Adam R. Abate received an AB in Physics from Harvard College in 2002, a Masters in Physics from UCLA in 2004, and a PhD in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. He returned to Harvard for a postdoc in Physics in the lab of David Weitz, working on a variety of topics in soft matter physics, chemical and microparticle synthesis, and microfluidics. While a postdoc, he developed a droplet-based microfluidic sequencer that became the foundation for the sequencing company GnuBIO. He has founded several additional companies, including Mission Bio, Fluent Bio, and Scribe Biosciences. He is a Professor at the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences and an Investigator in QB3. His research interests are in microfluidics, single cell analysis, and genomics.

Nancy L. Allbritton is the Frank & Julie Jungers Dean of Engineering and Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington in Seattle (2019- current). From 2009-2019, she was the Kenan Professor of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering and Chair of the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and North Carolina State University (NC State). Her research focuses on the development of novel technologies for applications in single-cell analysis, micro-arrays and fluidics, and organ-on-chip and has resulted in over 180 full-length journal publications and patents and led to 15 commercial products. Four companies have been formed based on her research discoveries: Protein Simple (acquired by Bio-Techne in 2014), Intellego, Cell Microsystems (www.cellmicrosystems.com), and Altis Biosystems (www.altisbiosystems.com). Dr. Allbritton is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering, and the National Academy of Inventors. She obtained her B.S. in physics from Louisiana State University, M.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and Ph.D. in Medical Physics/Medical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.

Green is a graduate student in Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi’s lab at Stanford University. She received her B.S. in biochemistry from University of Southern California and moved to Stanford to start her graduate studies in chemistry. Her research in the Bertozzi lab focuses on lysosome targeting chimeras (LYTACs) to degrade extracellular and membrane proteins via endolysosomal pathway.

During my time at the University of California, Irvine I conducted research in the lab of Dr. Frederick Ehlert which involved analyzing the effect of muscarinic receptors in the heart. I also conducted research at Quest Diagnostics in the lab of Matthew Houston which involved examining the changes in serum proteins in patients infected with the dengue virus. Upon attending USC, I rotated in both Dr. Alachkar’s and Dr. MacKay’s research groups. This allowed me to utilize recombinant protein bioengineering from Dr. MacKay’s rotation and apply that to pharmacogenomics and leukemia projects studied with Dr. Alachkar. Thanks to both mentors, I now possess complementary techniques. More specifically, I can generate elastin like polypeptides fused to scFv domains that target FLT3 and CD99. Throughout my studies I gained a deep interest in immunology, and this sparked my interest in developing different immunotherapeutics to combat AML.

"Courtney Anderson is director of product marketing at Deepcell in Menlo Park, California, which is leveraging high-speed cell imaging and AI to deeply characterize and analyze cell morphology. Prior to joining Deepcell, Dr. Anderson led spatial product marketing at 10x Genomics and before that she led the applications group at ACD focused on spatial biology. Dr. Anderson received her bachelor's degree in human biology from Brown University and her Ph.D. in molecular and developmental biology from UCSF, and completed her postdoctoral studies in metabolic biology at the University of California Berkeley. "

Arndt Asperger is analytical chemist by training and got his PhD from Leipzig University in Germany. He joined Bruker in 2002 and has been working in various positions related to MALDI-MS applications and applications development. His current focus is on applications development and customre support of MALDI-MS based high-throughput methods.

Paul Auspitz is a graduate of Thomas Jefferson University with a BS degree in Finance and IT Systems Management. He has a 25 year track record of success as a trusted digital solutions expert, and adviser to business leaders in highly regulated research driven organisations. Prior to his current role as Director of Preclinical Solutions and Standards for Exchange of Nonclinical Data (SEND) services for Xybion Digital he spent five years in a similar role with Instem, Plc and also has experience including SAP EWM, SCM and sterilization consulting as well as MS 365 Business and Operations solution sales. Paul Auspitz has spent eight years successfully helping organizations address and manage SEND across preclinical research and development businesses.

"Jeff leads product and business development and customer support and success at Celltrio. He has three decades of experience innovating, developing, and delivering robotic automation for high-throughput, high-reliability applications in all industries including Life Sciences. His passion is to drive growth and innovation at Celltrio to establish global leadership in cell line automation and biobanking. 

Prior to joining Celltrio in 2018, Jeff held key roles in product and technology development including CTO at FP International, VP of Global Automation at Flextronics and VP of Engineering and Operations at Adept Technology. He has a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kentucky."

Dr David Baker earned his PhD from The University of Sheffield in 2015 for investigating the role of astrocytes in SOD1-related amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Following a short post-doctoral spell, David joined the Cellular Assay Development team in AstraZeneca, initially supporting Neuroscience and Oncology projects but with an ever-growing interest in complex models and assays for Immuno-Oncology . In 2020 David secured a position specialising in assay development for cellular therapies and as of 2022 is leading a small team working on wide-ranging projects encompassing whole genome pooled and arrayed CRISPR screens through to bespoke co-culture models for immuno-oncology projects.

Felix Beltran is the Western US Sales Manager for Refeyn.  Felix started his commercial career in lab automation with emphasis in clinical diagnostics, and immunoassays.  Felix joined Refeyn because of their impressive, innovative technology in 2022.  Felix loves helping scientists by introducing new technology that makes their work easier – stop by the Refeyn booth for a chat.

Dr Anthony Berger is CN Bio’s US-based Field Application Scientist, providing support for the PhysioMimix™ Organ-on-Chip benchtop platform. Anthony has an extensive research background in 3D cell culture, biomaterials, and microfluidics, focusing on how the microenvironment influences cellular decision-making. He is a proponent of complex 3D in vitro models and desires to decrease the barrier to entry of these technologies. Anthony received his BS from Indiana University (US), PhD from the University of Wisconsin (US), and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Temple University (US).

"Ryan Bernhardt is the Chief Commercial Officer for Biosero where he leads Business Development opportunities through strategic partnerships, collaborations, and commercial agreements to increase diverse market penetration for Biosero’s industry-leading Green Button Go automation scheduling software suite.

In this role, Ryan also oversees Biosero’s productization roadmap and strategic focus as it relates to Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Applications, and Business Development.  Prior to joining Biosero, Ryan Bernhardt, spent the last six and half years at Eli Lilly and Company as the Global Discovery Automation Research and Technologies Group Leader, leading a team of automation engineers and scientists in the design, implementation, and operation of a variety of innovative automation initiatives across Research and Development Laboratories."

\

"With over 34 years of industry experience, Donna Bibber has developed thousands of miniaturized devices incorporating micro molding and automated assembly. Ms. Bibber received her Bachelor of Science in Plastics Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and is currently the CEO of Isometric Micro Molding, Inc. 

Ms. Bibber’s plastics engineering background, expertise and unique problem-solving skills have earned her an excellent reputation and national and international recognition for her work in micro manufacturing. She has been a featured speaker at medical and drug delivery conferences across the globe and has published countless technical papers on micro molding and micro assembly.

Her expertise in bioresorbable polymers and active ingredient combination devices, slow-release devices, ophthalmic devices and implants, glucose monitoring and insulin-delivery devices, neurological implants, biosensors, and oncology markers have given rise to many platform-type miniaturized devices commercially available today."

"Karen Billeci began her career at Genentech She have 19 years of experience developing cell based and biochemical assays to support process development, in vivo pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies, and in vitro molecular characterization in a GLP/GMP, clinical and research environment. Her work in this area has resulted in the lead or co-authorship of 14 publications, and 2 patents.

In 2008, her area of focus shifted to an operation role where she worked to develop automation and build efficiencies in lab processes to support high through put generic assays used to support stable cell line development and in vivo studies.  

In 2016 Karen continue to gain experience building high throughput operation at genomic engineer, CROs and diagnostic companies.  In 2022, Karen join Recursion where she has been to apply her background and experience to build a robust and stable phenomics high throughput operation."

