We Are Cortex | Justin Raymundo

When you start your career in the shadow of a Nobel Peace Prize winner, you’re bound to absorb a few profound life lessons. And Justin Raymundo definitely carries some of those core lessons into their position as vice president of innovation ecosystem-building for BioSTL.

In those early career days, Raymundo, a St. Louis native, led Monsanto’s Beachell-Borlaug International Scholars Program, named for two pioneering plant breeders and researchers in rice and wheat — including 1970 Nobel laureate Norman E. Borlaug.

Raymundo never forgot Borlaug’s philosophy, that global food security and global peace start with cultivating talent — plant breeders, scientists, the people who do the work. That, Borlaug said, was the way to drive great societal change.

“That's always stuck with me,” Raymundo said. “If we really want to see a change in an ecosystem, a change in the economy, a change in an industry, it starts with really investing in the people.”

In their current role, Raymundo relishes the opportunity to do just that. They break down the needs of an organization into its elemental pieces, then seek ways to engage and train individuals in work those individuals may never have dreamed they could do.

“Because when you can break it down that way, you can make that much more accessible,” Raymundo said. “You can train people that maybe thought, ‘You know, my career right now, I work in hospitality. I work in food service. I understand how to make a salad.’ But if you can make a salad, you can really follow the same instructions to make a drug or to document a new process.”

In their role at BioSTL, Raymundo works with more than 50 partners across industry, academia, philanthropy and government to foster the innovation ecosystem in St. Louis. Much of that work is centered in the Cortex Innovation District, which has come far since it started in 2002 in what Raymundo described as “the depopulated, continually declining urban core in St. Louis.”

Raymundo raves about the opportunity Cortex has created for St. Louis to attract billions of dollars of economic development and thousands of jobs. They see their job at BioSTL focused on making the opportunities, the jobs, accessible to people who might not have seen themselves as part of the world of plant sciences or biotechnology.

“It takes an ecosystem. Cortex isn’t just a bunch of buildings,” Raymundo said. “Cortex isn't just one person. Cortex is a community. It takes investors, it takes capital, it takes physical place, it takes policy, it takes community. And you cannot do that in a silo.”