Richard Batycky and the art of starting again

The company needed a name. It already had technology, equipment, a manufacturing facility, and people who understood the work. But as its first financing approached the finish line, investors wanted a different name. Richard Batycky later recalled the ensuing scramble: “It was kind of scrambling, like just pick one.” Civitas emerged from the exercise. Corporate identity, apparently, could be less leisurely than the science.

It is a small episode in a career with several acquisitions and a succession of senior titles. It is also a useful place to begin. Company histories tend to acquire a smooth finish after the money arrives. Batycky’s recollection leaves the pencil marks visible: a practical problem, a deadline, a choice that had to be made. Even the pronunciation became a matter of what felt easier to say.

Richard P. Batycky, known professionally as Rick, is now president and chief executive officer of Nocion Therapeutics. Before that came a chemical engineering classroom, an early role at Advanced Inhalation Research, senior positions at Alkermes and Pulmatrix, a co-founder’s job at Civitas, and a technology chief’s seat at Acorda. The interesting part is how often the work continued while the organization around it changed.

First, teach things to move

Batycky earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at the University of Calgary and his S.M. and Ph.D. in the same discipline at MIT. His academic career included postdoctoral work at Penn State and an assistant professorship at the University of Alberta. There he taught fluid mechanics and transport phenomena, subjects concerned with movement, forces, and the transfer of matter and energy.

Those course titles are wonderfully resistant to glamour. They also describe a useful education for anyone who hopes to turn a laboratory idea into a repeatable process. Something must move through something else. The conditions matter. The measurements matter. An elegant concept still has to behave when someone builds it. Engineering gives the practical details a permanent seat at the table.

A glimpse of Batycky as a professor survives in the career of Blair Jackson. After enrolling at Alberta in 1996, Jackson spent his first year working with him. Batycky tried to persuade Jackson to pursue a doctorate at MIT. Jackson felt he had already spent enough time in school, but investigated the possibility and discovered a one-year master’s program instead.

The anecdote has a pleasingly untidy outcome. A professor points a student toward one door; the student finds another. It gives Batycky’s academic years a human scale beyond degrees and appointments. He was someone encouraging a younger colleague to keep studying, even if that colleague eventually negotiated with the suggestion. Advice, like most useful technology, can acquire a second application.

The early employee’s education

By January 1998, Batycky was a director at Advanced Inhalation Research, usually shortened to AIR. He was an original employee of the business. AIR had been founded by Robert Langer and David Edwards, connecting Batycky’s next chapter to the academic engineering world he had just left. His responsibility included product development, where an invention begins accumulating the obligations of a business.

Alkermes acquired AIR in 1999. Batycky stayed with the work, serving as a director at Alkermes before becoming vice president of research and development in September 2001. He held that vice presidency until May 2007. The sequence is worth lingering over: an early employee became part of a larger organization, then took on a broader remit inside it.

At Alkermes, his responsibilities encompassed formulation development, process science, device development, and analytical development. The list sounds administrative until one considers its variety. A formulation, a process, a device, and a measurement each demand different expertise. Bringing them together requires a kind of translation. A development leader has to understand why one group’s answer can become another group’s problem.

From 2007 to 2009, he served as chief scientific officer and senior vice president of research and development at Pulmatrix. He then became a founder and chief scientific officer of Civitas. The progression put him on several sides of company building: joining early, operating within an acquirer, leading research elsewhere, and helping establish a new enterprise. Each position came with a different set of decisions.

A startup with a past

Civitas was a new company built around assets that already existed. Its January 2011 launch announcement paired a $20 million Series A financing with a spinout of Alkermes’ business. The package included technology, intellectual property, equipment, and a manufacturing facility. Founders included Glenn Batchelder, Batycky, and Martin Freed. Longitude Capital and Canaan Partners supplied the announced financing.

