Speaker Biographies

VP of Business Development

Can (“John”) Akgun, PhD, is the VP of Business Development of Flywheel. He brings over 15 years of experience in medical imaging spanning academic research, product development, and commercialization. Can holds a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Minnesota.

Assistant Professor

Mohammed AlQuraishi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems Biology and a member of Columbia’s Program for Mathematical Genomics, where he works at the intersection of machine learning, biophysics, and systems biology. The AlQuraishi Lab focuses on two biological perspectives: the molecular and systems levels. On the molecular side, the lab develops machine learning models for predicting protein structure and function, protein-ligand interactions, and learned representations of proteins and proteomes. On the systems side, the lab applies these models in a proteome-wide fashion to investigate the organization, combinatorial logic, and computational paradigms of signal transduction networks, how these networks vary in human populations, and how they are dysregulated in human diseases, particularly cancer. Dr. AlQuraishi holds undergraduate degrees in Biology, Computer Science, and Mathematics. He earned an M.S. in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Genetics from Stanford University. He subsequently joined the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School as a Departmental Fellow and a Fellow in Systems Pharmacology, where he developed the first end-to-end differentiable model for learning protein structure from data. Prior to starting his academic career, Dr. AlQuraishi spent three years founding two startups in the mobile computing space.

Dr.

Computer Scientist with extended experience in developing bioinformatics tools for data handling, processing, and analysis. Working In Pharma, providing solutions on Lab Automation, and Data Engineering and FAIRification.

CoFounder & Managing Partner

Navid Alipour is Co-founder and Managing Partner at Analytics Ventures, a Venture Formation Fund focused on starting new ventures with artificial intelligence and machine learning at their core. Prior to co-founding Analytics Ventures, he founded La Costa Investment Group, making investments in startups nationally. Through the founding of multiple Artificial Intelligence (AI) based companies like CureMetrix and CureMatch, Navid is a long-time entrepreneur in the AI space, and looks to address the need between angel investors and big venture capital funds. He has a passion for finding scientists and academics who are domain experts in their respective fields, and helping them turn their research into viable businesses, helping build companies from inception. Navid serves on the Board of Tech San Diego helping build the thriving eco-system in San Diego. He is also on the Board of CureMetrix, AV Lab, Kazuhm, Dynam.AI & AlphaTrAI. Navid is a sought-after panelist, judge, speaker and moderator on the topics of venture capital and entrepreneurship at forums such as UCSD, USD, SDSU, CyberHive, HeraHub, MIT Forum, RSNA, U.S. News STEM Conference, and CONNECT. Navid holds a BA from UC San Diego, and a JD/MBA from the University of San Diego.

Executive Director

Rachana Ananthakrishnan is Executive Director & Head of Products at the University of Chicago, and has a Joint Staff Appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. In her role at the university, she leads Globus (www.globus.org) department, which delivers research data management services and platform to national and international research institutions. She also serves on the WestGrid Board of Directors, and is a member of the InCommon Community Assurance and Trust Board. Her work is focused on research and education field, and she has worked on security and data management solutions on various projects including Earth System Grid (ESG), Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) and Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). Prior to that she worked on the Globus Toolkit engineering team and customer engagement teams, leading the efforts in web services and security technologies. Rachana received her MS in Computer Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Advanced Advisory Consultant

Peter Smedegaard Andersen is an experienced Advisory Consultant, who has focused on data modelling and leveraging natural language processing to improve data transformations impact on business processes in the Life Science and Pharmaceutical industries. He comes with extensive knowledge of and practical experience working with regulated data models and reference architectures.

CEO & Co Founder

Ardy Arianpour is CEO & Co-Founder of Seqster, an award-winning SaaS healthcare platform that enables organizations to drive efficient healthcare via comprehensive medical records (EHR), individual genomic profiles (DNA), and personal health device data. For the first time, users create their own matched, longitudinal health data profile across all of their US-based healthcare data sources through person-centric interoperability. Ardy is a visionary health tech executive and serial entrepreneur in biotech and digital health. Prior to starting Seqster, Ardy launched several clinical and consumer-based genetic tests as CCO of Pathway Genomics, and SVP of Ambry Genetics that sold to Konica for $1B in 2017. As a key player in the 2013 landmark SCOTUS decision scrapping gene patents, Ardy played an instrumental role in expanding genetic testing access with the launch of BRCA testing benefiting patients and family members across the country. Ardy received his BS in Biological Sciences from UC Irvine and an MBA from Marshall Goldsmith School of Management. 2019 Recipient of Top 40 Healthcare Transformer and SDBJ 40 under 40.

Dir HEAL Initiative

Rebecca G. Baker, PhD, is the director of the Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative, in the Office of the Director, NIH. Dr. Baker leads coordination of NIH HEAL Initiative programmatic activities and manages the Office of the NIH HEAL Initiative, and NIH HEAL Initiative governance committees. Dr. Baker helped develop the NIH HEAL Initiative, and provides expert advice to and represents the NIH Director on initiative-related activities, including interagency efforts in pain and opioid research and policy. Prior to holding this position, Dr. Baker was special assistant to the NIH Director working directly with NIH leadership to analyze complex biomedical research policy issues and assist in the development of new science and policy initiatives. Before that, she worked in the NIH Office of Science, Outreach, and Policy, where she worked on legislative, communications, and policy issues. She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her bachelor's degree from Cornell University.

Global Head of RWE

Dorothee B. Bartels is Global Head of Real World Evidence at UCB after having been Clinical and Real World Data Strategy Lead at X, Moonshot (Alphabet). Before, she used to be Corporate Head of Global Epidemiology at Boehringer Ingelheim (BI) for 10 years and for nearly two years Chief Digital Science Officer in the digital incubator of BI. She holds a Professorship of Epidemiology and Public Health at Hannover Medical School and is Adjunct Professor at McGill University, where she lectures in the course of Advanced Pharmacoepidemiology. Her research is focused on secondary data use and data linkages, on innovative real world data analysis approaches, new strategies for faster drug developments and approvals, and digital epidemiology, in particular combining AI/ML and traditional epidemiological methods.

Dir

Dr. Bennett directs NCI’s Center for Research Strategy, a science-based office that since 2015 collaboratively develops recommendations for addressing scientific opportunities, monitors the direction and application of scientific knowledge and resources, and identifies research funding gaps. Prior to taking on this role, she served as the deputy scientific director of the Division of Intramural Research at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and before that was deputy director at NCI’s Center for Cancer Research. Dr. Bennett earned her PhD in oncology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison studying genetic susceptibility to cancer and, as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, performed some of the earliest work on BRCA1 and BRCA2 including the characterization and localization of BRCA1 to the long arm of Chromosome 17. Dr. Bennett has extensive practical experience in promoting collaboration and team-based approaches by bringing together research scientists with diverse backgrounds and expertise to solve complex scientific problems. She has supported efforts to increase diversity in the biomedical workforce, played a leadership role in launching and building the NIH Stadtman Tenure Track Investigator program, and developed a trans-NIH web presence for the NIH Intramural program. Dr. Bennett is the recipient of many awards, including NIH and Institute Director’s Awards, the NCI Women’s Scientist Advisors Achievement Award, and the NCI Exceptional Mentor Award.

Dir Research & Early Clinical Dev BT

Jay Bergeron is Director, Digital Client Partner for Early Clinic Development and Integrative Biology at Pfizer. He served as the Scientific Coordinator of IMI-eTRIKS, a $30M Public Private Partnership for building open source translation research information management systems.

CEO

Ari received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology with a focus on Neuroscience in 2005 from the University of Texas at Austin (UT). His graduate work focused on studying the effects of genetics on addictive behaviors such as alcoholism. His postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging focused on improving our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases of aging (specifically, Parkinson’s and Alzheimers Disease) by utilizing a combination of laboratory science and animal models, as well as bioinformatics and computational biology. Ari is also an expert in Scientific Computing specializing in high performance computing (HPC), high-performance networks, data centers, storage, cloud, general IT infrastructure, and bioinformatics and data analytics. He has been designing, building, and operating scientific computing environments for 27 years and strives to advocate for science and empower researchers to make discoveries from their complex datasets. His ultimate goal is to help create a dynamic enough abstraction of flexible infrastructure from research end-users to enable anyone to analyze and gain knowledge from very complex datasets.

Asst Prof

Devipsita Bhattacharya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Security and Digital Forensics at the University at Albany, SUNY. She received her PhD in Management Information Systems (MIS) from the University of Arizona. Her research interests include online news propagation, disinformation, large scale network analysis, information security and performance analysis of distributed computing systems.

Customer Solutions Engineer

No bio available.

IT Specialist

Brian Bissett holds graduate degrees in Business (MBA) and Electrical Engineering (MSEE) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and holds an expert level certification in Program Management (FAC-P/PM Level III) from the federal government. He is the author of three textbooks, Practical Pharmaceutical Laboratory Automation (May 2003 CRC Press), and Automated Data Analysis with Excel 2nd Edition (August 2020 Chapman & Hall), as well as numerous technical articles, and co-author of several book chapters. Prior to his work with the Federal Government, he worked at Pfizer Global Research and Development in Groton, CT for 16 years reporting to Dr. Christopher Lipinski (author of the “Rule of 5”) and Dr. Franco Lombardo, where he automated the determination of drug discovery parameters across five worldwide research sites.

Managing Partner

Jeff is the founder and manager of Bioinformatics.org. He has an M.Sc. in Chemistry (biochemistry concentration) from Boston College and a B.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Managing Dir & Chief Biomedical Data Scientist

Vivien Bonazzi, PhD, recently joined its government and public services practice as both a managing director and its chief biomedical data scientist for Deloitte Consulting LLP. In this position, Bonazzi will focus on helping federal agencies utilize data science methods, technologies and cyberinfrastructures to better understand and utilize biomedical data. Previously, Bonazzi was a senior advisor in the Office of the Director at National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as co-founder and leader of the NIH Data Commons. In her role, she focused on creating connections across all NIH institutes, other government agencies, nonprofit, and commercial organizations in the U.S. and internationally to create new ways to share, access, analyze, find and provide attribution to biomedical data and tools regardless of geographical location, size, or complexity of Prior to NIH, Bonazzi held several roles in the private and nonprofit sector, including Bonazzi holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Canberra, Australia, and a master's degree and doctorate in biomedicine and computational biology from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Research Assoc

Dani is a Digital Health and Wellness Research Associate at Lux Research with deep expertise in digital therapeutics, digital biomarkers, and FemTech. Prior to her time at Lux, Dani worked as an Environmental Group Manager for a water treatment company, surveying and developing treatment plans for waterborne pathogen outbreaks in healthcare facilities across the United States. Dani graduated with a Masters Degree in biology from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Director, Technical Sales US

Adam manages technical sales for SciBite's growing US operation, helping to bridge the gap between the scientific and sales arms of SciBite and providing end-to-end support for US-based customer engagements. Adam also oversees scientific project management for proof of value projects and ongoing licenses. Adam holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from Harvard where he studied computational drug repositioning methods and reproducibility.

Chemist

Larry Callahan is a chemist at the FDA, responsible for the development of ISO data standards and the Global Substance Registration System (GSRS). He collaborates with the NIH and other leading researchers in industry and academia on standards and ontologies for regulatory submissions.

CEO

Tanya Cashorali is the founding partner of TCB Analytics, a Boston-based data consultancy. Prior to launching TCB Analytics, she worked as a data scientist at Biogen. Tanya started her career in bioinformatics and has applied her experience to other data-rich verticals such as telecom, finance, and sports. She brings over 10 years of experience using R in data scientist roles as well as managing and training data analysts, and she’s helped grow a handful of Boston startups.

Asst Member

Dr. Xiang Chen is an assistant member in the Dept. of Computational Biology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN, USA. He is also the member of AACR and ASCB. He received his BS degree in Biochemistry from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, MS degree in Biochemistry in Biochemistry from National University of Singapore in Singapore and Ph.D. degree in Biological Sciences and MS degree in Computational and Statistical Learning from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. He has completed his postdoctoral training in Biostatistics at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, CT, USA. Dr. Chen’s main research interest is in development and application of novel machine learning based analytical methods for high-throughput, multi-platform omics data in delineating genetic alterations and epigenetic deregulations in pediatric solid tumors, especially those leading to tumor relapse and metastasis. He is also interested in developing experimental models to understand functional roles in tumorigenesis for candidate cancer driver genes emerged after critical evaluation of omics data. Dr. Chen has over 20 years of in-depth research experience in molecular/cellular biology, computer science and statistical genetics and has made major contributions to understanding the genetic and epigenetic landscape of pediatric cancers in both computational method development and data analysis. He has published more than 70 research papers in top-tier, high-impact biomedical journals, including Nature, Nature Methods, Nature Genetics, Cancer Cell, Neuron, Cell Report, Genome Biology, Nucleic Acids Research and Nature Communications. He has also authored several invited review articles and a book chapter. He is a regular reviewer for scientific journals including Nature, Nature Methods, Nature Communication, Genome Biology, Nucleic Acids Research, Plos Computational Biology, Plos Genetics, Bioinformatics and others.

Sr Investment Mgr

Sean is Venture Investor at Philips, a CVC portfolio of promising early-stage companies including Babyscripts, Xealth, Orbita to drive the Philips Health Tech vision. He is interested in early-stage investment opportunities in digital health, medical devices, and imaging-based diagnostics. Prior to Ventures, he drove key strategic decisions for the Philips leadership on topics including Wearables, Health Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Data Interoperability. Previously, Sean held positions at the Boston Consulting Group, the U.S. FDA, and NASA. In addition to his investment boards, Sean also proudly serves on the Board of The Professional Center for Child Development and Board of Advisors at the Johns Hopkins University. Sean holds a PhD in Engineering from the University of Cambridge, where he developed expertise in medical device design, simulations, and optimization algorithms.

Principal Program Manager

Dr Jer-Ming Chia is a Program Manager in the Azure HPC team at Microsoft. Trained as a computational biologist, Jer-Ming holds a PhD in Human Genetics, and works on delivering high performance computing solutions to customers with complex workloads.