Patrick Bingham is a Senior Scientist in the Biochemistry Department of the Oncology Research Unit at Pfizer, Inc. Patrick has more than 20 years of experience developing and implementing biochemical and cell based assays for target identification and validation, screening and lead identification. Currently, Patrick uses Rapid Fire Mass Spectrometry along with traditional biochemical approaches to develop assays for evaluation of epigenetic and metabolism targets within oncology research enabling a deep understanding of target biology and model systems.  Patrick is an active member of The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening and has presented his research and contributions to the field of Mass Spectrometry at past annual meetings.

Multifaceted, cross-functional leader who seamlessly meshes his scientific and automation background with his top-notch business education. Innovative visionary with 20 years of successive career advancement in the life sciences industry, focused on automated platform development, process improvement, and value chain optimization. Specialties: - Technology development and implementation - Automation systems, including design & fabrication - Innovative solutions, efficiency, and value creation - Compound management operations - Biobank operations - Staff development and cultivation - Cross-functional team building - Change management leadership - Lean Sigma analysis and implementation - Project Management - Product Development - Self-motivated innovation - Creative problem solving - (Calculated) risk taking - Thinking outside the box - Being able to see the big picture

Glenn Brandon, Chief Executive Officer and one of the founding members of SentrySciences, brings 30+ years of sales and service experience serving both the High Technology Electronics and Pharmaceutical Markets. Prior to SentrySciences, Glenn was the Global VP of Sales and Service for Particle Measuring Systems, Inc., responsible for a global network of sales and service offices focused on the Semiconductor, Data Storage and Pharmaceutical Markets. In this capacity, he oversaw both direct and indirect sales and service resources and was responsible for the development and execution of global sales and service strategies.

The Braverman lab at the Innovative Genomics Institute is beginning operations Q1 2023, focusing on developing precision organoid models across a number of health applications including cancer, infectious disease, and rare/neglected diseases. Research directions include studying the tissue-level biology of colon cancer with the aim of identifying synthetic vulnerabilities, developing organoid co-culture models to facilitate development of next generation immunotherapies, and leveraging CRISPRa/i tools to study host/pathogen interactions and therapeutically modulate immune responses.

Simon Briel holds a Master's degree in Applied and Molecular Biotechnology MS from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and is currently pursuing a Master's degree MS in Management & Engineering from RWTH Aachen University Business School and the University of Cambridge. He began his career in research at Technical University of Berlin and joined Beckman Coulter Life Sciences in late 2019 as a Global Product Manager. In this role, Simon seeks to streamline users' needs, technical innovation and internal strategies. His aim is to aid the development and optimization of cell culture & microbial bioprocesses. In symbiosis with cell line and strain engineering this is posing a huge potential to drive innovation in biotechnology.

"Paul is the CEO at CN Bio, having joined in 2022. He has over 25 years of experience in building businesses and leading high-performance research, product, marketing, and sales teams to develop and commercialize new biotechnology technologies globally for drug discovery, bioproduction and diagnostics.

Paul has held senior leadership positions in the USA and the UK, including Head of Business Operations and Managing Director of Horizon Discovery Ltd; Chief Commercial Officer and Executive Board member of Oxford Genetics Ltd; Head of Discovery Research Services at MilliporeSigma (Merck KGaA); and Global Marketing Manager at Sigma-Aldrich Corp. Paul has a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Wales, a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), and an MBA from the University of Nottingham Business School."

Dr. Cyrill Brunner is a trained pharmacist and obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich in the group of Prof. Gisbert Schneider. His main background are numerous biophysical assays including SPR and computational drug design. He joined Bruker as application specialist in April 2020 and heads the SPR application lab in Fällanden, Switzerland.

"Marybeth Burton is Executive Director, Discovery Sample Management at Merck in Rahway, NJ, USA.  Marybeth leads Merck’s global Discovery Sample Management and is responsible for small molecule and peptide compound management, high throughput purification, commercial chemical inventory management, and discovery chemistry operations.  Her group monitors compound collection quality and participates in efforts to continuously improve both stewardship and composition of Merck's small molecule compound collection.  Marybeth has been involved with process optimization efforts and development of new workflows to support changing sample management needs resulting from globalization of drug discovery efforts.  Marybeth and her team recently completed a multiyear major infrastructure upgrade which includes new automation platforms and processes for small molecule and peptide sample management.

Prior to her tenure at Merck, Marybeth led the compound management group at Schering-Plough.  Marybeth holds a B.A. in Biology and an M.S. in Information Science."

My name is Jessica Bush, I am a fifth year PhD student in The Disney Lab at The Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology (formerly The Scripps Research Institute). My work focuses on the identification of novel small molecules targeting pathogenic RNA structures to modulate downstream disease pathology and biological phenotypes. The majority of my PhD has been devoted to the identification of small molecules that target the stable r(G4C2)exp repeat hairpin in C9orf72 that has been identified as the most prevalent cause of heritable amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

"Keeping a continual focus on optimizing laboratory productivity, particularly in an increasingly global environment, Bjoern has been contributing to the development of international standards for well over a decade. He is a technical expert contributing to the efforts of standards development committees of ISO, ASTM International, and CLSI. 

Filling a void in testing guidance for users of automated liquid handling systems, Bjoern was one of the industry experts who proposed the development of ISO/IWA 15. He then served as project leader and technical editor for the development of the ISO 23783 series of standards for automated liquid handling systems, which was published in August 2022.  

As technical expert, Bjoern has been contributing to the 2022 revision of the ISO 8655 series of standards, serving as lead author and project leader for the new Part 8 “Photometric reference measurement procedure for the determination of volume” and project leader and technical editor for the revision of Part 7 “Alternative measurement procedures for the determination of volume.” He is the lead author and project leader for the development of Part 10 “User guidance, and requirements for competence, training, and POVA suitability.” 

Bjoern serves as chair of the ASTM E41.06 subcommittee Laboratory Instruments and Equipment and was the project leader and technical editor for the 2022 revision of ASTM E1154 “Piston or plunger operated volumetric apparatus and operator qualification.” 

Head of Applications team at FUJIFILM CDI since 2012.

Rebecca Carlson is a PhD candidate co-advised by Paul Blainey and Nir Hacohen at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. She is completing a degree in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT with a Concentration in Computer Science. She has also received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Michigan State University with a minor in Chinese.

"Engineer by training in biological sciences, Olivier Casamitjana acquired 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Successively at Pfizer and Solvay-Fournier, Olivier worked in the domains of assay development, high throughput screening and management of sample patrimony. Then Olivier worked within Sanofi during 10 years. He was successively project leader of large automated stores for compound management and of a LIMS’ implementation to manage the inventories, the workflows and the robotics interfaces. 

Olivier Casamitjana has been the global coordinator of the Sanofi compound management group, notably in charge of the strategy and key partnership and led the Toulouse Sample Management group during 8 years. Then, Olivier held an MBA program from Toulouse Business School and led, as a deputy, a technological & translational platform (integrated Drug Discovery), aiming at developing external business.

In 2015, Olivier joined Evotec and leads the screening and compound management department of Evotec France and he is part of the senior leader team in charge of the company’s strategy. In January 2017, he became SVP global head of compound management in charge of the business development and drive the operation in this domain. 

Active member of the club robotique and then ELRIGfr since 1999, Olivier has been elected in June 2013, president of Elrigfr (European Laboratory Robotics Interest Group – Francophone)."

