From Bench to Boardroom: BCLA Consulting Launches Partnership with Lumanity

On September 24th, BCLA Consulting kicked off a new partnership with Lumanity, the life sciences strategy consulting firm, with a virtual Consulting 101 session open to BCLA members and advanced-degree students across Southern California exploring a move from the bench into consulting.

The evening opened with BCLA Consulting co-directors Stuti Chakrabarti, Leah Kim, and Alisa Peshina, all PhD candidates at USC, introducing the partnership and BCLA Consulting's work more broadly. Since 2014, BCLA has grown into a Southern California nonprofit with more than 3,000 event attendees across 150+ events, and its consulting arm has already brought in real client revenue this year while staffing 16 advanced-degree candidates across PhD, postdoc, and MBA backgrounds on client-facing projects. The Lumanity partnership adds twice-yearly learning sessions plus future hands-on case workshops reserved for BCLA Consulting team members.

From Lumanity, the panel featured Meredith Phelps, PhD, an Engagement Manager who left academic virology research at Harvard for consulting; Tyler McCullough, a Senior Consultant and structural biologist who got his start through the graduate consulting club miLEAD; Megan Pendiala, PhD, a Senior Consultant with a background in orthopedics and inflammation; and Caroline Kernan, Lumanity’s Talent Acquisition Manager. Each shared a version of the same arc: a PhD that didn't lead where they expected, and a consulting club, internship, or cold LinkedIn message that redirected them.

The panelists walked through what Lumanity does, helping biopharma clients de-risk assets and drive value across the product life cycle, from early market shaping through launch and portfolio growth. Phelps described compressing a months-long global device strategy into a six-week sprint for a client juggling competing regional priorities. McCullough discussed helping a national drug distributor sharpen its pitch to cell and gene therapy manufacturers, work that put him in conversation with over 50 U.S. payer experts. Pendiala shared a three-year engagement building a dermatology brand's launch strategy, including scenario planning for a drug that isn't best-in-class on efficacy.

A recurring theme across every speaker was that consulting prizes communication and real-world judgment as much as technical depth. Panelists advised attendees to go beyond just answering a case question and speak to its strategic implications, and to frame lab experience around impact rather than tasks performed. On standing out in an increasingly competitive hiring cycle, the advice was consistent: get any experience adjacent to startups, VC, or consulting before applying, and demonstrate genuine fluency in market dynamics during interviews.

Networking came up again and again as the single highest-leverage thing a PhD student can do, not just for referrals, but as practice for a skill the job itself demands daily. As Chakrabarti noted, the Lumanity partnership itself exists because a BCLA leader cold-messaged a Lumanity consultant on LinkedIn.

The session closed with a Q&A touching on Lumanity's in-house AI tools, career trajectories from associate through engagement manager to principal, and advice panelists would give their younger selves finishing a PhD today, nearly all of which circled back to starting the networking and application process earlier than feels comfortable.

A special thank you to the Lumanity team, Meredith, Tyler, Megan, and Caroline, for generously sharing their time and experience, and to BCLA Consulting's co-directors for organizing the session. We're grateful for the continued support of our sponsors, Amgen, Teknova, LA BioSpace, and Magnify at CNSI.