Visualization Group Leader

Amit Chourasia is SeedMeLab Director and Leader of the Visualization group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego. His work is focused on leading the research, development, and application of software tools and techniques for visualization. The key area of his work is to develop methods to represent data in a visual form that is clear, succinct, and accurate (a challenging, yet very exciting endeavor). He has had an opportunity to work with research groups in diverse science and engineering disciplines and contends that with the help of visualization, domain and data scientists can visually validate and investigate their data, explore and gain significant insights, as well as share results within and outside their community. Computing is ephemeral, but data wills to persist: Result and data sharing are also at the forefront of his interests and, to this end, he has developed a modular web-based cloud infrastructure to enable this important and, at times, critical gap in scientific process via the SeedMeLab project.

VP R&D Business Technology

Strategic, visionary leader with an established track record of building and leading multidisciplinary, global Informatics and IS/IT teams, driving change and simplification and delivering value through innovation. Over 20 years’ experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry working in both Discovery and Development leading projects, managing complex portfolios, driving change programs, identifying opportunities for strategic initiatives, and translating scientific and medical questions into innovative solutions. Areas of particular strength include: strategy development and implementation, translational medicine, biomedical and health informatics, evidence-based decision makings, data and decision science, and "Big Data" exploitation.

Asst Prof

Michael Cianfrocco grew up in a small town in upstate New York and went to undergraduate at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, where he majored in biochemistry. After that, he did his Ph.D. in biophysics in the lab of Eva Nogales at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on single particle cryo-electron microscopy of human transcription factor complexes. Following his graduate work, he pursued postdoctoral research jointly in the labs of Samara Reck-Peterson and Andres Leschziner at University of California, San Diego. During this time, he helped pioneer the use of cloud computing tools for cryo-EM while also discover a novel mode of dynein regulation by its binding partner Lis1. In his own lab, Michael is passionate about exploring cell biology through the lens of microtubule motor protein transport, and how he can use computational tools to streamline and enhance the power of cryo-EM to determine new and exciting structures.

Technical Architect

Mike Conway is a developer and architect with long experience in the field of cyberinfrastructure for data-driven research. Mike actually began his career in information technology, programming on an IBM Mainframe computer, and carried on through client-server architectures through the early web, multi-tier application server technology, and finally microservices architecture. Over time Mike moved into the area of research computing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, moving eventually to the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). At RENCI Mike was involved in multiple large-scale visualization environments supporting scientific research and digital humanities, along with virtual worlds and serious gaming. From RENCI Mike moved to the Data Intensive Cyber Environments Center (DICE Center), funded by the US National Archives (NARA) to develop trusted digital preservation environments. Mike worked on policy-based data management and implementations of the OAIS (Open Archival Information Systems) model, including multiple papers and presentations at NARA, the Society of American Archivists, and other forums. Mike then became involved with the National Science Foundation’s DataNet initiative, working as a developer and architect on the DataNet Federation Consortium, a multi-institutional effort to develop national-scale cyberinfrastructure for data-driven research. This effort included collaborations to integrate CyVerse, Dataverse, and several other platforms. Mike was a lead developer on the iRODS (Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) platform that powered the core of DFC, developing several key libraries, protocol implementations, and open API still in widespread use today. Currently Mike is with the Office of Data Science (ODS) at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health. ODS is focused on FAIR data and tools for data-driven analysis, open science standards, standard workflow languages, semantic metadata, data governance, and other topics.

Asst Prof

Seth Cooper is an Assistant Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. Prior to joining Northeastern, Seth was the Creative Director of the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington. He previously worked in industry at Square Enix, Electronic Arts, and Pixar Animation Studios. A pioneer of the field of scientific discovery games, Seth’s work has shown that video game players are able to outperform purely computational methods for certain types of structural biochemistry problems, effectively codify their strategies, and integrate with the lab to help design real synthetic proteins. In addition to developing video games to solve problems and involve the public in science, he’s published research in character animation and crowd simulation.

Head

Tim is responsible for the provision of all the IT services which specifically deliver scientific data and computation. This includes private and hybrid cloud services, high performance computing (HPC) clusters, high performance filesystems for data analysis; training in the use of HPC and cloud resources; data management systems for scientific data; research and development of IT technologies for solving tomorrow's scientific problems; and, IT support for core business IT systems, included databases, financial and HR systems. The changing focus of the Institute has led to us concentrating on a few areas: • Scientific reproducibility. Creating IT and informatics systems which enable the portability of scientific analysis between collaborating institutions, and between on premise and other cloud environments, according to scientific need. • IT Research and Development. Looking further down the road to identify technologies and approaches which could transform today's impossible scientific questions into something tractable and affordable. • Pre-configured systems. To free the team's time to assist scientists with their computational challenges we are moving, where possible, to pre-configured hardware systems rather than building them by hand. An example area where we are following this approach is in Lustre parallel filesystems. This becomes as easier as these technologies gradually become more mature and mainstream. • Flexible secure architecture. Science changes all the time, and the approaches to it change all the time. IT technology generally lasts 5 years, which means we must deploy solutions which have the maximum flexibility to adapt to unknown requirements years from now. We are actively promoting and using private cloud infrastructure with software-defined storage and networking to enable scientists to deploy experimental working environments rapidly and without adversely impacting their colleagues. • Collaboration. We are actively involved in the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, Health Data Research UK, the Pan-cancer project, and other projects building infrastructures for the sharing and collaborative analysis of large volumes of data. During his previous role creating and leading the Infrastructure Management Team, he focused on a number of areas: • Server virtualisation and consolidation. The previous strategy of buying traditional highly available server pairs for providing services was replaced with a virtualisation strategy, going from zero to more than 1000 virtual machines in the course of a couple of years. Virtualisation has now expanded from this established base towards use in computational and data sharing areas. • Automation. Configuration management of our Linux and Windows estates to minimise the effort in administering thousands of machines. In the Informatics Support Group, he was an enthusiastic early adopter of blade server technology, deploying our first blade cluster in 2002, squeezing a then-un-precedented 768 cores into just two 19" racks. He also took part in our early work with parallel filesystems, deploying IBM GPFS for the storing of large shared datasets. Incyte Genomics (formerly Hexagen) Here I gained experience on being the customer of scientific IT services, and the skills and techniques needed to run large scale analysis efficiently on limited IT resources. I developed and ran the company's SNP-calling pipeline, and visualised that data for the senior company scientists. I was also involved in customer engagement, discussing data needs of customers, and made contributions to the perl framework used by the LifeSeq product to generate and deliver the data to customers. PhD: Checkpoint Controls in the Latter Half of the Mammalian Cell Cycle CRC DNA Repair Research Group Dept of Zoology, University of Cambridge My research was focused on the contrasting behaviour of human and rodent transformed cell lines with respect to their G2/M phase checkpoints following perturbation of their nucleotide pool levels during S-phase.

Sr Dir

Bioinformaticist-gone-bad Chris Dagdigian has spent much of the last 15 years designing, building, fixing and improving research-focused HPC and IT systems for use in demanding production computing environments. He occasionally is known to blog, tweet and speak about industry trends and best practices. Formerly of Blackstone Computing and Genetics Institute, Dagdigian specializes in research computing and infrastructure technology issues in the life sciences. A supporter of free software and open standards for life science research, he is a founding member of the Bioperl Project, co-founder of the Bioclusters mailing list and serves on the board of directors as Treasurer of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation.

Managing Director and Partner

Avantika leads venture investments in early and late stage technology and healthcare companies for Plum Alley Investments. Avantika’s experience spans both private and public companies in these sectors. Her professional experience spans over 25 years, as both an executive and a founder, with responsibility in management, product development, business development, operations and M&A across start-ups and Fortune 1000 companies. Prior, she was the Chief Revenue Officer at Jopwell, an Andreessen-Horowitz backed company. Prior to that, she served as the Chief Growth Officer at Zomato/UrbanSpoon, a Temasek, Sequoia and ANT Financial funded company which grew to $1.3+ Billion in valuation during her leadership. She also founded a venture-backed, international SaaS marketplace. Avantika was the first commercial employee at Eyetech Pharmaceuticals, where she worked closely with the founders to grow the company from clinical trial to IPO (NASDAQ) at a $735 Million market capitalization in 3 years. Avantika’s earlier career includes corporate finance at Newell Rubbermaid, brand management at Procter &Gamble, and strategy and M&A at Bristol Myers Squibb for both the consumer and biotech divisions. Avantika attained her undergraduate degree, as a scholarship student, in Economics, Political Science and International Relations. She was awarded the Omicron Delta Epsilon Award, by the American Economic Association. She has worked in countries including the U.S., U.K., India, and Canada. She is a TedX speaker and is on the Board of Directors at TiE, New York.

Exec VP & Exec Editor

Kevin has almost three decades’ experience in science publishing as an editor, journalist, author and publisher. He is the founding editor of Nature Genetics and Bio-IT World magazine and also served as Editor-in-Chief of Cell Press and publisher of Chemical & Engineering News. Kevin is the author of four popular science books including Cracking the Genome, The $1,000 Genome, and an updated version of DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution with James D. Watson and Andrew Berry. In 2017, Kevin won a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in science writing. That same year, he joined Mary Ann Liebert Inc. to spearhead the launch of The CRISPR Journal and join the GEN editorial team. Kevin holds a degree in Biochemistry from Oxford University and a PhD in Human Genetics from St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, London. He carried out postdocs at MIT and Harvard Medical School before joining the editorial staff at Nature. He still clings to a British accent.

SVP Informatics and Data

Mark has a background in molecular genetics and bioinformatics and has over 15 years of experience working on biomedical data representation, data analysis and application development. In 2001, he joined the London based biotechnology company Inpharmatica, where he was initially working on mining the output of the Human Genome Projects and eventually moved on to building Chemogenomics systems used by pharmaceutical companies, such as Bayer. Mark moved to the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) as one of the founding members and technical lead for the ChEMBL resource - the largest open-source SAR database. Mark was also responsible for the successful transition of the SureChEMBL chemical patent system from Digital Science to the EMBL-EBI.

Director of Engineering

Sam is both an accomplished scientific developer in molecular modeling with a specialty in Rosetta, as well as an experienced software engineer in cloud infrastructure for high throughput systems. Sam developed a version of the RosettaLigand small molecule docking algorithm suitable for high throughput screening while a graduate student in the Meiler lab at Vanderbilt. In addition to his scientific research, Sam was also a core contributor to RosettaCommons infrastructure. Prior to Cyrus, Sam worked at CloudLock (later acquired by Cisco), where he was a Senior software engineer who designed and implemented a high throughput system system for analyzing large numbers of documents stored in the cloud. Sam completed a B.S. in Bioinformatics at Rensselaer Polytechnic University and a Ph.D. in chemical and physical biology at Vanderbilt University.

Deputy Head, Diagnostics

Tom received his PhD from the University of California San Francisco. He started his career in bioinformatics and data science, eventually leading teams in genomics, and molecular sciences. He then transitioned to project management, project leadership and portfolio management, ultimately taking on the role of chief of staff for the neuroscience research area. Tom has been with Alexion for four years, and is now the Deputy Head of Diagnostics. A recent alliance with the Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine and CliniThink led to a record-setting patient diagnostic effort.

Biomedical Semantics Solutions Lead

Dr. Helena Deus is a Biomedical Semantics Solutions Lead with with ZA Associates. Previously, she was a Technology Research Director for Elsevier Labs. She received her PhD in Bioinformatics from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where she focused on linked data and semantic web applications for healthcare and life sciences with an emphasis on cancer research. Helena is a data scientist passionate about applying data integration and machine learning techniques to the generation of insights affecting clinical practice and biomedical discovery. Before she joined Elsevier in 2017, Helena's roles included directing a knowledge engineering and data science team at Foundation Medicine and leading projects and strategy for Health Care and Life Sciences at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland at Galway (DERI/NUIG). Helena has published over 30 peer reviewed papers. She was one of the winners of the Big Data Track in the 2013 Semantic Web Challenge and of the Linked Data Cup with her work on linking data from The Cancer Genome Atlas.

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Ctr

Sr HPC Systems Engineer

John Dey has more than 15 years' experience supporting bioinformatics computing for big pharma and non-profit organizations. He has built tools to help manage and monitor HPC clusters; developed Pwalk for collection of file metadata at petabyte scale; and written ProcMon to track user software usage on Linux clusters and DB4Sci, a SAAS application for scientists to provision databases. He currently maintains the scientific software inventory for the Fred Hutchinson Scientific Computing environment using EasyBuild for software building. John has contributed to the community by developing additional tools, such as EasyUpdate and EasyAnnotate, which allow users to extend the use of EasyBuild.

General Manager, Americas

No bio available.

Head of Data Science Consulting

Kevin leads the scientific and technical consulting team at Genestack. He has worked with leading pharma, agriscience, and FMCG companies on diverse bioinformatics projects, as a consultant, software engineer, and data scientist. Before Genestack, Kevin conducted bioinformatics research and was educated at Cambridge (MPhil, Computational Biology) and Oxford (B.A., Mathematics).

PostDoc Assoc

Jiarui Ding is a postdoctoral associate in the Aviv Regev lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Ding received a PhD in computer science from the University of British Columbia in 2016. His research focuses on developing statistical models and efficient algorithms to learn biologically interpretable latent structures in large-scale, high-dimensional single-cell genomics data, such as those from single-cell transcriptomics, single-cell epigenomics, and spatially resolved methods. He is interested in integrating these datasets generated by cutting-edge single-cell genomics technologies to provide a comprehensive view of biological systems, and understand how they change dynamically under disease perturbations (e.g., food allergy, cancer) and treatments.

Managing Director

No bio available.