Lead Automation Engineer

Dr. Natalie Castellana is CEO of Abterra Biosciences in San Diego, CA.  She is passionate about mapping the natural immune response to challenge, particularly the relationship between the B-cell receptor repertoire encoded in B cells and secreted antibodies in serum.  Abterra Bio specializes in next generation antibody discovery and sequencing, leveraging machine learning to mine the immune repertoire of llamas, alpacas, rabbits, and humans.  She earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California - San Diego, and BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Working at the interface between automation and biology for most of my scientific career, I have worked on high throughput systems in many settings, from early high throughput molecular biology platforms to my current role leading the High Throughput Antibody Expression team within Biopharm Discovery at GSK where the Small Scale Antibody Expression System is based.

Rebecca Berdeaux, Ph.D., is Vice President of Science at CellChorus, the leader in dynamic single cell analysis. Using her expertise in dynamic cellular signaling and leadership of scientific teams, she is overseeing development of single-cell analysis assays for immunooncology and other areas of the life sciences. Dr. Berdeaux earned a B.S. in Biology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from University of California, Berkeley. Following postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute, she took a faculty position at the McGovern Medical School of University of Texas Health, Houston. Dr. Berdeaux’ academic research program focuses on molecular signaling mechanisms in type 2 diabetes and muscle regeneration. Her lab has created numerous conditional transgenic mouse models to cAMP signaling in physiological and pathophysiologic contexts, including mice for tissue-specific chemical-genetic activation of cAMP signaling and non-invasive bioluminescent imaging of cAMP-activated transcription in vivo. She is passionate about developing methods to visualize and rigorously quantify cell behavior at single-cell resolution. 

I am a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia developing single-cell assays paired with machine learning analytics. My career goal is to become a scientist and engineer in an industry-based institution in the field of cell biology. In my career, I aim to develop new single-cell screening technologies which will aid in understanding how, and to what end, sub-populations of cells and tissues respond to pharmaceutical intervention. To date, a significant number of pharmaceutical studies have focused on characterizing the bulk response of cellular and tissue groups to introduced therapeutics. However, these bulk screening methods assume that the cellular targets exhibit a homogeneous identity, which can lead to costly misalignments between in-vitro and in-vivo models. Shifting the discretization of pharmaceutical experiments from bulk to single-cells will aid in developing higher quality products, minimize therapeutic resistance, and expedite disease research.

Dr. Bevins has two decades of experience in research, clinical medicine, and the life sciences industry. He earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Columbia University then completed the Medical Scientist Training Program (MD-PhD) and residency in clinical pathology (laboratory medicine) at the University of California, San Diego. For five years he served the biopharma and diagnostics industry as a management consultant specializing in clinical development and go-to-market strategy. Dr. Bevins has more than 40 peer-reviewed publications and abstracts in genetics, clinical chemistry, and laboratory utilization. He volunteers on the Economic Affairs Committee for the Association of Molecular Pathology. Dr. Bevins is currently a free-lance commercial strategy consultant and clinical laboratory director.

Sanjeev Bhavnani MD FACC is a Senior Medical Advisor for Digital Health at FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), where he is a senior clinical expert and subject matter expert related to digital health medical devices. In his role at the CDRH Digital Health Center of Excellence, Dr. Bhavnani provides leadership for digital health policy development, technologies including artificial intelligence, and design considerations for DHTs and AI/ML clinical investigations including hybrid, decentralized, and virtual care clinical trials. Prior to joining the Agency, Dr. Bhavnani was the founder and executive director of Healthcare Innovation at Scripps Clinic in San Diego, CA and led the development of clinical trials and patient care programs that evaluated the safety and effectiveness of DHTs, nanosensor devices, cloud-based analytical platforms, and handheld ultrasound.  Over more than a decade, Dr. Bhavnani served as principal investigator of 90 DHT and AI clinical trials and patient care programs that have enrolled over 30,000 patients in the US and in resource limited areas and successfully designed the first point-of-care methods for DHT used within clinical trials.  His team developed the SMART-FHIR integration interface for DHT data into EMRs for remote patient monitoring, deployed enterprise-wide telehealth during COVID-19 achieving 1M+ telehealth visitations and created a learning health system real-world data platform to monitor healthcare quality of DHT and ML devices. Dr. Bhavnani is a practicing cardiologist and has held various leadership positions at national professional societies, advisory boards, think tanks, and educational institutions and has trained a global consortium of innovation scholars towards the advances in digital health.

Marc Bickle obtained his Ph.D. at the Biozentrum in Basel, Switzerland, studying the immunosuppressive drug Rapamycin in yeast. He studied the genetics of behavior in C. elegans at the LMB in Cambridge, UK. He then participated in the creation of Aptanomics a Biotech in Lyon, France. 

I am a research scientist at GenScript developing new DNA assembly paradigms that are suitable for automation. I am also optimizing the production of large numbers of plasmid for contract plasmid production and developing robotic platforms for this. Our goal is to use cutting edge DNA manufacturing protocols that scale up for producing vaccines, gene therapies and other CGT products.

Rajan Chaudhari is a Computational Chemistry Scientist at Eurofins Beacon Discovery in San Diego, CA. Chaudhari received his M.S. Bioinformatics degree in 2010 from the University of Sciences in Philadelphia and then his Ph.D. biochemistry (computational) in 2015 from the same institution. His doctoral work involved development of membrane protein structure prediction method and identification of novel GLP1R agonists. He completed postdoctoral training at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX, where he worked on variety of cancer therapeutic targets and modalities. Before joining Eurofins, Chaudhari worked as Senior Scientist at Lassogen, San Diego, CA, where he established computational chemistry capabilities and developed novel lasso peptide based preclinical candidates targeting GPCRs and integrins.

Shimul Chowdhury has served as a clinical laboratory director in multiple laboratories including Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine (RCIGM), Illumina Inc. and Quest Diagnostics. He has dedicated his career to implementing new genomic technologies to improve patient care and outcomes. He is a board-certified clinical molecular geneticist and licensed as a laboratory director in California, Florida and New York.

Eric Chow is the Director of the UCSF Center for Advanced Technology and former Head of Technology at the Laboratory for Genomics Research a collaborative center between UCSF, UC Berkeley, and GSK. He currently directs the UCSF Center for Advanced Technology, a facility focused on NGS, single cell sequencing, and high throughput auatomation.

Dr. Beth Cimini is a Senior Group Leader, CZI Imaging Scientist and head of the Cimini Lab in the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA.  She obtained a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn at UCSF, studying splicing variants of the telomere master scaffolding protein TIN2.  This work honed her interests in image analysis, leading her to postdoctoral and staff scientist roles with Dr. Anne Carpenter's lab at the Broad, leading a team collaborating with ~30 outside scientists per year on custom image analysis projects.  The Cimini lab focuses on bioimage analysis tool creation (Piximi) and maintenance (CellProfiler), as well as on applying open source tools to novel biological problems.  She created and directs the Platform's Postdoctoral Training Program in Bioimage Analysis, and also leads the Broad efforts towards community engagement and driving biological projects for the Center for Open Bioimage Analysis (COBA).

"Filippo Cipriani, PhD, is Principal Scientist at The New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute working on the Diabetes team. The team’s research focuses on developing robust models of diabetes using Pancreatic organoids derived from patient induced pluripotent stem cells. He recently received a NYSCF – Druckenmiller Fellowship Award.

In 2019, Dr. Cipriani completed his PhD in Biomedical Research at the University of Valladolid (Spain). Prior to his PhD, he was a Marie Curie Fellow working as Associate Researcher in the field of microfluidics and microsensors in the IMSAS Group at the University of Bremen, Germany. He completed his Bachelor degree in Environmental and Industrial Biotechnology in 2010 at the Faculty of Science of the University of Florence, Italy, followed by a Master degree in Molecular and Industrial Biotechnology at the Faculty of Science of the University of Pisa, Italy."

Maria Clapés holds an MSc in Bioengineering from the Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL). She joined the R&D department at SUN bioscience in 2020, where she established liver models on their proprietary platform, Gri3D®. In her current role as a Field Application Specialist, she supports sales and applications of SUN bioscience products. In a collaboration with Molecular Devices, she supports the experimental design and imaging on the SUN bioscience platform, Gri3D®, for human intestinal organoids.