There is something appealing about a startup that begins with a factory rather than a metaphor. This one inherited physical infrastructure and the responsibility of finding a future for it. Batycky brought direct familiarity with the underlying platform. He had worked on it at AIR and Alkermes before helping build the company that would take it forward.

The compressed naming exercise belongs here. A financing could be carefully assembled while a company name remained unsettled until the day before closing. That detail makes room for an ordinary truth about technical enterprises: the difficult work does not arrive in a tidy queue. Scientific judgment, investor preferences, facilities, and paperwork can all demand attention in the same week.

In August 2014, Civitas filed a registration statement for a proposed public offering. By October, Acorda had acquired it. The merger consideration was $525 million. Batycky became Acorda’s chief technology officer, serving from 2014 to 2018. Once again, a change in corporate ownership became a new operating role for someone who already understood the assets.

“It was kind of scrambling, like just pick one.”

Richard Batycky, on naming Civitas

The return trip to the boardroom

In August 2018, Batycky joined Nocion as chief executive. The title widened his responsibilities beyond the scientific and technical functions that had defined much of his earlier career. A CEO must assemble the people, capital, and organization around the work. The classroom’s questions about how things move now had an organizational companion: how does a company keep moving?

A year later, a former employer returned to his professional calendar. Pulmatrix appointed him to its board on November 1, 2019, also assigning him to the audit and compensation committees. The move was a return in a different capacity. He had once led research there; now he would participate in oversight, including the less photogenic business of accounts and executive compensation.

Such committee assignments rarely make the opening paragraph of a founder’s biography. They deserve a little attention here. They show a career extending beyond invention and transactions into governance. Someone has to examine the numbers and the incentives. A company’s ability to function depends partly on people prepared to read documents whose titles offer very little entertainment.

Old connections, new responsibilities

The network around Batycky’s current company contains some familiar names. In April 2026, Mark Iwicki joined Nocion’s board. Iwicki had been Civitas’ president and CEO and had led its strategic process through the Acorda acquisition. His appointment put a former colleague from that transaction alongside Batycky again, this time in a board relationship at Nocion.

In May, Nocion appointed Vineet Agarwal chief business officer. Agarwal’s background included more than fourteen years at J.P. Morgan and a subsequent finance and business development role at Korro Bio. Among the transactions he had worked on was Acorda’s acquisition of Civitas. The connection is specific: one earlier transaction appears in the histories of several people now gathered around a new company.

The financial backdrop had also changed. In March 2024, Nocion announced a $62 million Series B led by Arkin Bio Capital and Monograph Capital. In January 2026, it announced a further $23 million extension, bringing the Series B total to $93 million. At that announcement, the company said its operating runway extended through 2027. The figures describe company financing, rather than personal wealth.

Seen together, these appointments show how an executive’s earlier work can remain relevant years after a company has changed hands. A former CEO brings experience of leading the business. A former transaction adviser brings a financing perspective. Batycky brings the history of working inside the enterprise before and after its sale. Their responsibilities at Nocion are distinct, but their professional histories intersect. The connection does not tell us what comes next. It does explain something concrete about the experience around the table, and why a career is more than the title someone currently puts beneath a name.

Leave room for the next answer

In a June 2026 interview, Batycky described a deliberate preference for keeping Nocion lean and able to adapt. He also argued for more openness about failure across his industry. That position gives the long sequence of companies a useful perspective: experience has value when people can examine it, including the parts that did not deliver what they expected.

His career contains substantial numbers, but its smaller episodes are equally revealing. A student considers a professor’s advice and finds a different course. A team needs a new name at the last minute. A scientist stays with a technology through an acquisition, then later helps build a company around it. The continuities become visible through the changes.

Today, Batycky’s desk belongs to a chief executive. His earlier roles remain part of the story: teacher, early employee, research leader, co-founder, technology chief, director. Starting again has often meant taking established knowledge into a different setting. Civitas eventually got its name. The more consequential work was giving the company something to do once the paperwork was signed.