Director of Digital Strategy

Ariel V. Dowling, PhD is a Director of Digital Strategy within the Data Sciences Institute at Takeda Pharmaceuticals. In this role, Ariel oversees the strategy, assessment, and deployment of digital devices in clinical studies and related activities across the organization. She advises clinical teams on the selection of digital devices, conducts due diligence on vendors, develops digital sensor implementation protocols and risk mitigation strategies, and assists with data analysis plans for device data. Prior to joining Takeda, she was a Senior Clinical Data Scientist at Biogen Inc where she oversaw the analysis of data from wearable sensors deployed in drug development clinical trials for Parkinson’s Disease. Prior to Biogen, Ariel was the algorithm team lead at MC10 Inc, where she oversaw the development and implementation of algorithms across the full product line and managed all aspects of algorithm testing that lead to a successful FDA submission. She has also worked as a senior research scientist at BioSensics LLC, where she designed algorithms to analyze digital device data from Huntington’s disease patients, stroke patients, and wheelchair users. Ariel holds an MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and a BE in Mechanical Engineering from Dartmouth College.

Vice President

Chris Dwan started out in artificial intelligence in the 90s, using neural nets to attempt to identify military vehicles with only occasional success. He moved to bioinformatics and research computing in 2000, building successively larger and more complex computing and data storage systems to support the needs of genomics research. Chris designed and built the IT infrastructure for the NY Genome Center, and served as the head of research computing and interim head of IT at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA. Today, Chris is Vice President for Production Bioinformatics at Sema4.

VP of Customer Solutions

As VP of Customer Solutions, Jeff Evernham is managing the company’s Consulting team in North America, composed of Sales Engineers, Solution Engineers, and Solution Architects. Evernham joined Sinequa from Knowledgent where he served as the practice lead for the company’s Analytics and Visualization practice. Evernham has also held executive leadership positions with North Highland Data and Analytics and Synygy. He holds a Master of Engineering degree from MIT.

CIO

In April 2016, Dr. Kjiersten Fagnan became the JGI’s Chief Informatics Officer. She responsible for developing and executing the strategic plan for computing and data analysis. Dr. Fagnan joined the JGI in 2012 after completing a petascale postdoctoral fellowship at the DOE National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and the Computational Research Division at Berkeley Lab. In 2014 Fagnan became the JGI-NERSC Engagement Lead and focused on adapting JGI data-intensive workloads to run on supercomputing hardware. She is also the group lead for NERSC’s Data Science Engagement group and leads efforts to build collaborations between NERSC and other DOE facilities.

Venture Affiliate Partner

Recognized as one of the top 100 global CDOs, a "Power-Lady" of the German economy, and a leading Health Tech Influencer, Jessica Federer is adept at translating digital developments into meaningful advancements for both business and society. Federer is a board member, advisor, and investor for technology and health companies, and a Venture Affiliate Partner at Boston Millennia Partners. Federer was the Chief Digital Officer at Bayer A.G., leading the global digital transformation for the life sciences leader across consumer health, pharmaceuticals, animal health, and agriculture. While at Bayer, she held positions in Global Regulatory Affairs, Market Access, Communications and Public Affairs. Federer served on the United Nations m-Powering Development Advisory Board for the Agency for Information and Communications Technology (ITU). Federer began her public health career as an analyst at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in the US Department of Health and Human Services. Federer earned a Bachelor of Science from the George Washington University, and a Master of Public Health from Yale. She and her husband live in New York City.

Prof & Assoc Chair

James K. Ferri is Professor and Associate Department Chair of Chemical and Life Science Engineering (CLSE) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, Virginia. James came to VCU CLSE, after sixteen years at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he was the James T. Marcus ’50 Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. At Lafayette, he served as the Department Head of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, the Robert Adenbaum ’49 Director of the IDEAL Center for Innovation, and the Dean of Curriculum and Resources. His teaching and research at Lafayette were recognized with the Jones Faculty lecture award and the Marquis Distinguished Teaching award. He has taught across the chemical engineering curriculum in more than (20) different courses and in a wide range of inter- and transdisciplinary courses focusing on the intersections of economic development, cultural heritage conservation, environmental science, and engineering. His research focuses on the stability of disperse systems, interfacial phenomena, additive manufacturing, and continuous process intensification. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the U.S. Department of Education, as well as through industrial partnerships. He has received awards from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Max Planck Society, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. He is an appointed member of a number of editorial and scientific advisory boards of academic and industrial enterprises. James has been a guest and visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany; the Consorzio per lo Sviluppo dei Sistemi a Grande Interfase and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florence, Florence, Italy; the Suzhou Institute for Biomedical Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, Suzhou, China; and the Future Industries Institute, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia. He received his BS and PhD both in Chemical Engineering from Johns Hopkins in 1995 and 2000.

Sr Biomedical Informatics Program Mgr

Dr. Ian Fore is a Senior Biomedical Informatics Program Manager at the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology with a focus on data integration in both basic and clinical science. Current contributions are in managing NIH and NCI interests in data discovery and in establishing Commons for research data. Dr Fore is an active participant in the Research Data Alliance and FORCE11. He previously led CBIIT’s programs in biorepository and pathology informatics. Previously Dr Fore worked on drug discovery informatics at Wyeth Research in both the UK and USA, and at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D including developing global databases for research data. He was a product manager at Celera Genomics responsible for programmers interfaces. Prior to leaving the lab for an informatics career Ian gained his D.Phil. in Physiology at the University of Oxford and subsequently worked as a Research Pharmacologist.

Dir Bioinformatics

I am a human geneticist and a bioinformatician. My primary research interest is in understanding human genetic variations and how they are related to human diseases, including constitutional disorders like mitochondrial diseases and pediatric cancers. I have served as the head of bioinformatics at four different biomedical institutions. Currently, I am an Associate Professor of Clinical Pathology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and also the Director of Bioinformatics for the Center for Personalized Medicine at the Children's Hospital Los Angeles. At the Center, we develop and implement a variety of genomics-based tests for both pediatric cancers and for constitutional disorders, including the clinical exome-sequencing test and in particular the OncoKids test for pediatric cancers that we developed in collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific. I am responsible for the informatics solutions for all of our tests, which is highly relevant to the proposed research. At the Center, we have been using ClinVar/ClinGen resources and following strictly AMP/ACMG guidelines. I currently serve as a Multi-PI for a NICHD-funded U24 grant, aiming to curate disease-gene and gene-variant pathogenicity assertions in relation to Leigh and Leigh-like syndromes. I have had extensive involvement in many large research projects, having served as PI, Co-PI, or Co-Investigator on a number of university-, hospital-, or NIH-funded grants.

Founder & Managing Dir

Jyotin Gambhir (Founder/Consultant | SecureFLO, LLC| SECaaS – Security as a Service) GRC | SECaaS | DaaS | IDM | WAF | Security Architecture | DDOS | Compliance| Policy Development| | SaaS Introduction Mr. Gambhir has an extensive experience in Information Security, Risk, Privacy, and technology. He has worked with a wide array of clients in varying verticals for over eighteen (18) years. My most recent experience in the CISO role is building an IT Risk Management Program, focused on IT security for a large Healthcare organization network in the Northeast. Jyotin has experience in Financial Services, Retail, Research and Development, Biotechnology/Pharmaceutical, Healthcare, and the Government sectors. At Deloitte, he worked for six years in managing large projects at Fortune 100 companies. His teams deployed complex solutions for some of the largest financial services, state and federal government, and telecom industry clients. Jyotin has worked extensively with senior management and board of directors to develop strategies, vision, and direction for Information security programs. He has hands on experience started in security operations on mainframe environments, which encompassed the areas of privacy and security regulations, data protection, vulnerability management, operational security, and identity and access management. His current focus has on the data lifecycle within businesses and looking at each aspect of security from data creation to its destruction and disposal. Jyotin’ has developed frameworks to manage various aspects of the information security programs using NIST, ISO, HI-TRUST, CIS and other standards and models. This standards-based approach provides the ability to address multiple areas of compliance and regulations and provides for consistency. Prior to joining SecureFLO, LLC, Mr. Gambhir was with recognized consulting firms such as Deloitte, Tivoli/IBM, and BMC Software. During his current and past tenures, he has delivered successful initiatives across multiple industries such as Telecommunications, Energy, Healthcare/ Pharmaceuticals, Federal Government, Financial Services, Higher Education, Manufacturing, and Law Enforcement.

Head

As the Head of Health Informatics and Analytics (HIA), Victoria leads a team of experts in cross-functional collaborations on various initiatives within the competitive environment to optimize BI’s ability to meet current and emerging needs for Real World Evidence to help meet patients’ needs. The HIA team at Boehringer Ingelheim is a global team uniquely positioned to leverage the rich information from Real World Data using advanced analytics for Big Data through close collaborations with internal/external partners to foster efficient patient-oriented clinical development programs. Prior to leading the HIA team, Victoria worked as both a project and trial statistician providing expert advice in designing and analyzing data from various sources using appropriate analytic and statistical techniques. She earned her PhD in Biostatistics and Master’s in Biostatistics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and a Master’s and Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Boston University. She currently also teaches at Columbia University.

Data & Analytics Leader

Sivasankar has over 15 years of experience providing strategic consulting and technical leadership managing complex, high-performing environments in the Pharmaceutical Data Management space. He has worked in leadership roles providing business insight from conception to the deployment of commercial and clinical capabilities across different pharma customers

Data & Analytics Leader

Sivasankar has over 15 years of experience providing strategic consulting and technical leadership managing complex, high-performing environments in the Pharmaceutical Data Management space. He has worked in leadership roles providing business insight from conception to the deployment of commercial and clinical capabilities across different pharma customers

CEO

Timothy Gardner, Riffyn’s Founder and CEO, is a scientist who pioneered the field of synthetic biology. He was previously Vice President of R&D at Amyris, where he led the engineering of yeast strain and process technology for bio-manufacturing of renewable chemicals. Tim has been recognized for his pioneering work by Scientific American, the New Scientist, Nature, Technology Review, and the New York Times. He also serves as an advisor to the European Union Scientific Committees, Imperial College London, and the Boston University Engineering Alumni Advisory Board. He holds a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University.

CEO

Timothy Gardner, Riffyn’s Founder/CEO, is a scientist who pioneered the field of synthetic biology. He was previously Vice President of R&D at Amyris, where he led the engineering of yeast strain and process technology for bio-manufacturing of renewable chemicals. Tim has been recognized for his pioneering work by Scientific American, the New Scientist, Nature, Technology Review, and the New York Times. He also serves as an advisor to the European Union Scientific Committees, Imperial College London. 

Senior Data Scientist

Dr. Bhushan Garware works as a Senior Data Scientist at Persistent Systems leading an expert group for developing applications of AI-ML in Medical Imaging. Bhushan holds a Ph.D. with Gold Medal and has three patents on his name. His current area of research interest is Explainable-AI and Assistive Intelligence. 

Dir Data Analytics

Yan Ge is the Director of Data Analytics in the Data Sciences Institute at Takeda Pharmaceuticals. An industry veteran with over 20 years of experience in the Life Sciences and Healthcare, Yan has built up Analytics and Data Science capabilities at three different companies including Takeda. His focus in Takeda are research including discovery, translational and real-world plus applications of AI/ML to address R&D challenges. Before Takeda, Yan served in data analytics leadership roles in Ascensia Diabetes, Telcare, Deloitte Consulting, Medidata and IBM among others. Yan holds multiple graduate degrees in Statistics, Molecular Biosciences and MBA with his BSc in Applied Chemistry from Peking University, China.

Dir & Head of Imaging & AI

Leading a global team of passionate imaging scientists that deliver expertise across our cutting-edge multidimensional imaging modalities. Deriving project insight and impact by connecting safety and efficacy endpoints using advanced tissue histology, molecular imaging, in vivo PET, MRI and much more. All connected by an integrated image analysis, digitization and AI group. Passionate about collaboration and Honorary Professor at University of Glasgow.

Senior Director

Jess Gordon currently leads development of Data Solutions within Illumina’s Software Product Development group.  In her 13+ years at the company, she has managed software teams across the areas of instrument control software, primary & secondary analysis, and cloud platform software.  She has her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.

Prof & Dir G2P Research

Robert C. Green, MD, MPH is Professor of Medicine (Genetics) at Harvard Medical School and a physician-scientist who directs the G2P Research Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Broad Institute. Dr. Green is internationally recognized for research and policy efforts accelerating the implementation of genomic/precision medicine. Education and Training: Dr. Green graduated Amherst College and University of Virginia School of Medicine, with MPH in epidemiology from Emory University School of Public Health. His specialty training was at Harvard Medical School residencies and he is board certified in both neurology and medical genetics. Research Achievements: Dr. Green led the first experimental trials disclosing common complex disease risk (REVEAL Study) and the first prospective studies of direct-to-consumer genetic testing services (PGen Study). He currently leads and co-leads the first NIH funded randomized trials of sequencing in adults (MedSeq Project), newborns (BabySeq Project), and active duty US military personnel (MilSeq Project). He created the concept of aggregate penetrance of genomic variants in prospective population cohorts and is demonstrating the feasibility of genomic sequencing in healthy newborns, paving the way for humans to gain lifelong medical benefits from genomics. With continuous funding from NIH for 26 years he has published more than 300 papers with an h index of 90. In 2014, he won the Coriell Prize for Scientific Achievement in Personalized Medicine, and in 2019 was named by BIS Research as one of the 25 most influential voices in precision medicine. Since joining the Harvard Medical School faculty in 2011, the G2P research team has been awarded research support of over $49 million. Research Leadership: Dr. Green recently co-chaired the Steering Committee of both the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research program (18 NIH grants, over 300 investigators), and the Steering Committee of the Newborn Sequencing in Genomic Medicine and Public Health program (4 NIH grants, over 100 investigators) and is a co-investigator on the Boston site within the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network. He is Associate Director for Research of Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine and is leading the development of protocols for return of genomic results for the All of Us Research Program of the United States Precision Medicine Initiative and the Google/Verily Project Baseline. Policy Leadership: Dr. Green is accelerating the worldwide implementation of medical genomics. He was lead author on the influential recommendations for managing incidental findings in clinical sequencing from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics and contributing author on recommendations for managing incidental findings in research biobanks among participants and among family members of participants. He is a Board Member of the Council for Responsible Genetics and works within the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health and the All of Us Research Program on designing efforts to return research information, particularly genomic information, to research participants. Clinical Care: Dr. Green directs the Preventive Genomics Clinic at Brigham Health, providing evidence-based genomic and multi-omics evaluation to early adopters seeking to anticipate and prevent future illness. Entrepreneurship: Dr. Green co-founded Genome Medical, a telegenomics technology and services company providing genetics expertise to patients, providers, employers and healthcare systems. Presentations & Media: Scientific plenary presentations include American College of Medical Genetics/Genomics, Cold Spring Harbor, AGBT, European Society for Human Genetics and BioData World. Presentations to business include Forbes Healthcare Summit, World Science Festival, Future of Genomic Medicine, Exponential Medicine, Festival of Genomics, Aspen Ideas Festival, SXSW, Asian Healthcare Leadership and JP Morgan. His work and commentary have been featured on PBS television/radio, NBC Nightly News, CBS Sunday Morning, Today Show, CNBC, the Doctors, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, New Scientist, FastCompany, GenomeWeb, Gizmodo and Buzzfeed. Research findings from Genomes2People Research are highlighted in these podcasts, blog posts and videos. Research Support: Dr. Green’s research is supported by grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the Snite Foundation and the Franca Sozzani Fund for Preventive Genomics. Disclosures: Dr. Green receives compensation for advising the following companies: AIA, Applied Therapeutics, Humanity, Verily; and is co-founder of Genome Medical, Inc, a technology and services company providing genetics expertise to patients, providers, employers and care systems.