"Roger is Head of High Throughput Screening (HTS) within Early Discovery at Charles River Labs (CRL). An experienced drug-discovery Bioscientist, Roger joined CRL in 2018 from AstraZeneca - where he had moved through various early discovery roles over ~19 years. His current remit sees him leading CRL’s HTS department - delivering assay development and execution of molecular target-based and phenotypic Hit ID campaigns for multiple client projects.

Over his pharmaceutical R&D career Roger has worked across many fields in early discovery including HTS, SAR Screening, High Content Biology and Laboratory Automation."

Joe Clayton is the Global Scientific Program Manager within the Cell Analysis division at Agilent. He received his Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Vermont and a M.S. in Clinical Research and Informatics from Dartmouth College. Joe has nearly 20 years of experience in diverse life science research with an emphasis on imaging-based application development and emerging technologies. 

Brad received his doctorate in biomedical engineering from Texas A&M University in 2013.  Holding several research positions, he has contributed to the development of a variety of analytical and microfluidic biotechnologies.  Since 2017, Brad has been working for Labcorp where he currently investigates and validates various novel capillary blood microsampling solutions as well as markers of neurodegeneration.

John founded 20/15 Visioneers after spending 30 years in R&D Biopharmas, Scientific Software and Consulting orgnizations where he focused on science and technology, computational sciences, informatics and strategy.  John and his teams have brought several scientiifc software platforms to market and have constantly strived to make a difference to science understanding and informatics.

Biography: Dr Patrick Courtney has 20 years industrial experience in technology development. He worked as Director for global firms such as PerkinElmer, as well as at Sartorius and Cap Gemini. He leads a European working group on analytical laboratory robotics and is member of board of directors of SiLA (Standards in Laboratory Automation). He holds an MBA with a PhD in Robotic Engineering/Molecular Biology, and has 100 publications and holds ten patents.

I have a PhD in the synthesis of insect defence secretions.  Following 12 years at British Petroleum working on automated analytical processes and the development of a cartesian robot system & software, I cofounded Process Analysis & Automation.  Now over 30 years on, Peak Analysis & Automation are now part of the Directech Group of Companies still developing cutting edge laboratory automation hardware & software solutions for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries and academic and research institutes.

"Software Product Manager at Hamilton Company in Reno, Nevada.

Alvaro has a bachelor´s in Biotechnology and has worked in the life science automation industry for over 17 years. He has occupied diverse roles on three continents as a distributor, product specialist, applications engineer, sales, sales manager, and product manager. He is an expert in Hamilton's software. "

"Luigi Da Via’ is a Team Leader in Analytical Development at GSK working in the high throughput automation group. 

He has a PhD in photochemistry and catalysis at the University of Liverpool (UK). In 2018 he was elected as a GSK Fellow which recognizes the top 5% R&D staff as established leaders of science and mentors.
His current research involves the design, development, and deployment of new automated workflows for the screening of physicochemical properties of new assets during preclinical drug development. 
His role is also focusing on establishing data management strategies to streamline the integration of robotic platforms and analytical instrumentation with the wider GSK IT infrastructure."

Dr. Robert Damoiseaux’s main interests are at the interface of chemistry, biology and engineering and include the development of novel assay technology platforms, High Throughput Screening, High Content Screening and nanotechnology. After having earned a Ph.D. degree at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) where he worked on directed molecular evolution of antibodies he joined the Novartis Institute for Functional Genomics (GNF) in La Jolla, CA in 2001. Since 2004 he is the Director of the Molecular Shared Screening Resources (MSSR) – a unique state of the art screening facility at the California NanoSystems Institute of UCLA where he directs all drug discovery as well as the functional genomics projects. His private research focuses on automation, novel assay systems and toxicological issues of small molecules and nano-materials and consults for the pharmaceutical industry and law firms as expert witness in patent litigation cases.

Libby Daniele joined Quartzy as a Customer Success Manager in 2022 after working as a Researcher and Lab Manager in academic and industry settings for over 7 years. As a former Quartzy user, she understands the perspective and needs of scientists using the platform. She is excited to continue helping labs organize and streamline their work on a larger scale.

"Prof Davies’ CEO Vale Life Sciences, Trinity College Dublin. 

Prof Davies has for the lattwo decades focused on the development of advanced in vitro cell-based models and the rapidly growing field of high content screening and analysis. 
 He has overseen and led the establishment of Research Centres in Europe and Oceania where his work was centred on understanding human disease. In 2005 he set up the Irish National Centre for High Content Screening and Analysis (INCHSA), based in the Department of Clinical Medicine at Trinity College Dublin, one of the first purpose built academic screening centres of its kind in Europe. Anthony has developed and commercialised a number of new technologies, most notably the worlds first liquid 3D cellular scaffold and solid-state Bioreactor technologies specifically designed for use in automated drug discovery. Prof Davies is now based in Brisbane Australia where he holds the position of CEO of Vale life Sciences who have developed a range of advanced cell culture technologies."

Dr. Christophe Deben is currently the head of the Tumoroid Screening lab at the University of Antwerp. In this position he combines his passion for cancer research with his interest in new technologies to develop more advanced 3D cancer models and automated drug screening assays. His team applies a multidisciplinary approach that combines cancer biology, live-cell imaging, and data science to find new combination strategies that target cancer cells more efficiently and to improve the prediction of a clinical response from ex vivo tumoroid drug screenings. As co-founder of Orbits Oncology, he aims to make advanced live-cell image analysis more accessible to academic researchers and facilitate the implementation of 3D cancer models. 

Prof. Dennis Della Corte leads the Life Science Analytics team as Chief Science Officer of ZONTAL and is the acting director of the Consortium of Molecular Design at Brigham Young University. His work is focussed on building the laboratory of the future, through better datasets, algorithms, training strategies. Formerly, he worked at Bayer AG as Global IT Project manager and obtained a PhD in Computational Biophysics at FZ Jülich in collaboration with Stanford University. He also holds Master's Degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics.

Dr. Daniela Dengler has been a lead scientist in the assay development group of the Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics (CPCCG) at Sanford Burnham Prebys (SBP) Medical Discovery Institute since 2018. Prior to joining SBP, Dr. Dengler obtained her Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, where she focused on organic synthesis and structure-based design of small molecules targeting G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). In her current role, Dr. Dengler seeks to exploit the tremendous untapped therapeutic potential of GPCRs by developing and optimizing novel automation-friendly methods tailored to identify small molecules that act on challenging GPCR targets or exhibit unique pharmacological profiles, such as biased agonism and allosteric modulation, which she believes will ultimately result in more effective and safe therapeutics.

I’m Marie DEPRESLE, an engineer assistant in BIORCELL3D consortium in France, more precisely in Clermont-Ferrand. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology five years ago. I have worked in cosmetic research in LVMH research center for a work-study contract and then in screening oncology field for a permanent contract. I mainly work in cell biology and fluorescence staining, and I am also responsible for our screening machines.

Dwayne is a seasoned life science commercial professional with 22 years’ experience in delivering novel life science research solutions to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, molecular diagnostic, and academic markets. As Director of Inventia US, he supports the commercialization and development efforts of the RASTRUM technology in North America. His scientific and business experiences have mainly focused on bringing innovative approaches and technologies to scientific problems. He has helped companies commercialize innovative technologies, including high-throughput drug screening products and services at Invitrogen and Bellbrook, high-content imaging platforms such as the GE In Cell and the Celigo imaging platform, single-cell isolation platforms from Menarini Silicon Biosystems, and most recently the Organ-On-a-Chip technology from Mimetas.

