Born in Sydney in 1987, David Llewellyn grew up near Forster, New South Wales and studied at the University of Sydney before coming to Oxford to read for a DPhil in medical sciences. After his doctorate, he stayed on in Oxford and co-founded the start-up DJS Antibodies, which went on to develop antibodies which may prove to be vital drugs for the treatment of life threatening chronic diseases. The company was sold in 2022 and Llewellyn continues to live in Oxford, exploring projects around biology and sustainability. He is also a member of the board of trustees of Beyond Equality, which was set up with a group of fellow Rhodes Scholars to engage men and boys in transformative conversations to create safer and more inclusive communities. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 4 November 2024.
David Llewellyn
New South Wales & St John's 2010
‘A below-the-grass-eye view’
My family moved from Sydney to a little place just outside the town of Forster when I was very young. It was a magical place to grow up. My sister and I spent all our time out in the bush making cubby houses or at the beach, surfing, just exploring the world with very few limitations.
I went to the one little state primary school nearby and that was definitely where my first interest in science was fostered. We had this teacher who was always getting us to build and test things. We made plastic boats out of milk cartons with little propellers on them and raced them in a neighbours pool, or built windmills which pumped water. I was also very lucky that my parents were biologists. They worked doing ecological surveys and, from five years old, I’d pull on my wellies and traipse after them through swamps, catching frogs and snakes and birds. It was phenomenal, a below-the-grass-eye view.
On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship
At high school, by the final year, I wasn’t really enjoying biology, but I think I kept on with it at university because my parents had shown me how much fun it could be. However, given I wasn’t sure, at the University of Sydney, I did a broad science degree with a bit of everything. I loved asking questions, and I always enjoyed different bits of science, but other than that I didn’t have a plan. As my degree was coming to an end I started to think that a grad course would be interesting and I was keen to look at overseas opportunities which is when the Rhodes came up as an option. It wasn’t until I was putting the application together that I learned that that I had had a grandfather and a cousin who had been Rhodes Scholars.
When it came time for the Rhodes interviews, I remember going to the New South Wales governor’s house in Sydney where they were held. I was in the suit I’d bought from a charity shop and feeling pretty nervous, but luckily I got chatting to the security guard outside who was incredibly friendly and really took some of the edge off. After that, the interviews were actually really enjoyable. When they announced that I had won the Scholarship, I was thrilled, but it was also bittersweet, because I’d got to know some of the other finalists over that few days and they were all amazing people.
‘A mind-opening and eye-opening experience’
I arrived in Oxford via a backpacking trip through Europe. I remember getting the bus from London and thinking every church spire I saw must be Oxford. Then the bus drove over Magdalen bridge and I thought, ‘Oh, wow. Okay, this is pretty cool.’ I lived in my college, St John’s, and that was wonderful, but the most important part of my community was the other Rhodes Scholars. Rhodes House was this big open space for us to come and meet. The Warden, Don Markwell (Queensland & Trinity 1981) made it really welcoming and really helped everyone get to know each other. If he saw you talking to someone you knew, he would come and say, ‘No, you’ve got to meet this person.’ By the end, I felt like I knew every single person in my year and most of those in the years on either side of me too.
Every week or so, there would be a talk at Rhodes House, sometimes from Rhodes Alumni but also from just really interesting people in the community, and you would be able to hear people speaking on areas you didn’t know anything about. It was just such a mind-opening and eye-opening experience. I was doing my PhD in medical science, and I learned a bunch of very niche stuff about that, but the lessons I learned from those talks and the conversations after them probably shaped how I think more than any of the formal academic work I did in Oxford.
‘Our combination of approaches was actually the strength of the whole thing’
I’m one of those people who stayed on in Oxford. I was doing my PhD in a group working on malaria vaccines, which was super interesting, however one of the most influential things was meeting another PhD student, Joe Illingworth, in my first week there. We would share ideas, chat and help each other out. Towards the end of our PhDs, we were both applying for postdoc positions and we sort of said, just casually, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool, one day, to start a company?’ We didn’t have any ideas at that point, but not long later, when an email dropped into my inbox about a biotech business plan competition, we decided to enter. We came up with this pretty hare-brained idea about making antibodies to these proteins that are really important in lots of disease but that people have really struggled to make antibodies against. We didn’t win the competition, but in the pub afterwards, Joe got chatting to this guy at the bar. Three weeks, later, the guy got in touch. It turned out that he worked for Johnson & Johnson, and they offered to fund us to test our idea. That was where it all started.
I was working out of my bedroom at first, trying to sketch out the one experiment that we could do with this money. Eventually we upgraded to a lab space that was only big enough for one of us to use at a time, so, we had to work in shifts. We were learning all the time, and we had no idea about how biotech investment worked, but trial by fire and learning on the ground was a great way to do it. Joe and I shared a keen interest in science, but we almost exclusively disagreed on how to go about it. That never became antagonistic. Instead, our combination of approaches was actually the strength of the whole thing and became a way to get a better solution to every problem. Our experiments didn’t work at first, but finally, we got it to work perfectly. We got antibodies to all ten targets we had tried. Targets which no one had ever succeeded against before. On that basis, we were able to start securing further investment. It’s amazing to look back at how lucky we were with all of this while starting DJS Antibodies in 2015. That got us on the journey of growing the business, making our first hire in 2017, and eventually selling the company in 2022. I’m enormously proud of the science we did, but also the team we built and the structures which ensured their fair treatment. We insisted on establishing policies which were transparent about progression and pay, and where all the team got a share in the company when it was sold, even though we had lots of advice telling us we couldn’t do that.
I’ve been lucky to be able to take the past year or so to rest and recoup and to ask myself what I want to do next. I’ve found my mind wandering back to biodiversity and sustainability, and in how we can drive sustainability forward in a way that utilises established incentive structures. The opportunity to do something in that space would be pretty awesome. I’m also keeping on with my work on another project, Beyond Equality, which is led by Dan Guinness (Australia-at-Large & Keble 2008). It started off mainly with sports teams, getting them to have conversations about defining their own cultures and to think about positive masculinity. Now we offer programmes everywhere from schools and universities to corporate spaces with the aim of engaging all men in rethinking what ‘being a man’ means for them and others, in order to prevent gender-based violence and create communities that are safe for everyone.
‘Be true to yourself’
I think the Rhodes Scholarship is an amazing opportunity for people to come and explore themselves, their own ideas and other people’s ideas, and that is the great richness of it. The thing the Rhodes can do that I haven’t seen any other programme do is offer a physical space for bringing people together to talk, mix and learn. That is really, I believe, the power of the Scholarship and something that is incredibly special.
For people who are thinking about applying to the Rhodes, I’d say it’s really about being yourself. You are your best advocate. I was a bit worried before I came to Oxford that this would be a bunch of extremely ambitious people who just knew what they had to do to game the system, but when I got here, I was blown away by how much that was not true. Yes, Rhodes Scholars are amazingly impressive, but everyone that I met was just really genuine. They were themselves, they were impressive in their own way, but they weren’t pretending to be someone they weren’t. So, be true to yourself. It’s a good strategy, and hopefully one that brings you happiness and fulfilment.