Director Data Science & Artificial Intelligence

Nigel Greene leads the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence department in Clinical Pharmacology and Safety Sciences at AstraZeneca and is interested in the application of artificial intelligence methods to understand of mechanisms of drug-induced toxicity and their translation to a clinical patient population. Previously Dr. Greene was a head of the Predictive Compound ADME and Safety group at AstraZeneca. Dr Greene also spent 14 years at Pfizer, Inc. where he started in Drug Safety R&D and later transitioned to the Compound Safety Prediction group in Medicinal Chemistry. In his early career, Dr. Greene worked for Lhasa Ltd. where he pioneered computational toxicology, and for Tripos, Inc. Nigel’s other activities outside of AstraZeneca have included being the Chair of the Board of Trustees for Lhasa Ltd. and he has served on multiple National Research Council committees sponsored by the US Environmental Protection Agency, US Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Greene received his BSc and PhD from the University of Leeds in the UK.

Associate Director for Data Science

Susan K. Gregurick, PhD, was appointed Associate Director for Data Science and Director of the Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on September 16, 2019. Under Dr. Gregurick’s leadership, the ODSS leads the implementation of the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science through scientific, technical, and operational collaboration with the institutes, centers, and offices that comprise NIH. Dr. Gregurick was instrumental in the creation of the ODSS in 2018 and served as a senior advisor to the office until being named to her current position. Dr. Gregurick was previously the Division Director for Biophysics, Biomedical Technology, and Computational Biosciences at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). Her mission in this role was to advance research in computational biology, biophysics and data sciences, mathematical and biostatistical methods, and biomedical technologies in support of the NIGMS mission to increase our understanding of life processes. In this role Dr. Gregurick led the institutes effort to reimagine the NIGMS technology programs including early stage, concept development, focused technology programs, development and dissemination centers, through National and Regional Resources to support state-of-the-art facilities, equipment, technologies, research tools, software, and service. Prior to joining the NIH in 2013, Dr. Gregurick was a program director in the Office of Biological and Environmental Research at the Department of Energy (DOE). In this role, she developed the information and data sharing policy for the agency’s Genomics Science Program and oversaw the development and implementation of the DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase, a framework to integrate data, models, and simulations together for a better understanding of energy and environmental processes. Dr. Gregurick is an advisory council member for the DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research and a member of two National Science Foundation advisory committees – the Biological Sciences Advisory Committee and the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Committee. She has received several awards during her tenure at NIH, including two NIH Director’s Awards. Before beginning a career of government service, Dr. Gregurick was a professor of computational chemistry at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research interests included dynamics of large biological macromolecules, and her areas of expertise are computational biology, high performance computing, neutron scattering and bioinformatics. Dr. Gregurick received her undergraduate degree in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Michigan and her PhD in physical chemistry from the University of Maryland. She completed a Lady Davis postdoctoral fellowship at Hebrew University in Israel and a Sloan postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology, now the Institute for Bioscience & Biotechnology Research, in Shady Grove, Md.

Professor

Robert L. Grossman, PhD, is the Frederick H. Rawson Distinguished Service Professor in Medicine and Computer Science and the Jim and Karen Frank Director of the Center for Translational Data Science at the University of Chicago. He has served as the chief research informatics officer of the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago since 2011 and is the Co-Chief in the Section of Computational Biomedicine and Biomedical Data Science in the Department of Medicine. He is also the chair of the Open Commons Consortium (OCC), an independent not-for-profit that develops and operates data commons to support research in science, medicine, health care, and the environment.

Head of In Silico Research

Dr. Philipp Harbach has a PhD in theoretical chemistry from the University of Heidelberg and is the Head of In Silico Research in EMD Digital where he focuses on the digitalization of development and production processes with the help of modern computational modelling and data analytics methods. He is specifically interested in the application of quantum mechanical methods to industrial chemistry problems and is also leading first initiatives to adapt these algorithms to near-term available quantum computers.

Principal Solutions Architect

Dustin is a Principal Solutions Architect, first member of the technical sales staff. He's helped organizations protect, move and analyze billions of files & petabytes of data on premises & in the cloud. After a career in IT that included scaling SaaS architecture at Webtrends, he championed innovative solutions from BlueArc, Isilon and Kaminario solving large-scale block and file storage needs. He has a Computer Science degree from Georgia Technology and lives in Portland, OR.

Consultant Project Mgr

Ian Harrow manages the FAIR Implementation project for the Pistoia Alliance. He is an independent consultant providing expert project management and data analytics. His consultancy is also a partner for the BioExcel Centre of Excellence for Computational Biomolecular Research. He has over 30 years’ experience working in and for the Pharmaceutical and Life Science industry.

Scientific Analytics and Visualization Director

Samiul Hasan is a director within the Scientific Analytics Visualization team at GSK. Samiul’s passion is in using computational techniques including semantic technologies to enhance scientific decision making and increase the chances of getting better treatments to patients more quickly. Prior to his current role, Samiul was with GSK’s Computational Biology group for over 10 years. In that time, he implemented several analysis pipelines for critical GSK drug projects and was instrumental in developing widely used technical infrastructure including OpenTargets. Before his GSK career, Samiul completed a 2-year Bioinformatics postdoctoral fellowship at the Novartis Institute of Tropical Diseases in Singapore where he applied machine learning approaches for prioritizing drug targets in pathogens. This came after his PhD in Bioinformatics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute/University of Cambridge where he was applying similar methods for predicting regulatory regions in human DNA.

Visiting Assoc

Successful statistician/operation research analyst and industrial engineering professional with experience in univariate/multivariate statistical techniques, categorical data analysis, analysis of variance/covariance (ANOVA/ANCOVA) and multivariate analysis of variance/covariance (MANOVA/MANCOVA), performing testing procedures utilizing reliability analysis tools, censored data analysis, using stochastics processes in modeling reliability problems, structured and unstructured data mining, design of experiment, process control, simultaneous statistical inference, Bayesian modeling, sustainable and agile manufacturing dynamic system modeling and simulation, large-scale optimization, development of analytical tools and scalable computational schemes for optimization and equilibrium problems, real-time big data analytics for manufacturing system, and supply chain management. Recognized as a self-starter and quick learner with providing exceptional, innovative, and efficient solutions to business problems through a profound knowledge of the underlying physics and mathematics as well as computational tools, written and verbal communication skills, and excellent work ethic.

Prof & Dir Genome Technology Access Ctr

As the Director of Genomics at the McDonnell Genome Institute (GTAC@MGI), I bring 28 years of experience in medical research, with more than 22 years in the development and application of high-throughput genomic technologies (next generation sequencing, microarray, and high-throughput PCR). In addition to large-scale data generation, I also maintain considerable expertise in the analysis and interpretation of the same, particularly with regards to drug discovery, clinical research and patient care. In my years within the pharmaceutical industry and academia, I led numerous successful efforts in the discovery of novel drug targets, identification of drug mode of action, biomarkers for patient stratification, elucidating the translatability of pre-clinical models, and ascertaining the causes for drug failures. My current primary research interests focus on the development of novel interpretive analytical methods for multi-omics data and their use in the areas of inflammation & immunology, oncology, and cardiovascular & metabolic diseases.

Dir Data Technology & Innovation

Allison Heath is the Director of Data Technology and Innovation responsible for providing technical and collaborative leadership to build platforms for data-driven discovery that span across both research and operational efforts. She provides supervision of the data products and platforms team which performs basic and applied research in data intensive computing, bioinformatics, cloud computing, and related areas. Since joining CHOP in 2017, Allison and her team have been working on solving big data challenges in the unique context of pediatric diseases, including leading the development of the Kids First Data Resource Center (DRC).

Machine Learning & AI Lead

Peter Henstock is working to transform Pfizer using AI and Machine Learning. He is the Machine Learning and Technical Lead in Pfizer’s Digital group based in Massachusetts. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Purdue University and Master’s degrees in Biology, Software Engineering, Statistics, Applied Linguistics, and Image Processing. Before joining Pfizer, Peter worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in image processing and computational linguistics. He also teaches graduate level Machine Learning & Data Mining, Image Processing & Computer Vision, and Software Engineering at Harvard University.

Co-founder & CSO

Spencer has a decade of experience as an academic research scientist (first at McGill University in Canada and then at Harvard), developing and publishing new methods to reduce inefficiency and improve the quality of biomedical science. He recently started a company, Prism Analytic Technologies, to transform these methods into software tools and put them in the hands of the decision-makers who need them.

Industry Principal Director

Jens is an Industry Principal Director with Accenture Digital specializing in Life Sciences Research, Development, and Translational Medicine IT solutions, responsible for defining the strategic direction of Research platform solutions within the Life Sciences R&D practice. He is a passionate and dynamic professional offering almost 20 years of experience in a variety of positions in the bioinformatics space. 

Jens holds a dual major Ph.D. in mathematics and physics from Michigan State University.

 

Asst Prof

Dr. Bonnie Hurwitz is an Associate Professor of Biosystems Engineering at the University of Arizona and Bio5 Research Institute Fellow. She has worked as a computational biologist for nearly two decades on interdisciplinary projects in both industry and academia. Her research on the earth and human microbiome incorporates large-scale –omics datasets, high-throughput computing, and big data analytics to answer questions in systems biology. In particular, Dr. Hurwitz is interested how viruses re-engineer host metabolism and the implications on host-driven processes. Dr. Hurwitz is well-cited for her work in computational biology in diverse areas from plant genomics to viral metagenomics.

Lead IT Business Partner

Daniel Huston is responsible for Bioinformatics IT Business Partnering at Bristol Myers Squib. He has 10 years of scientific and technical experience with roles in academic, startup, and large pharmaceutical settings. He was a Genomics Laboratory Scientist at Yale School of Medicine and Mount Sinai Medical Center. He moved from laboratory into software and informatics while at the New York Genome Center. He managed Genomics Product Applications at the scientific software startup company Core Informatics (acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific,) and joined Bristol Myers Squibb in 2016. Daniel has an Bachelor's of Science in Biomolecular Sciences and a Master's of Science in Technology Management.

Assistant Professor

Dr. Yuval Itan is an expert in human disease genomic and developing methods to identify applying pathogenic mutations in next generation sequencing data by applying diverse methods across biology and computer science including machine learning, statistical genomics, bioinformatics and more. Dr. Itan has a BSc. in computational biology, Master in modeling biological complexity, a PhD in human evolutionary genomics, and postdoctoral research experience of human disease genomics that include methods development and identifying mutations and gene underlying susceptibility to viral infection and other genetic diseases. His current research aims to accurately estimate the functional consequence of mutations using machine learning and neural network approaches, applied across various disease cohorts and biobanks.

Director

Alex Ivliev is Director of Bioinformatics at Clarivate Analytics, the leading provider of life science informatics and services. Alex holds a PhD in bioinformatics. For the past 8 years, Alex has been working in service and consulting roles, helping pharmaceutical companies transform data into insights and build predictive models to support drug discovery research.

Scientific Systems Engineer

No bio available.

CEO

Dr. Charles Jaffe is the Chief Executive Officer of Health Level 7 International (HL7). He completed his medical training at Johns Hopkins and Duke Universities and post-doctoral training at the National Institutes of Health and the Lombardi Cancer Center. He has served in various academic positions in the Departments of Medicine and Pathology, as well as in the School of Engineering. Prior to joining HL7, he was the Senior Global Strategist at Intel. In addition, he led a national research consortium, found a consultancy for research informatics, served as the VP of Medical Informatics at AstraZeneca, and the VP of Life Sciences at SAIC. Currently, he is the Visiting Scholar at the University of California San Diego. Dr. Jaffe has been the contributing editor for several journals and has published on clinical management, informatics deployment, and healthcare policy.

Assoc Dir Global Data Science

Adam is the Lead Data Scientist at Biogen, where he works on optimizing commercial outcomes through marketing, patient outreach and field force infrastructure utilizing data science and predictive analytics. Biogen is a leader in the treatment and research of neurological diseases for 40 years. Prior to being commercial lead, Adam was part of their Digital Health team where he worked on next generation application of wearable and neurological tests. Holding a PhD in genomics, he also teaches management skills for data science and big data initiatives at Boston College.

IT Business Partner

Ewa Jermakowicz is an IT Business Partner in the Scientific Decision Support Network at Roche, supporting Biometrics and wider Product Development activities. Her current focus is on processes and tools supporting FAIRification of data coming from clinical trials. She's an IT Lead implementing a Platform allowing to pool clinical data with molecular, genomics and digital biomarkers for diverse therapeutic areas to fully capitalize Roche scientific data in support of Reverse Translation. Prior to this role she has been the Informatics Project Manager leading number of global multimillion projects in the clinical and real world data space. She has been with the company for 10 years with previous experience in a global financial institution.