Dr. Yujia Ding (M.S., M.A.Ed., Ed.D.) is a STEM educator and disability advocate with a passion for sharing her love of biology with her students. She completed her Doctor of Education where she explores how to make STEM accessible to individuals with disabilities. Her personal experiences and her students motivate her to keep fighting every day, despite the challenges she faces. Dr. Ding was the Los Angeles Unified School District Rookie of the Year recipient for the 2020-2021 school year. In addition, she received Distinguished Teacher recognition from Dallas Independent School District for the 2022 - 2023 school year. She is a proud Northwestern University Alumna (B.A., M.S.) seeking to leave a positive impact for future generations of scientists. Dr. Ding strives to show her students nothing is impossible, the word itself spells "I'm possible".

Matt is a passionate and experienced research scientist with a background in chromatin biology and a focus on advanced imaging techniques and the application of computational approaches towards looking at biological data. He earned his PhD from MIT where he developed and applied novel imaging-based approaches towards interrogating the DNA damage response in the nervous system. Matt has worked towards bringing high-content imaging platforms and their corresponding data analysis pipelines online at several startups and bio-techs while simultaneously gaining exposure to the client and business-facing side of science.

John Doench is the director of research and development in the Genetic Perturbation Platform of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard,. He provides expert guidance on the design, execution, and analysis of genetic screens. He has contributed to numerous publications in fields such as infectious disease, cancer biology, and immunology. Additionally, Doench leads a group focused on the development of functional genomic techniques, first with RNAi and more recently with CRISPR technology. Here, his team demonstrated the potential of genetic screens with CRISPR and has since developed leading bioinformatics tools and screening libraries to enable community-wide usage of this powerful technology. Importantly, their efforts emphasize not only staying on the cutting edge of the newest approaches, but also focusing on making technologies widely available and useful, which is critical for enabling collaboration with a broader community of researchers working in diverse and challenging model systems.

Dr Audrey Dubourg is CN Bio’s Product Manager for the PhysioMimix™ OOC range of microphysiological systems. Prior to joining CN Bio, she worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA), in the US, in the Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics department. She completed an MSc in microbiology at the University of Montpellier II (France), followed by a PhD in microbiology/parasitology at the University of East Anglia (UEA), in the UK. Audrey has extensive experience in the disciplines of molecular biology and 3D mammalian cell culture. Since joining CN Bio, she has been actively involved in promoting the benefits of incorporating organ-on-a-chip technology into drug discovery and development workflows.

After studying Natural Sciences and Business & Administration at Utrecht University, Frans-Willem Duijnhouwer started his career at Capgemini as an internet consultant, after which he continued as an entrepreneur in IT. Through a startup in web archiving and a role as a project manager at Uselab, he and a partner started a company for mobile app development, called Mobile Agency. In addition, he has developed and sold an IOT platform at EasyIQ. In 2020, Frans-Willem started working at USoft, where he works with former Capgemini colleagues in the sales department. With his broad knowledge of ICT, Frans-Willem, in his role as pre-sales/business consultant, knows how to translate specifications into solutions for core systems based on a low code development methodology.

Originally from Dublin, Ireland, I have been at The Neuro for over 15 years. As an Associate Professor at The Neuro and McGill University, my research focus is on applying patient-derived stem cells towards the development of phenotypic discovery assays and 3D brain organoid models for both neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. As director of the Early Drug Discovery Unit (EDDU) at The Neuro, I oversee a team of over 45 research staff and trainees, committed to applying novel stem cell technology, combined with CRISPR genome editing, mini-brain models and new microfluidic technologies towards elucidating the underlying causes of these complex disorders. Integrating new approaches in the group towards building MultiOmics profiles on the patient-derived IPSC cells, the long-term strategy is to identify new personalized precision therapies that can be applied towards building clinical trials on a dish.

Nick Edwards, PhD is a Director of Business Development and Strategic Accounts at Science Exchange, an R&D services marketplace. He works with biotech companies to strategically make science move faster by improving outsourcing efficiency. Nick completed his PhD in Neuroscience at Brown University and a postdoc at UCSD. After working as a consultant at BCG, he spent time in commercial strategy and operations at Illumina. During his time at Resilience and Alloy Therapeutics, Nick gained firsthand experience in building and operating fast-scaling research organizations. Outside of his day job, Nick is a passionate advocate for science communication and careers. He hosts the Once a Scientist podcast, where he interviews scientists across diverse industries and functional roles to help early career researchers understand industry and academic career options.

"David Egan is the co-founder and CEO of Core Life Analytics, a Netherlands-based company that helps biologists to analyze their own data. Born in Carrickerry, Ireland, he completed his undergraduate training in Industrial Chemistry at the University of Limerick. He received his Ph.D. in 1997 from Cornell University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in New York, NY. 

After a post-doctoral fellowship at The Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA, and a position at OSI Pharmaceuticals in NY, he returned to Europe in 2003. In Utrecht, The Netherlands, while managing the Cell Screening Core at the Department of Cell Biology, he encountered the challenges of data analytics in phenotypic screening. This led to the development of the StratoMineR data analytics platform with Wienand Omta and the subsequent establishment of Core Life Analytics in 2016. Since then StratoMineR has been widely adopted in big pharma, biotech, and academic centers.

As part of the next stage of its development Core Life Analytics is launching the StratoVerse, a complete end- to-end, cloud-based, high-content analysis platform. It offers image storage in StratoMineR, high-performance image analysis in StratoScale, and downstream data analytics in StartoMineR, the current product."

R&D molecular diagnostics professional, 10+ years of experience, with drive for results, known for high productivity and delivering products, from concept through commercialization, to market in time. Extensive
knowledge of molecular biology high throughput laboratory systems and CLIA lab operations, analytical assay validation and clinical studies to supporting clinical utility for LDTs. Enthusiastic about learning and enabling tools and solutions contributing to the improvement of human health.

Patrick has spent 25 years in biotech, with 11 years directly supporting the PerkinElmer Drug Discovery Reagent portfolio in various Western US regions, namely the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego. Patrick’s experience spans early discovery assay development for HTS and SAR campaigns, to method development for biomarker analysis in clinical studies.

"Yaw Etse is the Vice President of Engineering and Lab Innovation at Invitae. His strategic focus is next-generation and fully autonomous lab operations, machine learning, and predictive analytics. In this role, Yaw leads scientists and engineers to build fully autonomous platforms, automated assay testing and virtualization, digital twin, continuous integration, and deployment of fully automated next-generation sequencing-based assays.

Yaw previously led platform engineering and the health care provider experience and engineering at Invitae.

Before joining Invitae, Yaw was the CTO of Promise Financial and Repetere and previously led engineering teams at American Express and Capital IQ.

He has a bachelor's degree from Cornell University and pursuing a Master's in Computer Science and Machine Learning from Johns Hopkins University."

Dr. Evans received her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio focusing on Serotonin 1A receptor pharmacology. She did a post-doc at the University of Houston, College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences concentrating on cardiovascular and respiratory pharmacology. Kenda joined Encysive Pharmaceuticals in the high throughput screening lab where she worked through many screening campaigns and had specific project management responsibilities. After 5 years with Encysive Pharmaceuticals, she joined PerkinElmer as a field application scientist with the high throughput screening reagents and plate readers group. In 2011 Kenda joined Agilent Technologies as a product specialist in the automation workflow group. Recently Kenda took on a new role as the Applications Workflow Specialist for the Automation Team where she continues to work to build out new applications using the Bravo liquid handler, AssayMAP Bravo and the Metabolomics Bravo for automated sample preparation.

