Myla Lai-Goldman’s Second Act Began with a Retirement Letter

On December 31, 2008, Myla Lai-Goldman retired from Labcorp. There was a letter, an effective date and a plan for the following four months. After more than eighteen years at the company and its predecessor, she would remain available as a consultant. The arrangement anticipated ten hours a month. Even the exit had an operating schedule.

Retirement is an oddly inadequate word for what followed. She founded a consulting firm, took another chief executive role, co-founded GeneCentric and joined a venture capital firm. Later came the transition from CEO to executive chair and a series of board appointments. The retirement letter closed one employment relationship. Her working life promptly acquired several more.

The thread through these changes is a practical business question: how do you organize people, knowledge and capital so that an idea can become something a company can deliver? Lai-Goldman has approached that question from inside a large operation, at the head of a startup and from a director’s seat. The view changes with the chair.

Before the startup, the operating apprenticeship

Her route began with biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where her studies included a concentration in ecology, followed by a medical degree at Columbia. Ecology concerns relationships within systems. It is an appealing detail in a career later spent moving among organizations, although it would be a stretch to turn a college concentration into an explanation for every subsequent decision.

In 1990, she joined Roche Biomedical Laboratories, a predecessor of Labcorp. Her responsibilities expanded over the following years. She became a senior vice president in 1997 and an executive vice president and chief scientific officer in April 1998. By then, scientific work and management were thoroughly entangled in her job. She served on the company’s executive and management committees.

The scope was substantial: strategic and operating responsibilities for three major laboratories comprising more than 700 people. Those facilities were spread across North Carolina, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. A job at that scale includes the work between locations and disciplines: deciding priorities, assessing technology and making sure separate operations can function as parts of the same enterprise.

Her later Labcorp responsibilities included quality assurance, research and development, and technology assessment. The list matters because it spans the distance between evaluating something new and taking responsibility for an established operation. A promising proposal still needs scrutiny. An existing business still needs room to change. She had to work on both sides of that problem.

The retirement with a transition plan

The December 2008 agreement makes the departure unusually tangible. Her consulting term would run from January 1 through April 30, 2009. It covered advice, quality matters and business development, with meetings and site visits where appropriate. The document describes a transition designed to keep her experience available while her executive employment ended. Corporate knowledge, apparently, needed a forwarding address.

That same year, she founded Personalized Science, LLC, the consulting business where she remains managing partner. From June 2009 through December 2010, she served as chief executive and chief scientific officer of CancerGuide Diagnostics. The sequence moved quickly from leaving one large employer to taking responsibility for another enterprise. The calendar offers little support for a leisurely interpretation of retirement.

There was also an important continuity in the transition agreement: the employer she was leaving still had a use for her judgment. It anticipated questions that might arise after her last day and provided a way to ask them. That detail gives the departure a less theatrical quality than the usual career reinvention story. Responsibilities could change in stages, with a defined period for the old organization to draw on the experience of a departing executive.

There is a useful distinction here between leaving a position and leaving a field of work. Her subsequent roles drew on experience accumulated inside a larger organization, but each placed that experience under different conditions. Consulting asks for advice. A chief executive must turn decisions into action. A founder must also help create the organization that will do the acting.

A company small enough to choose

In 2011, Lai-Goldman co-founded GeneCentric with University of North Carolina researchers Charles Perou and Neil Hayes. She became CEO and president. In August of the same year, she also became a venture partner at Hatteras Venture Partners. Company building and company backing entered the chronology together, giving her two different vantage points on the demands of a young business.

Her early argument for GeneCentric included its operating model. In 2015, the company outsourced laboratory and kit-building activities rather than constructing those capabilities internally. That choice reduced the need to spend money building operations other organizations could provide. For someone whose previous responsibilities had included large laboratories, the decision offers a particularly useful glimpse of how experience can travel.

“We have a very attractive business model that investors are beginning to understand.”

Myla Lai-Goldman, 2015

The comment places organizational design inside the founder’s pitch. Scientific expertise was part of the proposition; so was an account of how the company would work. Which activities required its own people? Which could be handled by partners? Where would limited capital go? The appeal of outsourcing depended on answering those questions with enough clarity for investors to follow.

That is an instructive change of scale. At Labcorp, her remit included hundreds of people and multiple facilities. At GeneCentric, the early business model made choices about which facilities and functions the startup needed to own. The two situations called for different answers to a related management problem. Knowing a large operation can be useful when deciding how much of one to recreate.

The founder who changed chairs

Lai-Goldman led GeneCentric as CEO and president from its founding through 2018. On January 3, 2019, the company announced Michael Milburn as its next CEO and president. He had joined as chief scientific officer the previous September. Lai-Goldman would take the newly created position of executive chair, succeeding Hatteras co-founder and general partner Clay Thorp as board chair.

The announcement tied the change to the company’s commercial development. Lai-Goldman described Milburn as positioned to build on the base already established and advance its work with corporate partners. The structure preserved a role for the founding chief executive while assigning executive leadership to her successor. It was a change in responsibilities with named people, defined jobs and a stated business purpose.

Founder stories often give the first day more attention than the handoff. This one benefits from reading both. The person who helped establish the company would continue in its governance, while another executive took responsibility for leading it. The title of founder remained accurate. The job of CEO belonged to someone else. A company’s organizational chart can accommodate more than one chapter.

Where science meets the capital budget

Her board career had already begun to widen before that transition. West Pharmaceutical Services appointed her a director in February 2014. Her work there has included its innovation and technology committee, which she later chaired, and its finance committee. The combination put scientific judgment alongside decisions about where a business should commit resources. Both kinds of questions had appeared in her executive career.

The committee remits make the work more concrete. Innovation and technology oversight included emerging trends, major programs and patent strategies. Finance oversight covered capital allocation and potential transactions, including acquisitions and divestitures. Put together, these responsibilities concern the choices that precede an announcement: which possibilities deserve investment, how a proposal fits the business, and what committing to it will require.

West’s description of her contribution in 2024 emphasized scientific and market context for its finance committee. That is a useful way to understand the connection between her earlier operating work and her later governance roles. A technical proposal has commercial consequences. A financial decision can depend on understanding what a technology is capable of doing. The board needs to consider the relationship.

Other appointments followed: Akoya Biosciences in September 2021, NovoPath in 2022 and Mercy BioAnalytics in 2023. In February 2024, Hitachi High-Tech America named her to its newly formed scientific advisory board alongside Nitin Baliga and Tomi Pastinen. The group was assembled to provide strategic guidance for its molecular research and development division, bringing scientific and industry experience into the same discussion.

A new board, a continuing question

On July 8, 2025, Quanterix completed its acquisition of Akoya. Lai-Goldman moved onto the Quanterix board, carrying forward a director’s career that had included nearly four years at Akoya. Quanterix’s April 2026 proxy records her continuing service. Her other roles still include GeneCentric’s chair, Hatteras venture partner and managing partner of Personalized Science. The retirement letter now sits several chapters back.

The pattern is easier to see without compressing it into a single title. She has been responsible for large operations, helped form a company, made its early operating case, moved into its chair role and joined other boards. Each position changes the distance between a decision and its execution. Each makes a different demand on experience acquired in the previous one.

Her career gives the familiar idea of a second act some practical detail. There were dates, contracts, co-founders and successors. There were decisions about what to build internally and what to obtain through partners. There was a founder willing to occupy a different place in the organization she helped create. A retirement letter can be admirably precise about when a job ends. What follows may require a much longer document.