Principal Program Manager

Scott Jeschonek drives the Azure HPC Cache and Avere vFXT Roadmaps with Microsoft Azure. Prior to joining Microsoft, Scott drove product execution and vision in several startups and larger corporations, providing complex solutions to large telecommunications companies. At Microsoft, Scott works closely with customers, Microsoft Engineering and our Field Sales groups to ensure product direction matches customer needs. Scott has recently focused on both Financial Services and Life Sciences storage architectures, especially serving HPC scenarios.

Principal Program Manager

Scott Jeschonek drives the Azure HPC Cache and Avere vFXT Roadmaps with Microsoft Azure. Prior to joining Microsoft, Scott drove product execution and vision in several startups and larger corporations, providing complex solutions to large telecommunications companies. At Microsoft, Scott works closely with customers, Microsoft Engineering and our Field Sales groups to ensure product direction matches customer needs. Scott has recently focused on both Financial Services and Life Sciences storage architectures, especially serving HPC scenarios.

Principal Program Manager

Scott Jeschonek drives the Azure HPC Cache Roadmaps with Microsoft Azure. Scott works closely with customers, Microsoft Engineering and our Field Sales groups to ensure product direction matches customer needs. Scott has recently focused on both Financial Services and Life Sciences storage architectures, especially serving HPC scenarios.

Director of Innovation

Following his PhD at Imperial College London, Graham was a NATO fellow at Harvard University where he worked with Nobel Laureate E. J. Corey. His independent academic career spanned 25 years and generated >$100 million external funding and 160 peer reviewed publications in the fields of drug discovery, drug delivery, process technology, regulatory science and medical devices. He held a number of leadership roles in the academy including pro-vice chancellor, vice provost and institute director, most recently Professor of Medicine and Director of Translational Research at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) in Boston MA. In 2018 Graham was recruited by Novartis as Director of Innovation. Graham has been a regular consultant to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry and was an advisor to the FDA in the development of the biosimilars approval pathway. He has also been instrumental in establishing and advising a large number of technology-based startup companies who have subsequently raised >$4B in venture funding. Graham sits on several advisory and editorial boards and has been the recipient of numerous awards for scientific and technology development. He was awarded the DSc in 2006 for contributions to medicinal chemistry.

Industry CTO Healthcare

Sanjay Joshi is Industry CTO Healthcare at the Dell Global CTO Office. Based in Seattle, he has spanned the gamut of life-sciences from clinical and biotechnology research to healthcare informatics to medical devices. A "skunkworks" engineer and informaticist, he defines himself as a "non-reductionist" with a "systems view of the real world.” His current focus is a systems-level understanding of healthcare, genomics, proteomics, microbiomics, imaging and device processes, and data infrastructures.

Chief Digital Officer

Natalija Jovanovic is the Chief Digital Officer at Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of Sanofi. She is responsible for comprehensive digital, data and technology strategy and execution from R&D, to production, to medical and commercial operations. Natalija has extensive experience in delivering digital solutions at AIG, the global insurer, and as VP of Innovation at Brown Brothers Harriman, a global commercial bank. Previously, she was at McKinsey, the strategy consulting firm, and holds a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT.

Staff Product Manager, Clinical Software

Ritu Kamal leads the clinical software marketing team at Illumina, and is also the product manager for TruSight Software Suite. Previous to Illumina, she was the VP of product management at Fabric Genomics, an early-stage startup for clinical genomic analysis. She was also a 2010 Stanford-India Biodesign fellow and has her bachelors from Princeton University, a masters from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

Sr Mgr

Gurpreet has been working as Sr. Project manager for more than 21 years in IT technical project planning and implementation industry. He helped establishing the PMO at his company and has managed many complex projects globally. Gurpreet leads project managers team,works closely with customers and portfolio managers to help them resolve specific issues and problems regarding the projects. Gurpreet has MBA Degree from Edinburgh Business School.

Director, Data Advisory for Data Sciences

Umesh Katpally, PhD. is the Director of Data Advisory for Data Sciences at BC Platforms. Previously, he worked at Novartis focusing on research informatics as well as at various bio-pharma companies focusing on viral vaccines research. In his current role he supports Data Science customers, advising on the strategy needed to answer their research questions to help with integrating and mining clinical and genomic data from various sources to augment the drug development pipeline. 

Sr Software Engineer

Danny Katzel has been a Senior Software Engineer at NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) through RanchoBiosciences for the past 4 years. While at NCATS, Mr. Katzel has worked on the Global Substance Registration System, G-SRS, which provides a common identifier for all of the substances used in medicinal products, utilizing a consistent definition of substances globally, including active substances under clinical investigation. Previously, Mr. Katzel worked at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) which later became the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). During the 10 years he worked there, Danny was the lead Software Engineer for the Viral Genomics Group where he wrote the key components of most of the pipelines that have been used to sequence, assemble, analyze, annotate, and publish over 20,000 viral genomes to Genbank.

Exec Dir Advanced Analytics & AI

Faisal M. Khan, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence at Astrazeneca. His team focuses on the applications of AI and data science throughout the drug discovery lifecycle, from target identification through Phase 3 trials and beyond. His interests focus on the intersections of data science, biostatistics, bioimaging, personalized medicine, and healthcare delivery. His career has encompassed all aspects of healthcare and biomedical analytics, including diagnostics, devices, clinical trials/therapeutics, and payers/insurance. Dr. Khan has worked or consulted across academia and industry with both startups and Fortune-50 companies. He has over 90 published papers, abstracts, and patents

Director of Product Management, Marketing

Abhay Kini helps deliver IDBS’ vision of a digital lab, driving product marketing, management and strategy. His career spans over 15 years in R&D and consulting services in life sciences, holding positions at Waters Corporation, Medidata Solutions and Oracle.  He has a PhD in Chemistry from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana and pursued post-doctoral research in the molecular bases of olfaction at Columbia University.

Principal

Dr. Juergen Klenk is a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Monitor Strategy practice. He focuses on advancing Precision Medicine and Data Science in health care and biomedical research through the unique lens of his combined formal scientific training and entrepreneurial experience. Dr. Klenk has authored publications, patented inventions, spoken at international conferences, and he has started up, grown, and established innovative health analytics businesses. Throughout his career, he has worked with leading health organizations, including government health agencies, academic medical centers, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, health care providers, and non-profit organizations. His areas of specialty include strategy and business operations, digital transformation, data analytics, and science & technology. Dr. Klenk holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics and a Master’s degree in Mathematics and Physics from Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen.

Associate Director

Erik Koenig has been a strategic leader in genomic sciences and computational biology focused on translational biomarker development including PD, resistance, safety and predictive patient selection ranging from protein homeostatis, targeted, ADC and immuno-oncology programs. Currently at Takeda, Erik heads a strategy innovation management team which provides leadership for translationaly focused strategic initiatives, like STORK, and plays a key role in fostering collaborations with functional and scientific leaders to innovate transformative translational strategies aligned for patient benefit.

Dir Infrastructure & Cloud Architecture

No bio available.

VP and GM - Cloud

Rob Lalonde brings over 25 years of executive management experience to lead Univa's accelerating growth and entry into new markets. Rob has held executive positions in multiple, successful high tech companies and startups. He possesses a unique and multi-disciplined set of skills having held positions in Sales, Marketing, Business Development, and CEO and board positions. Rob has completed MBA studies at York University's Schulich School of Business and holds a degree in computer science from Laurentian University.

CIO

Lee Lancashire, PhD has over 15 years of experience in machine learning and statistics. His PhD was focused on the development of artificial neural network-based methodologies where he was involved in many of the first applications of neural nets to high dimensional datasets in bioinformatics. Prior to joining Cohen Veterans Bioscience, Lee spent over five years within the IP & Science business of Thomson Reuters where he established and led the machine learning and statistical data analysis team. Here he held global responsibility for managing and delivering analytical projects, serving the majority of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies, as well as government, academic and non-profit organizations. These projects focused on utilizing advanced machine learning approaches in the molecular profiling of disease for biomarker discovery, patient stratification and drug target identification. Lee completed his post-doctoral research in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research, a Cancer Research UK core facility. He has also worked as a bioinformatics project lead in personalized medicine and diagnostics companies CompanDX and Almac Diagnostics. He has published in over 30 key industry journals and holds several patents around the use of neural networks in the biomedical domain. In his free time Lee devotes time volunteering as a trustee for the Ichthyosis Support Group, a charity that supports individuals and families affected by a group of rare skin disorders.

ML & AI Lead R&D Informatics

Michael joined Roche in September 2018 as an ML/AI Lead. In this role, he is responsible for driving the Lab Automation. Before joining Roche, Michael worked already as consultant for Roche and also for other companies with a particular focus on data integration.

Head of Search and Evaluation

Michael is Head of Search, Evaluation and In-licensing for all new technology and products at Pear Therapeutics. Michael also runs point on telemedicine and virtual care transactions, as well as competitive intelligence at Pear. In addition, he works closely with the Pear fundraising team to build and maintain relationships with prospective investors primarily on the international front. Michael is also an investor, advisor and mentor to startups. Michael is the founding partner at a fund through his family called Old Silver VC, where he invests in Healthcare (Biotech and DigitalHealth) and Deep Tech with a focus on materials startups. He also invests directly into Seed and/or Healthcare/Biotech focused venture capital funds as a Limited Partner. He is a mentor and Judge at MassChallenge Healthtech and a mentor at MassConnectDH.

Dir Computational Biology & Translational Medicine

Dr. Bin Li leads a translational bioinformatics team at Takeda’s global computational biology organization. His team provides computational supports on both forward and reverse translational research, on multiple therapeutic areas including oncology, GI, neuroscience, and rare diseases. They develop methods, build ML/AI predictive models, and do data-driven exploratory analyses for biomarker and patient stratification needs. His team is also responsible on method evaluation and pipeline building for various NGS platforms, including WES, RNA-seq, scRNA-seq, microbiome, and targeted panels.

Managing Dir & Co Founder

Michael N. Liebman, PhD (theoretical chemistry and protein crystallography) is Managing Director of IPQ Analytics, LLC and CSO of United Cancer Centers after serving as Executive Director of the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Molecular Medicine. He is Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, Drexel College of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Drug Discovery, Wenzhou Medical University and Fudan University. He serves on the Advisory Board for the Center of Biomedical and Health Research, University of Massachusetts (Lowell). Previously, he was Director, Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics, University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center. He served as Global Head of Computational Genomics, Roche. He serves on the Board of the Nathaniel Adamczyk Foundation in Pediatric ARDS. Michael chairs Translational Medicine for the PhRMA Foundation and serves on the IUPAC Division on Human Health. His research focuses on computational models of disease that stress complexities of real-world patients and real-world clinical practice utilizing systems-based approaches for representation and analysis for pharma and healthcare.

Prof

Dr. X. Shirley Liu graduated summa cum laude from Smith College double majoring in Biochemistry and Computer Science in 1997, and received PhD in Biomedical Informatics and PhD minor in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2002. She is now Professor at the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard School of Public Health. She is the Director of the Center of Functional Cancer Epigenetics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and an associate member of the Broad Institute. Her research focuses on computational cancer epigenetics, and developing algorithms for big cancer data integration and mining.

Founder & CTO

Dr. Lynch has over 25 years’ experience in Data science & Informatics in various start-ups and biopharma. He is interested in making data more accessible for better analysis, and established Curlew Research in 2014, working with pharma/biotech and life science informatics/data science companies.

Staff Scientist

Tom Madden has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Chemistry Department at Brandeis University. In 1993, he moved to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NIH). Since then, he has worked on alignments with BLAST. His projects include a distributed version of BLAST still used at the NCBI BLAST webpage, the stand-alone BLAST packages distributed by the NCBI, a version of BLAST for NGS, and (most recently) BLAST in cloud environments.

Scientist

Ravi is a computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. He works in the intersection of high performance computing and life sciences. He leads the Globus Genomics project (www.globus.org/genomics), which is widely used for genomics, proteomics, and other biomedical computations on Amazon cloud and other platforms. See https://www.globus.org/genomics/publications for some relevant publications. He also architected the Globus Galaxies platform that underpins Globus Genomics and several other cloud-based gateways. Ravi Madduri is a key member in multiple NIH, NSF and DoE projects

Chief Technology Officer

An expert technologist with a PhD in Machine Learning in Bioinformatics, I bring a wealth of experience having developed bioinformatics solutions in both commercial and academic organisations. My previous roles include being Lead Ontologist at EMBL-EBI, where I developed semantic solutions using ontologies with life science data.

President

Lara Mangravite, PhD is President of Sage Bionetworks, an organization that focuses on open practices to drive reliable outcomes in computational life sciences. Recognizing that all research is limited by restrictions placed on the distribution of information, Sage works closely with institutes, foundations and research communities to improve information flow, benchmark research practices, and establish reliable research outcomes to support translation. Dr. Mangravite obtained a BS in Physics from the Pennsylvania State University, a PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of California, San Francisco, and a postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular pharmacogenomics at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute.

Head of AI and Strategic Alliances

No bio available.

Design Analyst

Sylvia Marecki joined the Operational Design Center within Global Clinical Operations at EMD Serono in 2019 as a strategic decision support partner driving efficiency and innovation in study planning and execution. Prior to joining EMD Serono, Sylvia led development and commercialization of data-driven analytic products and services at Citeline/Informa, DRG (Clarivate), and TriNetX, empowering informed decision-making across clinical and commercial functions at all stages of the product life cycle. She received her Doctorate in Pathology and Immunology from Boston University School of Medicine.

Technologist Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary

No bio available.