Tiffany Fabianac started her career as a molecular neurobiologist focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms controlling peripheral nerve development and the development of Neurofibromatosis Type 2 therapies. She went on to manage 2 cellular and molecular neuroscience laboratories where she led the research and development of in-vitro and in-vivo models used in the development of treatments for Multiple Sclerosis, Diabetic Neuropathy, Neurofibromatosis, and Schwannomatosis. Tiffany followed her passion for coding and statistics into the world of bioinformatics consulting where she designed, developed, and implemented analytics and data science systems for 7 of the world's largest pharma and biotech research organizations. Currently, Tiffany supports Astrazeneca's data, analytics, and artificial intelligence teams by leading the strategy of and innovation in Data & AI technology for the enterprise.

I graduated from Northeastern University in May of 2022 with a B.S in Bioengineering and minors in Chemistry and Spanish. I began working as a co-op at Dragonfly Therapeutics, a medium-sized immunotherapy biotech, during my final year of undergraduate studies as an SPR user in their protein analytics group. I've been at Dragonfly since May 2021, took a full-time position in May of 2022, and since then my role has expanded into one of Dragonfly's primary SPR users. I recently attended SensorFest, hosted by David Myszka of Biosensor Tools in October of 2022, where I was able to deepen both my overall SPR knowledge and my understanding of how to design a high-quality experiment. I’m currently working towards a master’s degree in biotechnology from Harvard and am looking forward to advancing my career in the biotechnology industry!

After his PhD in Cell Biology with a focus on High Content Screening, Matthias worked for 4 years as an Application Scientist at PerkinElmer, Hamburg. In this role Matthias established new imaging assays and image analysis workflows for High Content Screening. With this strong background in HCS Matthias joined Genedata in 2014, where he started as a Scientific Account Manager for Genedata Screener. In 2017 Matthias became the Project Lead for Genedata Imagence, a next-generation image analysis software based on deep learning. Since 2021, Matthias is responsible for the product management of the Genedata Screener platform and Genedata Imagence.

Amy Files is a Scientist working on the Assays and Reagents team at Bionano Genomics in San Diego, CA. She has been at Bionano Genomics for the past 10 years working on several different aspects of research and development to push forward the field of Optical Genome Mapping (OGM). She was a key contributor for the sample extraction (SP) technology and helped lead the development of the current labeling technology, Direct Label and Stain (DLS), used for OGM. Her contributions to DLS won her the Distinction in Innovation award at Bionano in 2018. For the past year, she has focused her efforts on the development of automation of the SP workflow in collaboration with Hamilton. Prior to Bionano, Amy worked at various biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, including Merck and Sequenom. She received her B.A. in Biology and Chemistry from Point Loma Nazarene University.

Sascha Fischer discovered his passion for automation during his work for Hamilton and Tecan as an Application Specialist for Genomics and NGS. He graduated in Molecular-Medicine at the University of Tübingen and is currently in the final phase of his PhD studies in Neuropsychiatric Genetics at the University of Basel. In April 2021, Sascha joined Genedata as a Business Development Manager supporting Genedata Screener’s Automation Initiatives.

Matthias Fischer has a background in biomedical engineering, obtained in 2007 from the University of Applied Sciences, Jena, Germany. While completing his Ph.D. at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany, he developed a fluorescence-based fiber-optical biofilm sensor for studying biofilm formation dynamics in the field. In 2013, he joined the photonics group at the University of York, United Kingdom, as a postdoctoral researcher. Since 2017 Dr. Fischer's focuses on the design and development of lab automation systems to address liquid handling applications.

Jennifer Fournier is the Director of Product Marketing in the Chemistry group at Waters.  She joined Waters Corporation in 2004. She has worked in many different parts of the organization.  She started in Life Science Research and Development, then moved into the manufacturing group for the MassPREP line of standards and was  most recently the Product Marketing Manager for the Analytical Standards and Reagents group specifically all bioseparations standards, RapiGest, Amino Acid and Released N-Glycan analysis (AccQTag and GlycoWorks).  She received her B.S. in Biotechnology and M.S. in Biology from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Worcester, MA).  Prior to joining Waters she taught high school biology for a year and also worked in manufacturing for a small pharmaceutical company that manufactures Albuterol for inhalers.  Jennifer currently manages a team that markets and supports the Chemistry Technology Group.

Dr. Fragiadakis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine and The University of California, San Francisco. Her lab uses computational approaches to study states of the immune system, using single-cell omics data from patient samples in disease contexts including autoimmunity, viral infection, and cancer. She earned her PhD in Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University. As part of her research program she runs the Data Science CoLab, a collaboration-based research lab focused on the analysis and curation of single-cell data including single-cell sequencing and CyTOF, and is the scientific lead of the UCSF Data Library project.

Professor Paul French is Vice Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College London. He received his BSc in physics (1983) and PhD in laser optics (1987) from Imperial College London, where he joined the academic staff in 1994, having previously also worked at the University of New Mexico (1988) and at AT&T Bell Laboratories, (1990/91). Today his research group is based in the Physics Department at Imperial and in a satellite laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute. His research has evolved from ultrafast dye and solid-state laser physics to biomedical optics for applications in cell biology, drug discovery and clinical diagnosis. Current interests include the development and application of multidimensional fluorescence imaging technology for assays of biomolecular interactions, super-resolved microscopy, automated high content analysis, endoscopy and tomography, with open-source approaches to instrumentation, including hardware, data acquisition and analysis. 

Olivier Frey is Vice President and Head of Technology & Platforms at InSphero and leads the Microphysiological Systems and Organ-on-Chip programs. Before joining InSphero, he was group leader and SNF Ambizione fellow at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering of ETH Zurich, Switzerland on integrated microfluidic systems for single cell handling and 3D tissue cultures. He holds a Dr.Sc in Micro Engineering from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and an MSc in Microtechnology and Mechanics from ETH Zürich.

David Fuller is the co-founder and CEO of Artificial who is developing a first-of-its-kind software stack and tools to empower labs to close the loop from scientific intent to reliable results for AI-driven and Cloud-ready lab orchestration.   David has over 25 years of experience in industrial automation and software platforms.  He has held positions in business and technology in such fields as Measurement and Automation where he was the VP of SW R&D at National Instruments.  While at NI, the tools and platforms he built provided the foundation for unique systems as diverse as the CERN hadron collider and SpaceX ground control.  He and several of the technical team now at Artificial, along with many others at NI, partnered with LEGO to build LEGO Mindstorms a low-code tool for kids of all ages to program LEGO robots.  After NI, David focused on Industrial Robotic and Logistic systems as CTO of the KUKA Group and the Managing Director of KUKA Robotics. KUKA is the number one global supplier of high throughput robots for Automotive production.  He received his BS in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M and in 2011 was recognized by the Texas Academy of Medicine & Engineering for Technology Innovation. He holds 42 patents.  He is driven by a love of technology that has a clear positive impact on society.

John Fuller is the commercial product manager for Echo Drug Discovery at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was previously a field applications scientist for Labcyte. He holds a PhD. from the U.N.T Health Science Center and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Linda Gijzen is working as a Scientific Project Lead in the Model Development team at Mimetas where she is involved in the development and characterization of human based microfluidic models of the kidney, intestine, and immune oncology. Besides her position as Scientific Project Lead, she is doing a PhD at Mimetas and the University of Utrecht focusing on microfluidic disease models.

Dr. Logan Gin is the Assistant Director for STEM in the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University where he works on initiatives related to STEM graduate student and postdoc teaching professional development. Prior to arriving at Brown, Logan was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Arizona State University and served as the Program Manager for an NSF S-STEM program focused on involving community college transfer students in undergraduate research. Logan holds a Ph.D. in Biology from Arizona State University where his dissertation work centered around the experiences of STEM students with disabilities. He also has a B.S. in Biology and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Peter Girling began his career researching the mechanisms of disease in a variety of organ systems at universities in Australia, California, and Switzerland. He then studied business and entrepreneurship at Babson College (Massachusetts) and the EPFL and USI (Switzerland) prior to co-founding and becoming CEO of CELLnTEC Advanced Cell Systems, a life science company focusing on advanced in vitro models for research and regenerative medicine.  He has worked at Tessara since 2020 where he is involved in advancing production processes and establishing projects under the early-access program.

