducing public health on an incredibly large scale.” Once everyone’s blood is contaminated, there is no control group with which to compare, making it difficult to establish responsibility.

New health effects continue to be discovered. Researchers have found that exposure to PFAS during pregnancy can lead to developmental delays in children. Numerous recent studies have linked the chemicals to diabetes and obesity. This year, a study discovered thirteen forever chemicals, including PFOS, in weeks-old fetuses from terminated pregnancies, and linked the chemicals to biomarkers associated with liver problems. A team of N.Y.U. researchers estimated, in 2018, that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS—in terms of disease burden, disability, and health-care expenses—amounted to as much as sixty-two billion dollars in a single year. This exceeds the current market value of 3M.

Philippe Grandjean, a physician who helped discover that PFAS harm the immune system, believes that anyone exposed to these chemicals—essentially everyone—may have an elevated risk of cancer. Our immune systems often find and kill abnormal cells before they turn into tumors. “PFAS interfere with the immune system, and likely also this critical function,” he told me. Grandjean, who served as an expert witness in the Minnesota A.G.’s case, has studied many environmental contaminants, including mercury. The impact of PFAS was so much more extreme, he said, that one of his colleagues initially thought it was the result of nuclear radiation.

In April, the E.P.A. took two historic steps to reduce exposure to PFAS. It said that PFOS and PFOA are “likely to cause cancer” and that no level of either chemical is considered safe; it deemed them hazardous substances under the Superfund law, increasing the government’s power to force polluters to clean them up. The agency also set limits for six PFAS in drinking water. In a few years, when the E.P.A. begins enforcing the new regulations, local utilities will be required to test their water and remove any amount of PFOS or PFOA which exceeds four parts per trillion—the equivalent of one drop dissolved in several Olympic swimming pools. 3M has produced enough PFOS and chemicals that degrade into PFOS to exceed this level in all of the freshwater on earth. Meanwhile, many other PFAS continue to be used, and companies are still developing new ones. Thousands of the compounds have been produced; the Department of Defense still depends on many for use in explosives, semiconductors, cleaning fluids, and batteries. PFAS can be found in nonstick cookware, guitar strings, dental floss, makeup, hand sanitizer, brake fluid, ski wax, fishing lines, and countless other products.

In a statement, a 3M spokesman told me that the company “is proactively managing PFAS,” and that 3M’s approach to the chemicals has evolved along with “the science and technology of PFAS, societal and regulatory expectations, and our expectations of ourselves.” He directed me to a fact sheet about their continued importance in society. “These substances are critical to multiple industries—including the cars we drive, planes we fly, computers and smart phones we use to stay connected, and more,” the fact sheet read.

Recently, 3M settled the lawsuit filed by cities and towns with polluted water. It will pay up to twelve and a half billion dollars to cover the costs of filtering out PFAS, depending on how many water systems need the chemicals removed. The settlement, however, doesn’t approach the scale of the problem. At least forty-five per cent of U.S. tap water is estimated to contain one or more forever chemicals, and one drinking-water expert told me that the cost of removing them all would likely reach a hundred billion dollars.

In 2022, 3M said that it would stop making PFAS, and would “work to discontinue the use of PFAS across its product portfolio,” by the end of 2025—a pledge that it called “another example of how we are positioning 3M for continued sustainable growth.” But it acknowledged that more than sixteen thousand of its products still contained PFAS. Direct sales of the chemicals were generating $1.3 billion annually. 3M’s regulatory filings also allow for the possibility that a full phaseout won’t happen—for example, if 3M fails to find substitutes. “We are continuing to make progress on our announcement to exit PFAS manufacturing,” 3M’s spokesperson told me. The company and its scientists have not admitted wrongdoing or faced criminal liability for producing forever chemicals or for concealing their harms.

Hansen often wonders what her father would say about 3M if he were still alive. A few years ago, he began to show signs of dementia, which worsened during the COVID -19 pandemic. Every time Hansen explained to him that a novel coronavirus was sickening people around the world, he asked how he might contribute—forgetting that the N95 mask he helped to create was already protecting millions of people from infection. When he died, in January, 2021, Hansen noticed some Coban wrap on his arm. It was shielding his delicate skin from tears, just as he had designed it to. “He invented that,” Hansen told the hospice nurse, who smiled politely.

After she left 3M, Hansen began volunteering at a local nature preserve, where she works to clear paths and protect native plants. Last August, she took me there, and we walked to a creek where she often spends time. The water is home to three species of trout, she told me. It is also polluted by forever chemicals that 3M once dumped upstream.

For most of our hike, a thick wall of flowers—purple joe-pye weed and goldenrod—made it impossible to see the creek bank. Then we came to a wooden bench. I climbed on top of it and looked down on the creek. As I listened to the gurgling of water and the buzzing of insects, I thought I understood why Hansen liked to come here. It was too late to save the creek from pollution; 3M’s chemicals could be there for thousands of years to come. Hansen just wanted to appreciate what was left, and to leave the place a little better than she’d found it. ♦

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