Research Fellow & Head of AI

Brian joined AbbVie in October of 2018 as the head of the newly formed RAIDERS team within Research & Development’s Information Research division, focused on accelerating, scaling, and amplifying the work of AbbVie’s R&D community using Artificial Intelligence technologies like machine learning, deep learning, and cognitive computing. Brian came to AbbVie after spending five years in technology consulting across many industries, and over a decade of additional experience before that working in trading and financial markets technology. During his consulting time, Brian architected the United States’ Common Securitization Platform and was a founding member of Publicis.Sapient’s AI practice. While his primary focus is AI technologies, his interests are much broader, and he has presented at multiple conferences on topics including optical networking, quantum computing, blockchain, cognitive architecture, and other emerging technology concepts that are all part of digital transformation. Brian holds a BS degree in Computer and Cognitive Science from Alma College and a MS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. He is actively involved with technology incubator programs at Mundelein and Lake Forest High Schools, the Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School, and is a member of the Education Committee for District 115’s Board of Education.

Lead Solution Engineer

No bio available.

Associate Director, DevSci Data Management and Curation

Mark McCreary is the Associate Director of DevSci Data Management and Curation in Development Sciences Informatics at Genentech. His team focuses on managing exploratory and high-dimensional biomarker data on behalf of clinical development and translational scientific teams. In his time in the role, he has led efforts to curate legacy and prospective data assets for high-priority therapeutic areas; standardize metadata about samples and assays; and develop streamlined end-to-end data lifecycle workflows from data planning through data processing that yield FAIR data and ultimately enable exciting data analytics. Mark has a strong interest in the intersection between biology, medicine, and computational biology, and has been exposed to multiple research areas. He has been at Genentech since 2015, where he initially focused for ~2.5 years on Bioinformatics efforts on Immunology and Infectious Disease Research efforts. He moved from an analytics role to a data management role as he grew interested in understanding how to more seamlessly prepare and integrate data for analytical use, ultimately being driven by inefficiencies that are often faced by computational scientists when preparing data for analytical activities. Prior to his engagement with Genentech, Mark worked as a Bioinformatics Research Data Analyst at Stanford in Stan Cohen’s laboratory in the Genetics department. His informatics expertise includes gene expression analysis; pathway analysis; application development in R, Perl, JavaScript, and Python; Linux system administration; and data lifecycle management. He holds a Masters in Bioinformatics from RIT.

Bioinformatician

Lisa McFerrin is a bioinformatician at AWS, where she leads a number of initiatives supporting the genomics industry as part of worldwide business development. Prior to AWS, Lisa specialized in the development of software and methods that bridge genomic and clinical data to advance the understanding of cancer biology.

Bioinformatician

Lisa McFerrin is a bioinformatician at AWS, where she leads a number of initiatives supporting the genomics industry as part of worldwide business development. Prior to AWS, Lisa specialized in the development of software and methods that bridge genomic and clinical data to advance the understanding of cancer biology.

Sr Scientist

Luis A. Mendez is a Senior Research Scientist within the Immunoscience Drug Discovery group at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS). Luis received his BA in Biology and BS in Exercise Science from Rutgers University and his MS in Biotechnology with a Concentration in Biotech Enterprise from Johns Hopkins University. Luis has over 15 year’s industry experience with previous stops at Celgene and at Merck. At BMS, Luis chairs the FACSusers' group and co-chairs the Flow Cytometry Community of Practice.

Assoc Dir Quantum Economic Dev Consortium

No bio available.

User Services Team Lead

Chris earned his PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago in 2014. Since then, he worked as a biomedical robotics engineer, empowering labs to achieve high-throughput NGS sequencing, medical sample preparation, and metabolomics. In 2017, Chris joined Robert Grossman's Center for Translational Data Science as a scientific support analyst, and he has since been elevated to user services team lead. He currently manages the Helpdesk for several data commons hosted by CTDS at the University of Chicago.

Co-Founder

Dr. Mhaka is an experienced lifesciences and digital health executive, investment professional, and biotech entrepreneur with a passion for global health. Leveraging expertise in biomedical discovery, technology development, healthcare delivery, and fundraising she creates transformative healthcare advances impactful on a global scale. Utilizing her experience in emerging technologies, cross-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder approaches, Dr. Mhaka has co-founded the Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (AAIH), a global coalition of 30+ organisations dedicated to resolving the myriad challenges facing the growing field of AI and Machine Learning based life sciences and healthcare solutions. In addition to her proven track record of over 50+ cross-industry deals in both the private and public sector, Dr. Mhaka has worked for a leading management consultant firm, a global clinical research organisation, and co-founded four companies within the drug development and nanotechnology sectors. This includes a mid-stage AI supported nanotechnology platform for diagnosis, disease management, therapeutic monitoring, data processing & transmission at the point-of-need. She holds several advisory roles in academia and industry, and serves on the board of the Belgian-American Chamber of Commerce (BelCham), which promotes transatlantic business growth and collaboration. Dr. Mhaka received her PhD in Cellular and Molecular Medicine from Johns Hopkins Medicine where she developed a clinical phase oncology drug and attained her Bachelor of Science in Chemistry [Highest Honors, Summa Cum Laude] from the University of Pittsburgh.

Director

Pietro Michelucci is the executive director of the Human Computation Institute, a multidisciplinary innovation center that develops crowd-powered systems to address societal problems. He is Editor-in-Chief of the 2013 Springer Handbook of Human Computation and founding editor of the journal Human Computation. Michelucci received a joint-PhD in cognitive science and mathematical psychology from Indiana University and spent ten years advising federal research agencies on Artificial Intelligence. In 2014, he led a three-day summit at the Wilson Center, which produced a national road-map for Human Computation research. He currently leads the Stall Catchers citizen science project, which accelerates Alzheimer's research. Dr. Michelucci recently launched a new initiative called Civium, which is an integration framework and marketplace for data science that leverages human-in-the-loop computing toward a new thinking economy.

Exec Dir

Dr. Shaw is executive director of the Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy (Khalifa Institute). She joined The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2013, bringing an extensive background in science leadership and education. Dr. Shaw is responsible for daily operations at the Khalifa Institute and its work to improve molecular characterization of tumors and apply that knowledge to clinical trials and advanced patient care. She also is operations director for MD Anderson’s Cancer Genomics Laboratory and administrative director of the Precision Oncology Decision Support System. Prior to joining MD Anderson, Dr. Shaw spent four years with The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), a flagship project of the National Cancer Institute focused on accelerating understanding of the molecular basis of cancer. She was scientific projects manager for a year, during which she served as the lead technical and public communications officer. In 2010 she was promoted to director and provided oversight and leadership to the TCGA’s complex research program with more than 300 funded components. Dr. Shaw earned undergraduate degrees in Spanish and Biology at the College of William and Mary, and completed her doctoral degree in cell and developmental biology at Harvard University. Dr. Shaw is executive director of the Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy (Khalifa Institute). She joined The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2013, bringing an extensive background in science leadership and education. Dr. Shaw is responsible for daily operations at the Khalifa Institute and its work to improve molecular characterization of tumors and apply that knowledge to clinical trials and advanced patient care. She also is operations director for MD Anderson’s Cancer Genomics Laboratory and administrative director of the Precision Oncology Decision Support System. Prior to joining MD Anderson, Dr. Shaw spent four years with The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), a flagship project of the National Cancer Institute focused on accelerating understanding of the molecular basis of cancer. She was scientific projects manager for a year, during which she served as the lead technical and public communications officer. In 2010 she was promoted to director and provided oversight and leadership to the TCGA’s complex research program with more than 300 funded components. Dr. Shaw earned undergraduate degrees in Spanish and Biology at the College of William and Mary, and completed her doctoral degree in cell and developmental biology at Harvard University.

Senior Director

David Milward is Senior Director, NLP Technology at Linguamatics. He is a pioneer of interactive text mining, and a founder of Linguamatics. He has over 20 years experience of product development, consultancy and research in natural language processing (NLP). After receiving a PhD from the University of Cambridge, he was a researcher and lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. He has published in the areas of information extraction, spoken dialogue, parsing, syntax and semantics.

Sr Cloud Architect

No bio available.

CoFounder & CEO

Michael Montgomery, MD is Co-Founder and CEO of Stable Solutions, LLC a healthcare and neural net consultancy (If it isn’t stable; it’s not a solution). Dr. Montgomery is Board certified in Internal Medicine. He has over 23 years experience as a Cell Biologist working in the field of Developmental Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, Cornell Medical College, and Temple University Medical School. He was an Assistant Professor in the department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at Temple University School of Medicine. Dr. Montgomery has been a leader in Medical Development at Centocor, Johnson & Johnson and Incyte for two decades producing multiple successful projects including the development of QUEST, an award winning process automation system; ANUBIS, a system for prioritizing development opportunities for new and approved products; and UTOPIA, a project to establish processes for reviewing and running clinical trials in Medical Affairs. At J&J he was a co-founder and Leader of the Proof-of-Concept Team which prioritized reviewed, funded, supported and disseminated information from all, novel Investigator Sponsored Trials exploring new treatments in over 110 diseases in 20 therapeutic areas. He led the Global Medical Affairs team at Incyte as Interim Head. Dr. Montgomery was accredited as a Certified Physician Investigator by the Association of Clinical Research Professionals and led high performance teams at Centocor, J&J, and Incyte. Dr. Montgomery was also Founding President of the Investigator Initiated and Sponsored Research Association (iisra, iisra.org) and is a lecturer on the subjects of process, IT in Pharma and IISR.

VP & GM

Dr. Jonathan Morris is Vice President and General Manager, US Healthcare Solutions. Jon is responsible for the provider, health system, payer, medical specialty society, and patient advocacy businesses within IQVIA. Jon joined IQVIA from United BioSource Corporation (UBC), where he was Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer. Prior to joining UBC, Jon was Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of ProSanos, a patient safety and health outcomes focused informatics company that he cofounded and sold to Medco (NYSE: MHS) in 2010. Jon holds an MD from Washington University in St. Louis, and a BS in economics from the University of Michigan. He completed his surgical internship, residency and pediatric surgical research fellowship at Stanford University.

Dr

The goal of the ODC is to enable improved study design through data-derived scenarios and optionality. The ODC is building an internal expert function that leverages big data and advanced analytics and applies consistent methodologies to achieve the optimal balance of time and cost in study design and execution. Omesan is a part of the ODC team with broad knowledge in Research and Development (R&D) and hands-on experience with data analytics and clinical research. He has been involved with various operations analyses and automation of analytics processes supporting R&D operations. His passion for clinical analytics stems from his work at the Red Cross Children‘s Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa where he conducted clinical data analysis on childhood brain cancers. Omesan has also been involved with analysis of translational research projects in this field and has collaborated with leading pediatric oncology centers at the Hospital for SickKids® in Toronto, Canada, and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. He has also worked with investigations of immunological diseases using translational proteomics and gene expression data analysis. Omesan holds a PhD in Neuro-Oncology, MSc in Medical Biochemistry and BSc Honors in Molecular & Cell Biology from University of Cape Town, South Africa; with an Advanced Certificate in Bio-Entrepreneurship from University of Basel, Switzerland.

PostDoc Fellow

I am a PostDoc Data Science fellow at Harvard University and my research is focused on visualizing multivariate networks (MVN). During my PhD, I published on MVNs in the context of genealogies and on using spanning trees and associating attribute tables as an approach to visualizing general multivariate networks. In my latest work, I conducted a large user study to assess how different MVN visualization techniques are best suited for different network exploration tasks. My Master’s thesis addressed the challenge of visualizing multivariate oceanographic data, which I modeled as trees of currents. I have a master’s degree in software engineering from the Harvard Extension School, as well as a previous life as an oceanographer studying the Arctic Ocean and its effect on our planet.

Sales Manager BI Solutions

Curtis has over 30 years of experience having built fraud and risk data systems for the largest banks in the US. His testing background includes every platform from mainframe to mobile. He has worked with testing embedded systems for Lockheed Martin's F-35 and Medtronic's pacemakers to the largest financial and business systems for ExxonMobil, Nationwide Insurance and WorldPay. 

Sr. Business Development Manager

No bio available.

Sr. Business Development Manager, Life Science

No bio available.

Life Science Business Development

No bio available.

Senior Business Development Manager

No bio available.

Senior Business Development Manager

No bio available.

Director of Product Marketing

As a Product Marketer, Scott helps organizations become information-driven. He believes that using modern technology to connect individual workers to the accumulated knowledge and expertise of an organization in order to do their jobs more effectively improves the overall performance of the entire organization.

Product Manager

Jay has worked across engineering and marketing teams to build and release a broad range of bioinformatics pipelines and software tools at Illumina over the past seven years. As product manager for BaseSpace Sequence Hub and DRAGEN Bio-IT Platform, Jay led the releases of key features, pipelines, and workflows to support high-volume NGS data analysis. Today, he is focused on building Illumina’s next-generation cloud platform to power multi-omics data analysis workflows and power insight generation at scale. Jay is driven to deliver the best genetic analysis tools and technology to help power advancements in human health. He holds a B.S. in Bioengineering from UC San Diego.

Becker Professor and Chief Data Scientist

Dr. Payne is the Becker Professor and Chief Data Scientist at the Washington University School of Medicine.  He is an internationally recognized leader in the field of translational bioinformatics and clinical research informatics, and his work focuses on computational phenotyping, predictive modeling, and the creation of a learning healthcare system.

Dir Bioinformatics & Data Science & AI

Dr. Plasterer has pursued interests in bioinformatics, clinical informatics, systems biology and biomarker discovery over the last twenty years in both industry and academia. He co-founded PanGenX (a Personalized Medicine/Pharmacogenetics Knowledge Base start-up), directed the project planning and data interpretation group at BG Medicine, and held an adjunct professor position in the department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Northeastern University. He now leads FAIR data and Knowledge Graph initiatives at AstraZeneca. In these roles at AstraZeneca, Dr. Plasterer has been responsible for establishing and executing the linked data strategy which includes knowledge representation, vocabulary & metadata services, semantic visualization, analytics and business case development. This strategy has been deployed to build the competitive intelligence and integrative informatics frameworks for R&D. Tom also serves on the Pistoia Alliance FAIR data implementation board.