"Specialised in cell biology (more precisely in cancer drug resistance and 3D cell culture models) Antoine has realised its PhD works in the Clermont Auvergne University (within the BIORCELL3D consortium). His works were focused on the development of innovative protocols to preserve caner spheroid models (as alternatives to classic cryopreservation methods), and on the biological validation of fluorescent conjugates able to detect and quantify cancer drug Resistance.

Publications :
• The New Serum-Free OptiPASS® Medium in Cold and Oxygen-Free Conditions: An Innovative Conservation Method for the Preservation of MDA-MB-231 Triple Negative Breast Cancer Spheroids - Cancers – April 2021 – DOI : 10.3390/cancers13081945
• LightSpot®-FL-1 Fluorescent Probe: An Innovative Tool for Cancer Drug Resistance Analysis by Direct Detection and Quantification of the P-glycoprotein (P-gp) on Monolayer Culture and Spheroid Triple Negative Breast Cancer Models - August 2021 – DOI : 10.3390/cancers13164050"

Dr. Ilya Goldberg has played a leading role in the development of image informatics and machine learning for bio-medical imaging. At ViQi, Ilya leads development of automated cell-based imaging assays using AIs. Prior to ViQi, Ilya co-founded a company that developed the first medical device to receive regulatory clearance that uses an AI to help diagnose lung cancer in CT screening exams. Prior to this, Ilya led a research group at the NIH National Institute on Aging, developing machine learning software for image analysis in the life sciences, and studying the basic biology of aging. As a postdoc at MIT, Ilya co-founded the OME project, which continues to be used for imaging infrastructure in large image repositories. Ilya has over 60 peer-reviewed articles from his years at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, MIT, and NIH in molecular and cell biology, pattern recognition, image informatics, and aging.

"2008 Ph.D. Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, Howard Cedar's lab;

2008-2014 Postdoctoral Fellow: The Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA - Aviv Regev and Brad Bernstein's Labs
2014-2016 Research Scientist, Broad Technology Labs, The Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA
2016-2022 Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego.
2022- Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego.

My research focuses on epigenomic mechanisms, and merges the study of basic and disease biology, technological innovations and computational analyses. I am an advocate of reproducible and robust research tools. My major interest is in regulatory epigenomics, and includes the employment and innovation of tools to address unanswered questions in chromatin biology. The main efforts of my group revolve around investigating the organization and function of chromatin regulatory networks during developmental transitions in normal and aberrant states, what are the cellular means to maintain the epigenome during processes such as the cell cycle, and how genetic variation, such as tandem repeats (TRs) and SNPs, impact the structure of chromatin."

"William Go, M.D., Ph.D., Chief Medical Offier, oversees all aspects of A2 Bio’s development of T cell therapies utilizing the company’s novel logic-gated platform technology.

Previously, Will worked at Kite Pharma (acquired by Gilead) where he developed novel immune-cellular therapies for the treatment of cancer. At Kite, Will led the ZUMA-1 pivotal study and eventual FDA and EMA approvals of YESCARTA®, the first CAR T cell therapy approved in large B-cell Lymphoma. YESCARTA received the Prix Galien Award for Best Biotechnology Product in 2018. He became a vice president of clinical development at Kite/Gilead leading large B-cell lymphoma clinical development.

Earlier in his career, Will played an instrumental role in the clinical development of Vectibix® in colorectal cancer, as well as identifying new predictive biomarkers as a medical director in global clinical development at Amgen.

Will received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Carleton College and then attended the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) Medical Scientist Training Program. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 with a focus on immunology and completed his M.D. in 2006. Will did his internal medicine residency, hematology/oncology fellowship at UCSD. He was the recipient of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine fellowship award and the American Association of Cancer Institutes’ fellowship award studying tumor immunology.

Will also volunteers as a Board Member for the American Pancreatic Association Foundation and as a Board of Trustee and COVID-19 Taskforce Scientific Advisor for Viewpoint School."

Mark Greenough PhD is the principal scientist at Tessara Therapeutics (Melbourne, Australia), having joined the company in 2021. Mark’s research expertise is in the fields of neuroscience and genetics where he has applied his skills using cell culture models to elucidate mechanisms of neurodegeneration, with a particular focus on Alzheimer’s disease. Mark also has a keen interest in the metal biology of neurodegeneration and the role that iron plays in health and disease states. Mark has had a significant impact on the growth of Tessara; helping to establish automated protocols for RealBrain microtissue production and leading R&D efforts in assay design, biomatrix formulation, QC protocols and generation of new RealBrain models. Leveraging Mark’s strong track record in Alzheimer’s disease research and recent discoveries related to ferroptosis susceptibility (Greenough et.al., Cell Death and Differentiation, 2022, DOI: 10.1038/s41418-022-01003-1) he has applied this knowledge to help establish ADBrain as a ‘first of its kind’ human 3D model for Alzheimer’s disease drug discovery.

"Russell is Automata's Director of Product Growth and looks after product strategy across the Synthetic Biology and Drug Development markets. He started his career studying molecular structures using crystallography, and then moved into life science instrumentation where he has held strategic roles at numerous Life Science technology businesses centred around automation hardware and software tools including Beckman Coulter, Thermo Fisher and Synthace. Russ has managed global teams consulting for automated systems for life sciences; led product development for hardware and software and been subject matter experts for automation of both genomics and cellular biology applications.

Day to day, Russ guides product development to best meet the automation needs of the Life Science industry."

"Kalpesh Gupta is the Principal Automation Engineer, leading the automation efforts at Moderna Inc., located in Cambridge, MA. Kalpesh has a master’s degree in Bioinformatics' from Brandies University, and a master’s in science in Biotechnology from Northeastern University. He is a recognized expert in developing and programming methods for various liquid handling platforms like STAR, STARlet, Starplus, Vantage, and Nimbus. Currently managing a team responsible for programming for 49 Hamilton systems, Kalpesh is overseeing automation growth in Moderna. 

Before joining Moderna, he also has worked in cell signaling technology where he has an extensive experience in Protein Chemistry, Molecular biology, Protein spectroscopic analysis, SDS-PAGE, IEF Western Blotting, Size Exclusion Chromatography, HPLC, DSC, ELISA, dissolution, Activity and cell-based assays, DLS, etc."

Dr. Zachary Gurard-Levin has served as chief scientific officer at SAMDI Tech, Inc. since 2016. He brings 15 years of multidisciplinary research experience with expertise in chemistry, biochemistry, cellular biology and drug discovery research. Dr. Gurard-Levin was a pioneer user of SAMDI technology and co-developed SAMDI as a high-throughput, label-free solution for drug discovery research.

Prior to SAMDI Tech, Dr. Gurard-Levin was a research scientist at the Institut Curie in Paris, France, leading epigenetics drug discovery and diagnostics projects in oncology. Dr. Gurard-Levin has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles and has been awarded multiple research grants. He has a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago. In addition, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Institut Curie with Dr. Genevieve Almouzni.

Richard is responsible for R&D at Sphere Fluidics, managing the development of their science and technology. Richard has over 20 years’ experience in developing cutting-edge commercial products for healthcare and life sciences. Richard has held numerous senior positions responsible for product and technology development. At Alere Inc (now part of Abbott) he led several major cross-company R+D programmes for in-vitro diagnostic devices including the development of the Alere i platform, the world’s first CLIA-waived point-of-care infectious disease diagnostic device using isothermal DNA amplification techniques. At Cambridge Consultants Ltd. Richard started their bioinnovation group, providing technical design and consultancy services at the intersection of biology and engineering. Over six years this group grew from one person to a team delivering substantial projects in areas such as automated cell transfection, CAR-T cell therapy manufacture and digital data storage in DNA. Most recently Richard was VP Technology at DNA Electronics, leading the R&D team developing a novel fully-automated sample-to-answer in-vitro diagnostic platform using DNA sequencing. Richard holds MA and MEng degrees in engineering from King’s College University of Cambridge.

