After years helping people put mass spectrometers to work, Hua-fen Liu founded Calibra Scientific in Hangzhou. Her company-building story begins with a practical question: how do you make a specialist’s know-how work in somebody else’s laboratory?

After two decades inside Pfizer, Roche and SCIEX, Huafen Liu left the multinational track to solve an unglamorous problem: making an exacting laboratory craft work the same way, every day. Her answer was not one machine, but a system around the machine.