Editorial Dir

Allison Proffitt is a science writer with a background in biology and chemistry, research experience in cancer biology, and an expanding repertoire in biotech, AI, and battery chemistry. She serves as the editorial director for the Healthtech Publishing media group, a growing collection of online news sites. In addition to Bio-IT World, her work has been published by Nature Biotech, Chemical & Engineering News, and the Economist Intelligence Unit. She has a bachelor’s degree in communication of science, engineering, and technology from Vanderbilt University and a Master’s degree in science and medical writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Dir

Dr. Pyarajan directs the development of VA's Genomics Platform for the Million Veteran Program (MVP). Dr. Pyarajan received his Ph.D in Immunology from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. He completed his Post-doctoral training from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and NYU School of Medicine before joining the VA. He has developed custom genotyping arrays for MVP and leads the acquisition of sample and molecular data, data QA/QC and provisioning of data for genomic analysis on an HPC environment.

Chair Biostatistics & Henry Pickering Walcott Prof

Dr. John Quakenbush is a Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and Chair in the Biostatistics Department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also Professor the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, as well as the director of the Harvard Quantitative Biomedical Research Center (QBRC). His research group is developing methods to infer regulatory network models and to associate the structure and properties of these models with phenotypes in health and disease.

Principal Domain Expert

 Dr. Subhadra R.V has 20 plus years of industry experience in providing deep functional subject matter expertise and solutions for different key segments of Life Sciences and Healthcare. She has assayed global leadership roles in providing the end to end software solutions to multiple customers in highly complex and demanding environments.

Product Manager

Ashoka Rajendra studied biology at UVA, working on small molecule drug combinations for melanoma and prostate cancer. He has worked on software platforms for cancer genomics, healthcare, and life sciences. As Head of Product for Benchling's Registration and Inventory, Ashoka works with biopharma organizations to optimize their R&D processes.

 

Director, Intelligent Automation & Analytics

Srikanth leads a team responsible for combining consulting and deep technology expertise to transform the way Artificial Intelligence is applied in Janssen R&D's Intelligent Automation & Analytics pursuits. His role as Product Line Owner, is accountable for implementing technology & platform initiatives in AI, Data Science Engineering and Cognitive Process Automation to accelerate breakthrough science and optimize operations.

Director

Meghan Raman has 20+ years of experience in successfully leading large scale business transformation programs. She has cross industry domain expertise including Life Sciences, Financial, Consulting, Insurance, Telecomm and Resellers. She is experienced in building and leading global, high performance teams. She has also built Analytics frameworks, AI/ML capabilities and Data Platforms to drive scientific prediction, revenue uplift and productivity. Meghan has led process development and implementation activities in Clinical, Regulatory and Pharmacovigilance domains. She has set up Analytics framework and integration efforts between Product Registration, Safety Reporting and Clinical Trial Management. She is currently leading the IT organization for Biometrics & Data Sciences. She is accountable for the roadmap, strategy, platforms including a Clinical Data Repository & Statistical Compute Environment and various digital-AI/ML products across the Drug Development area including cohort selection, biomarker identification, trial design, site feasibility, signal detection etc.

CEO

Dr. Vasu Rangadass, PhD is the CEO at L7 Informatics, Inc.(www.l7informatics.com), provides software and services that enable synchronized solutions for science + health. L7’s novel Enterprise Science Platform (ESP) is a scientific process and data management (SPDM) solution that enables life science and healthcare companies to connect people, processes, and systems to accelerate discoveries and drive precision healthcare.

 

Product Manager

Brigitte Raumann is a Product Manager at Globus and led the effort to enable Globus support for management of protected research data, including PHI and CUI. As the Globus Privacy Officer, she continues to oversee the Globus compliance program and incident investigations. Brigitte has focused her career on providing researchers with the software tools and data they require to advance discovery. Her decades of experience span sectors as diverse as biotech, publishing, patent law, and academic clinical research. Brigitte Raumann earned her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Assoc Prof

Dr. Kamal Rawal is an interdisciplinary professional with extensive experience in machine learning and bioinformatics. He has successfully executed large scale complex projects such as Semi-Automated Text Mining System, AI based Vaccine Discovery System; Next Generation AI based Cancer Diagnostic System, & AI- Driven Obesity and Diabetes Management System. Currently, he is working as a Project Director in an International project. Concurrently, he hold a Associate Professor position in one of the leading university and mentoring several AI based startups.

Director, Life Science

Jane  is responsible for developing the strategic vision for Linguamatics’ growing portfolio and business development. Jane has extensive experience in life science informatics. She worked for more than 15 years in vendor companies supplying data products, data integration and analysis, and consultancy to pharma and biotech. 

VP & Head Genome Informatics & Data Engineering

Dr. Reid is a vice president at the Regeneron Genetics Center where he leads the genome informatics and data engineering teams developing and applying novel large-scale computational analysis tools, systems, and methods with the goal of making precision medicine a reality. His primary focus is on maximizing the impact that the integration of health record derived phenotypes and genomic data can have in providing biological insights and improving patient outcomes. Dr. Reid has worked in all aspects of large-scale genomic sequence data production and analysis, and using his background in computational physics, has been an evangelist for cloud computing in genomics and the thoughtful application of data science techniques to next-generation sequencing problems. Dr. Reid received his Ph.D. in physics from The University of Washington and his Bachelor’s degree from Harvey Mudd College. He lives in Stamford, Connecticut with his husband Jim and three cats Sabrina, Lyndon, and Emile.

Principal Data Modeler

Kathy Reinold is a Principal Data Modeler at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and holds Masters of Science degrees in both Computer Science and BioInformatics. With roots in semantics and computer science and over 20 years’ experience with pharmaceutical and biotechnology challenges, Kathy builds data models connecting data in meaningful ways to enable researchers.

President

Michael oversees the executive management of RCH, including the company’s overall strategic direction, and brings more than 25 years of experience to his role. His primary responsibilities are business development, sales, and marketing. Michael has been an officer since 2006 and was instrumental in the evolution of the company business model.  During this time, RCH has experienced significant market and revenue growth in the Life Sciences and Healthcare industries.

Adjunct Asst Prof & Head

Dr. Robasky earned her PhD from Boston University on fellowship From George Church with Harvard’s Department of Genetics. She has 15+ years of experience in designing and delivering sustainable software systems, and spent several years as a scientist and product developer for a sequencing lab owned by Quintiles. Dr. Robasky joined the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) in the fall of 2016 and holds adjuncts to both the Department of Genetics and the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Robasky has contributed to the NIH Biomedical Data Translator, NIH Data Commons Pilot, and the NIH Human Biomolecular Atlas Program. Dr. Robasky’s Translational Science team is currently working on applications in the areas of precision dosing, clinical trial management, and on solving problems in the modelling and analysis of clinical and biomolecular data.

Asst Prof

Dr. Jeffrey Rosenfeld has extensive experience in genomics and bioinformatics. He is the author of over 40 scientific publications, a graduate-level textbook, and the recipient of a US patent. He received his undergraduate education at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD in biology from NYU. He performed his doctoral research at the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Over his 15-year career in genomics, he has worked on a wide range of biological and genetic projects including genetic association studies of schizophrenia, genomic testing of embryos for fertility treatments, gene patent litigation, and clinical cancer genome sequencing. For the past five years, he has been an Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the head of the Bioinformatics Core at the Rutgers Cancer Institute. In this role, he has become very familiar with laboratory testing both for cancer and other genetic diseases. He has set up the computational infrastructure for multiple tumor sequencing panels as well as a clinical data warehouse. Dr. Rosenfeld is always at the leading edge of technology and is looking for the newest ideas that can be used for scientific research and diagnostics including single cell techniques and long read sequencing. Additionally, Dr. Rosenfeld has been sought out for his expertise as the head of Rosenfeld Consulting LLC. Clients come to him seeking advice regarding genomics, oncology and laboratory testing. Due to his long tenure in the field and his knowledge of genomics as well as finance, he can give a clear assessment of the companies and their potential. Companies approach Dr. Rosenfeld looking for his expert-level genomics knowledge, industry insight and management experience.

Director

Philip Ross works at Bristol-Myers Squibb as Director, Head of Translational Bioinformatics Data Science. During his 9 years at BMS, his team has delivered dynamic clinical visualizations incorporating clinical and biomarker data for clinical drug development programs. Philip developed Clinical Review at BMS, a Spotfire application supporting near-real-time visualizations of clinical data for all ongoing in-house clinical trials at BMS. He currently is a leader in the expansion of the Data Commons in Informatics and Predictive Sciences to accelerate data exploration for clinical and biomarker data at BMS.

Healthcare AI Principal

Esteban has been in the IT industry for over 20 years, going from startups to Healthcare IT where he worked in Enterprise Imaging and AI. At NetApp he’s responsible for the Healthcare AI practice, helping create solutions that improve patient care and reduce provider burnout, informed by the Quadruple Aim. He's a visible participant in the AI-in-Healthcare conversation, with a focus on the translation of AI research into clinical practice.

Chief Technologist

Terrell Russell oversees the Development team and handles code review, package management, documentation, and high-level architecture design for the iRODS Consortium. He is interested in distributed systems, metadata, security, and open source software that accelerates science. Dr. Russell holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has been working on iRODS since 2008.

Tech Assoc Dir

I am interested in systems biology, the immune system, sequence analysis and automation, omics methods such as single cell RNAseq and Somascan, digital devices for clinical trials and causal modeling of clinical and scientific data. At NIBR my group has developed web applications that track scientific workflows, automated data pipelines including external data sources and developed a shared services layer that has been used for three subsequent applications. We have been internalizing and scalably deploying open source software such as SPRING and cellxgene. AWS, Scala, Python, R and Typescript are some of my favorite tech.

Head

Sebastian Schlicker has more than 15 years of experience in managing pharma R&D IT projects, specializing in the implementation of global enterprise software solutions for large molecule R&D. As the director of Genedata’s Biologics business, Sebastian oversees all major consulting and deployment projects globally. Currently based in Basel, Switzerland, Sebastian previously worked out of the Genedata Boston office, where he helped to build Genedata’s biopharma business in the US. Among his many responsibilities, he led implementation and customization projects for major US biopharma companies. Before joining Genedata, Sebastian worked at Sanofi, where he managed the implementation of new R&D platforms in both small- and large-molecule R&D, covering the complete project life-cycle and resulting in integrated and harmonized enterprise solutions used by scientists around the globe. Sebastian holds a degree in Computer Science and Economics from the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt, Germany.

Head, Product Marketing

As Head of Product Marketing at Benchling, Michael shares Benchling’s vision to accelerate life sciences R&D with companies across the world. Prior to joining Benchling, Michael led global life science strategy at Salesforce, co-founded Fluxion Biosciences, and led product management for Advanced Stent Technologies (acq. Boston Scientific).

Exec Dir & Head IT BP, IO/CT R&ED, Early Clinical Development and CP&P

Ajay Shah is Executive Director and Head of Translational Medicine IT at BMS, where he is responsible for platforms and solutions ranging from semantic integration of R&D data, biomarker characterization, precision medicine, imaging, bioinformatics, bio-analytical sciences, and laboratories, etc. Prior to BMS he headed Research Informatics (Discovery, Clinical and Translational) and Research IT at City of Hope National Medical Center. He has held roles of Director of Research Informatics at Elan Pharmaceuticals and Associate Director of Cheminformatics at Pfizer after starting his career at Biosym (now Biovia) in scientific software development and scientific support roles.

Head

Heather Shapiro is the Head of Data Science at Pear Therapeutics. As a neuroscience PhD with 10+ years experience in research and data, Heather's passion lies at the intersection of innovation and scientific discovery.

Principal Data Scientist

Vishakha Sharma is a Principal Data Scientist for diagnostic information solutions at Roche, where she leads advanced analytics initiatives such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to discover key insights improving NAVIFY product portfolio, leading to better and more efficient patient care. Vishakha has authored 40+ peer-reviewed publications and proceedings and has given 15+ invited talks. She serves on the program committee of the ACM-W, NIPS, AMIA, and ACM-BCB. Her research work has been funded by the NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative to build an NLP precision medicine software to automate molecular and clinical information extraction, categorization, and ranking of clinical evidence associated with biomarkers that predict response to cancer therapies. She holds a PhD in computer science.

Managing Director

Raveen is a Managing Director within Deloitte’s Life Sciences & Healthcare practice.  He has over 20 years of experience working with Life Sciences organizations to transform their data and analytics capabilities in R&D, real world evidence, and digital health to bring therapies to patients more efficiently.

Dir

Alex has 30+ years of experience in research, software development, software architecture, expert systems design, clinical trials systems design, data management and clinical trials management. As the Director of Systems at the Neurological Clinical Research Institute (NCRI), Mr. Sherman is responsible for the successful design, development and deployment of software systems for numerous clinical trials and biomarker studies in ALS, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, stroke and depression. Alex conceived and was instrumental in design, development and adoption by the international research community of NeuroBANK™, an accelerated clinical research platform, and ALSBANK™ platform, a virtual distributed biorepository currently utilized by numerous researchers and institutions. His team was responsible for design and implementation of PRO-ACT project that created the largest clinical dataset in ALS (10,700+ subjects) and is the de-facto reference dataset in ALS research. This platform was selected as the Best Bio-IT project of 2013 by the Bio-IT World Congress. Alex served on the NINDS Common Data Elements committee, is the Chair of the NeuroBANK™ committee of NEALS.

Sr Grp Leader

Shantanu Singh is a senior group leader in the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute. He leads a data science group that develops computational and statistical methods to create fingerprints of genes, chemicals, and diseases from microscopy images of cells. Using assays like Cell Painting that capture a broad range of their morphological properties, cellular populations are characterized at single-cell resolution to discover similarities and differences among treatments. This work has the potential to transform how both the targets and therapies for disease are identified. After completing his PhD at Ohio State in computer science, Shantanu joined the Imaging Platform, inspired by the group’s vision to make cell morphology as computable as genomes. He has previously worked in research groups at Mercedes-Benz R&D, GE Global Research, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he applied computer vision and machine learning techniques to a wide range of problems in road safety, cell biology, and geospatial imaging.

Lead Solution Engineer

No bio available.

