CHRIS MYATT '87 HAS A LASER FOCUS ON SCIENCE STORY BY REBECCA DELANEY
Typical summer jobs for high school students often bring to mind scooping ice cream, sitting by a pool as a lifeguard, or working with kids as a camp counselor. However, Chris Myatt’s ’87 summer job that he found with the help of his Thayer science teacher, Jack Foley, helped inspire a lifelong passion and successful career combining science and entrepreneurship.
“Here I am a high school kid working at an engineering firm in Cambridge next to MIT, it was awesome,” recalls Myatt. “It sparked a lot of my interests.”
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Thayer Magazine Winter / Spring 2017
That spark brought Myatt down a road of rigorous scientific work and late nights starting two companies of his own. Today he’s the founder and CEO of MBio Diagnostics, a company that’s developing sophisticated diagnostic tools to test samples of food, water, or blood and receive results quickly. Myatt grew up in Bridgewater and attended Thayer starting in 9th grade. He played football and basketball and excelled in math and science classes. “I had a great time at Thayer, I really enjoyed it,” he says. He fondly recalls science teachers Bill Elliott, Fernand LaChance, Marshall Litchfield, and Jack Foley, who helped him secure the summer job in Cambridge. “My Thayer teachers gave me a solid foundation,” he says. “Bill Elliott was my Chemistry teacher, he was terrific—he had the crazy Einstein hair,” recalls Myatt. “Mr. LaChance was an old school kind of teacher and