Consultant

Dr Christopher Southan, works at the interface between bioinformatics, cheminformatics, pharmacology and drug discovery. His current role as Principle Consultant at TW2 informatics in Göteborg, Sweden was preceded by Senior Cheminformatian for the Edinburgh University BPS/IUPHAR Guide to Pharmacology database team 2013-18. Prior to this he set up TW2Informatics, engaging in patent data consulting for SureChem (2011-12) and the AstraZeneca Knowledge Engineering Program for testing and documenting Chemistry Connect (2009-11). During 2008-9, he coordinated the ELIXIR Database Provider Survey at the EBI, preceded by a Principle Scientist and Bioinformatics Team Leader position in AstraZeneca, Mölndal (2004-7) preceded by senior bioinformatics positions at Oxford Glycosciences Gemini Genomics and SmithKline Beecham. He has a PhD in Protein Chemistry from the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich and a BSc Hons in Biochemistry from Dundee University (further information on LinkedIN).

Chief Product Officer

As Chief Product Officer, Paul leads Scality’s global marketing organization across both product and corporate marketing.  Paul’s experience spans 20+ years of industry experience in both Fortune 500 companies such as IBM and Oracle as well as several successful startups.

Professor

Ola Spjuth is Professor in Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences leading a research group on Intelligent systems for drug discovery and chemical safety. Research activities are focused on how automated high-throughput and high-content molecular and cell profiling technologies coupled with AI and predictive modeling on modern e-infrastructures can enable us to study complex phenomena in pharmacology, toxicology and metabolism. Research group website: https://pharmb.io/

Lead Discovery Informatics Data Management

Andreas Steinbacher is a trained mechatronic engineer and holds a PhD in Physics. Before starting his academic career, he was working on improving measurement and regulation systems for large-scale chemical production sites. During his physics studies, he explored the biophysics space before he focused on method development and automated data analysis in analytical, physical chemistry during his PhD and postdoctoral positions. He joined Roche Pharma Research and Development (pRED) to work on a digital lab automation platform and laboratory informatics (Registration, Inventory, LIMS & ELNs) in general. Besides that, he works together with Data Scientists and Researches to bring advanced analytics and machine learning to the research laboratory.

Global Head

Etzard leads the global Information/Knowledge Management effort in Pharma Technical Development for F. Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, with a focus on processes and tools for effective knowledge utilisation. Etzard has worked at the interface of the Life- and Computer-Sciences for more than 20 years, in technical, managerial as well as strategic roles. Before joining Roche, Etzard worked as CIO at the Jackson Lab (a US based genomics research institutes), and was CTO for the Life Sciences at Hewlett Packard (a large technology vendor). Etzard has earned academic degrees in Biology, Bio-Informatics and Informatics, with a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich on "A Scalable Architecture for Scientific Databases”.

Head Developer

No bio available.

Physician Scientist

Iman Tavassoly MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Systems Biology in Mount Sinai Institute for Systems Biomedicine of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He works in the field of cancer systems biology and precision oncology.

Consultant

Zahid is a consultant at the Pistoia Alliance, a not-for-profit members’ organization working to lower barriers to innovation in life science and healthcare R&D through pre-competitive collaboration.

Executive Director

The Pandemic Response Commons (PRC) represents a collaborative data ecosystem powering research to improve health outcomes, epidemiological models, and back-to-work models. It is developed and operated by a private-public partnership managed by a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation. The PRC was launched as a central and secure ecosystem for COVID-19 health data. The founding members of the consortium consist of hospital and nonprofit partners who are agreeing to share and co-locate deidentified patient data and convene to ensure this data can inform predictive models related to diagnostics, treatment and the overall behavior of the virus. Our first regional instance, The Chicagoland COVID-19 Commons, will use the data contribution of large medical providers, nonprofit hospitals and safety net partners to help us address the racial and socioeconomic disparities that have been exacerbated by COVID-19 in the Chicagoland and Illinois regions. In return, our members will have the potential to apply the collective clinical insights generated by the commons. With these capabilities, the data commons will enable clinicians at safety net organizations to yield insights on similar populations.

Sequencing Strategic Development

No bio available.

Founder & Owner

Kees studied Computer Science and Bioinformatics, for which he did his research project on lipoprotein metabolism at TNO Quality of Life in The Netherlands and the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, Boston. Through his many years of experience in open source software and standards development in bioinformatics, Kees has gained a deep understanding of all aspects of collaborative open source development. He founded The Hyve to facilitate open source software development in bioinformatics and clinical research.

Sr Scientific Consultant

As a PhD geneticist, Van Etten contributes the perspective of a scientist in helping clients solve their computer-aided research problems. Van Etten honed his informatics skills at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research at MIT before co-founding BioTeam in 2002. Since then he has specialized in the development of informatics software with a keen eye toward ease of use. Van Etten received his Doctorate of Philosophy in Genetics at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Following his graduate research Bill was Senior Software Engineer at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research where he contributed to the genetic mapping of the rat, and was the Head of Informatics for the Mouse Radiation Hybrid Mapping Project as well as Whitehead’s contribution to the SNP Consortium. Bill was involved with the generation of 2 million DNA sequences, and the discovery of 1.4 million Human SNPs; having developed and optimized novel algorithms for SNP discovery. He took these high-throughput computing research skills to Blackstone Computing as Principal Bioinformaticist where he designed, built and configured environments to support computer-aided research for life sciences.

Dir Biology & Preclinical IT

Dana Vanderwall is Director of Biology & Pre-Clinical IT at Bristol-Myers Squibb and is responsible for the strategy to enable data flow, analytics, knowledge capture, and provide general laboratory informatics capabilities to the Biology, Pharmaceutical Candidate Optimization, Drug Safety Evaluation and Veterinary Sciences functions at BMS. He is Chair of the Allotrope Foundation Board of the Directors, contributes projects within the Pistoia Alliance and is Fellow of the Society for Lab Automation and Screening. Prior to joining BMS Dana was at GlaxoSmthKline and Merck, and integrates experience from work in Computational Chemistry, Cheminformatics, Computational & Structural Biology, and Biochemistry. He received his BS in Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin, and his PhD in Biochemistry at University of Maryland.

Chief Customer Officer - Globus

Vas leads the customer team for Globus, an innovative software-as-a-service for research data management, developed and operated by the University of Chicago. He works with current and prospective users to grow adoption of the service and make it self-sustaining. Vas is also a lecturer in the Master's Program in Computer Science, where he teaches courses on Cloud Computing and Product Management. Vas has 30 years of experience in operational and consulting roles, spanning strategy, marketing and technology. He has nurtured early stage companies into successful businesses, and consulted to companies on a wide range of strategic issues. Vas holds an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Assoc Prof

I conduct research in computational molecular biology with a particular interest on RNA structural bioinformatics and cheminformatics. I also develop applications of crowdsourcing and human-computing techniques to bioinformatics, a field of research I contributed to pionneer with the citizen science video game Phylo DNA Puzzles. I received a PhD in Computer Science from École Polytechnnique (France) in 2004 under the mentorship of Jean-Marc Steyaert. From 2005 to 2006, I was a post-doctoral researcher in the group of Peter Clote at Boston College, and in 2006 I moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I was an instructor in applied mathematics under the mentorship of Bonnie Berger. In 2009, I joined the School of Computer Science at McGill University as faculty member. I am a recipient of the Tomlinson Scientist Award in 2012, and the Fessenden Professorship in Science Innovation in 2013. You can learn more about my research on my laboratory website. If you want to join the lab, you can find more information about how to apply for a position in my group on my research website. We do currently have several open PhD student positions.

Chief Technology Officer

No bio available.

Principal Technology Lead

Monica currently leads the Biology (including Biologics) Capabilities and Products in Takeda Scientific Informatics. She comes with multidiscipline education with PhD in Biochemistry and MSc in Software Engineering. She has 8+ years of experience in academic research and 15+ years of experience in Research Informatics in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. She is good at strategic planning with proven successful track records of managing complicated global enterprise informatics projects. She has delivered many informatics projects/programs within time and budget for many departments (Global Biologics, Molecular Pathology, Protein Science, Biotherapeutics, Translational Medicine and Legal IP, et al). She is technically and scientifically proficient in Bioinformatics, Cheminformatics, Functional Genomics, and Pharmacogenomics. Her team has designed and implemented many global enterprise informatics solutions to support biologics research, biomarker discovery, translational research and personalized medicine. Her recent focus is concentrated on building a state-of-art Global Biologics Platform to support the global biologics R&D research in Oncology, GI and CNS across Takeda.

Director, IT for Translational Medicine & Informatics & Predictive Sciences

Albert Wang is the Director of IT Business Partnering for Translational Medicine and for Informatics & Predictive Sciences at Bristol-Myers Squibb. He has 20 years of experience in designing and building technologies for accelerating all phases of drug research & development, from early target identification to biomarker discovery to post-launch medical research. Currently, his focus is on executing an enterprise-wide digital health data strategy for integrating patient-centric data across BMS, including clinical trial data, molecular data, and real-world evidence. He has a Bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering and a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Founder and CEO

As Founder and CEO, Lu is the driving force behind Komodo. A Harvard alumnus with broad experience in Data Science, Engineering, and Analytics, Lu brings a range of perspectives to every business challenge.

VP, Product Strategy

Scott Weiss manages the Products team and is responsible for IDBS’ portfolio of enterprise software, with a focus on delivering products that enable organizations to drive business transformation by fostering operational efficiency, innovation, and cost savings. Prior to joining IDBS, Scott was Director of Pharmacology at Vernalis, where he led multiple drug-development programs from conceptualization to entry in clinical trials and has authored over 30 peer-reviewed scientific papers and patents. 

Consultant

No bio available.

Co-Founder

Dr Vaughan Wittorff is Co-Founder of PetaGene and Chief Commercial Officer. Before PetaGene, Vaughan spent 11 years founding and managing Cambridge startups in computer networking, and biotechnology monitoring systems. He was previously a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and he holds a PhD (physics) from the University of Cambridge.

Solutions Architect

Brian Woznik is a senior solutions architect at Igneous, a industry leading data
management platform focused on the protection, movement, and visibility of
large scale unstructured data platforms. Brian has spent 22 years in IT
focused on Data Management and Storage. He graduated from University of
Massachusetts with a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science.

Professor

Dr. Yeung received her Ph.D. in computer science from University of Washington Seattle. Her current research focuses on the development of methods and software tools that leverage cloud and container technology that will allow biomedical researchers to build modular reproducible bioinformatics workflows. In particular, she is strongly committed to develop publicly available software tools for the biomedical community to facilitate reproducible research of big biomedical data.

Dir & Head Global Portfolio Mgmt

Grace You is currently leading Global Portfolio Valuation and Analytics for the Healthcare Sector of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. Prior to that, Grace led key strategy and analytics projects at MilliporeSigma, the Life Science Sector of Merck KGaA and a premier Life Science company. Previously, Grace was a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, working with a range of global pharmaceutical companies across their top priority strategy and implementation projects. Grace holds a PhD in Neurobiology from Harvard University, and a BS in Chemistry & Biology from Tsinghua University.

Sr Scientist

No bio available.

Head

Responsible for ensuring that Biogen has access to cutting edge NGS pipelines and methodologies, delivering genomic analysis to support portfolio projects, and implementing novel big data mining solutions to enable biologists to interact with high dimensional omics and genetics data sets.

Founder & CEO

Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov is the founder and CEO of InSilico Medicine, a global leader in the next-generation artificial intelligence technologies for drug discovery, biomarker development, and aging research. At InSilico, he pioneered the applications of generative adversarial networks and reinforcement learning techniques for generating the novel molecular structures with the desired properties and generation of synthetic biological and patient data. His group was the first to develop the deep-learned multi-modal predictors of age for drug discovery and biomarker development. He set up the R&D centers in 6 countries, including the United Kingdom, Korea, Russia, Hong Kong SAR, and Taiwan ROC. Prior to founding InSilico Medicine, Dr. Zhavoronkov worked in senior roles at ATI Technologies (acquired by AMD in 2006), NeuroG Neuroinformatics, and YLabs.AI and established the AgeNet.net competitions and Diversity.AI initiatives. He is co-founder and CSO of the Biogerontology Research Foundation (BGRF), a registered UK charity focusing on age-related diseases. Since 2012, Dr. Zhavoronkov published over 120 peer-reviewed research papers and 2 books, including “The Ageless Generation: How Biomedical Advances Will Transform the Global Economy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). From 2014 to 2018, he presented at over 200 academic and industry conferences. Dr. Zhavoronkov serves on the editorial boards of some of the highest-impact journals in the field, including Aging, Aging Research Reviews, Frontiers in Genetics of Aging, Trends in Molecular Medicine, and chairs the Annual Aging Research for Drug Discovery Forum (6th annual in 2019) at the Basel Life. Dr. Zhavoronkov holds two bachelor degrees from Queen’s University, a master’s in Biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD in Physics and Mathematics from Moscow State University. He is the adjunct professor of artificial intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

VP & Head of Medical Analytics & Insights Research

Kelly Zou, PhD, PStat®, FASA is Vice President, Head of Medical Analytics & Insights, R&D and Medical, Upjohn Division, Pfizer Inc. She is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and an Accredited Professional Statistician. Previously, she was Senior Director, Global Real World Evidence Center of Excellence, as well as Senior Director, Statistical Center for Outcomes, Real World & Aggregate Data at Pfizer Inc. She was Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, as well as Director of Biostatistics at its affiliated teaching hospitals. She was Associate Director of Rates at Barclays Capital. She received both MA and PhD degrees in Statistics from the University of Rochester. She completed her Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard. Her research interests include health policy, real world evidence, signal detection, and artificial intelligence, with over 140 professional articles and 4 books. She has served as Chair, Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies Awards; Chair and Secretary, ASA Health Care Policy Statistics Section; Chair and Vice Chair, ASA Statistical Partnerships among Academe, Industry, and Government Committee; Chair-Elect, ASA Text Mining Interest Group. She was featured as an Outstanding Woman in Data Analytics by Forbes, an Inspirational Women in Statistics & Data Science by Wiley and the Royal Statistical Society, and an Accomplished Woman in Statistics and Data Science by the ASA.


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