"Experienced team lead with 10+ years in NGS technology and nucleic acid methodology with molecular oncology focus. Experienced in leading assay development and validation in regulated environments. Passionate about creating engaged and collaborative teams that solve important technical and biological problems

PhD from Karolinska Institute Stockholm, Sweden, 2005-2010
Post Doc at Yale University, CT, 2011-2016
Toma Biosciences, Foster City, CA (Senior Scientist - VP R&D), 2016-2018
Guardant Health, Redwood City, CA (Manager - Associate Director), 2018-2022
Exai Bio, Palo Alto, CA (VP Product &Technology Development), 2022-current"

Sandy Hayes, PhD, is Senior Director, Cell Therapy Platform and Discovery, at Janssen Research & Development. She has more than 25 years of experience in both academia and industry studying the biology and clinical application of γδ T cells. Sandy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Franklin & Marshall College and a PhD in Immunology from the University of Connecticut Health Center.

Dr. Ernest Heimsath joined the Agilent Biotek scientific applications team in 2019 as an Applications Development Scientist. He earned his B.S. in Biology from UT San Antonio, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, where he studied the biochemical regulation of actin polymerization. Ernest conducted postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health and UNC School of Medicine, where he used advanced imaging techniques and animal models to define the contribution of actin-associated genes in building actin-based cellular structures crucial for cancer metastasis and organismal development. With expertise in fluorescence microscopy, his primary role at BioTek is to develop and optimize imaging-based applications.

"Nat is an industry leader with years of experience developing HTS assays, automating and optimizing laboratory equipment, and investigating new technologies with Eli Lilly & Co. and Bristol-Myers Squibb. During his tenure at North Carolina State University, Nat specialized in hands-on instruction and development activities to assist with the growth of the biomanufacturing industry. As Director, Scientific Market Development at Artel, Nat focusses on developing new applications to solve problems for the assay development community."

Dr. Hoffstrom is cell biologist with over 22 years of combined academic and industrial research experience in field of antibody discovery and drug development.  From 2011 to 2021 he was the Director of the Antibody Technology lab at the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center. In 2021 he was recruited to the Department of Medicine at ULCA by Dr. Dennis Slamon to design and build a next generation monoclonal antibody screening platform for therapeutic antibody discovery.

Dr Nick Holliday is Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at Excellerate Bioscience, a contract research organisation for in vitro pharmacology, and is also part-time Associate Professor in Pharmacology at the University of Nottingham (UK).  Following university studies in Cambridge (MA) and King’s College London (PhD), Nick has over 25 years’ experience in the molecular pharmacology of receptors and other drug targets, together with the development of in vitro imaging based assay systems to measure binding and signalling kinetics.  He is a Fellow of the British Pharmacological Society.

Daniel Holmes earned his undergraduate degree in Chemical Physics from the University of Toronto. He went to medical school at the University of British Columbia (UBC) where he also did his residency in Medical Biochemistry. He is a Clinical Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UBC and Head and Medical Director of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver and Interim Medical Director of the British Columbia Provincial Toxicology Laboratory. Interests include clinical endocrinology with a focus on secondary hypertension,  lipidology, clinical mass spectrometry, and data science in application to data automation, visualization and clinical utilization.

Dr. Honarnejad is a biotechnologist with >15 years of experience in high-throughput biomolecular and cellular screening and currently serves as Chief Scientific Offier at Pivot Park Screening Centre (PPSC), a spin-off from former Organon/MSD lead discovery screening unit in the Netherlands. At PPSC he is involved in a broad range of commercial, academic, and shared-risk lead discovery programs. He carried out his doctorate in biotechnology jointly at the University of Heidelberg and Harvard University. Prior to joining PPSC, he was active in methods development for high-content in-vitro compound profiling and genome-wide RNAi/cDNA screening methods at various prestigious research organizations such as Harvard Medical School, Max-Planck Society, and European Molecular Biology Laboratory.

"Dr. Nathan Hotaling received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Clinical and Translational Science from Emory University in 2013. After his PhD, Nathan did two post-doctoral research terms at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Eye Institute (NEI), respectively, where he helped standardize the measurement of biodegradable nanofiber scaffolds and the cells grown on them, for use in a primary human cell therapy for age-related macular degeneration, which implanted its first patient in August of 2022.  While pursuing these projects he began to develop a platform to analyze high content datasets collected for drug screening and cell bio-manufacturing. This work led to his transition to Axle Informatics and NCATS where he oversees the development of the next generation of data analysis tools for researchers in the high-throughput and high-content screening fields. 

In conjunction with the above research work Dr.Hotaling is the Senior Vice President of Data Science at Axle Informatics where he founded and developed the Data Science Division. As a division founder his role has spanned a gamut of management and leadership roles from budgeting/accounting to culture definition and operational planning. During this time, he also secured contract funding and has grown the team to over 40 data scientists, software engineers, and researchers in the past 4 years."

"Prof. Rob Howes, Site Director and CEO, Rosalind Franklin Laboratory, Leamington Spa, UK

Rob has 20 years experience in Industry working across a range of organisations in the early drug discovery area. Most recently he spent 8 years at AstraZeneca with a year at the Cambridge Covid-19 Testing Centre supporting the UK’s Covid-19 response. In June 2021, he joined the UK Government's Health Security Agency to run the newly created Rosalind Franklin Laboratory in Leamington Spa focused on Covid-19 Diagnostic assays and to establish it as a leading centre for diagnostics within the UK.

Rob is the SLAS Discovery podcast editor and an Editorial Board member of SLAS Discover. He was made a SLAS Fellow in 2020."

"James (Jay) Hoying is a leading expert in tissue vascularization, vascularized tissue models, and tissue model fabrication with more than 25 years of experience in basic and applied sciences involving tissue and vascular biology. Hoying is a founding Partner of Advanced Solutions Life Sciences and serves as its Chief Scientist.  Previously, he was Professor and Chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Therapeutics at the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute (CII) where he developed a broad background in tissue fabrication, cell therapeutics, and translation of discoveries to industry and the clinic. He also has joint appointments at the Department of Physiology at the University of Louisville and the Department of Biotechnology at the University of New Hampshire. Hoying pioneered the use of native, intact microvascular elements in modeling vascularization and vascularizing tissues in vitro and in vivo. He holds numerous patents related to vascularizing tissues and related cell-based therapies. He has edited a book and published over 130 original research papers, reviews, and book chapters. As a researcher, he has secured nearly $18 million in grants as PI or co-PI. Hoying currently serves on the Editorial staff of Frontiers of Physiology and reviews for several other national and international journals. He reviews individual and program grant proposals for the National Institutes of Health, the Veterans Affairs, the American Heart Association, and international funding agencies. Hoying has organized, chaired and co-chaired more than 11 international and national conference sessions and delivered more than 51 keynote and invited talks at conferences and University seminars. He currently serves in an advisory role for 5 programs including the Leadership Advisory Council of the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, the Research and Industry Council of the New Hampshire BioMade EPSCoR program, and the New Hampshire Tech Alliance/BioMed|Tech Leadership Council. He is also a Fellow of the American Heart Association. "

"Sarah Huntwork-Rodriguez, PhD, is a Director and Lab Leader at Denali Therapeutics in South San Francisco, California. In this role, she leads the development and implementation of target engagement and disease-associated pathway biomarker assays for Denali's LRRK2 inhibitor program for Parkinson's disease. She has worked extensively with academic collaborators and The Michael J. Fox Foundation to measure Parkinson’s disease biomarkers in the LRRK2 Cohort Consortium, the 24 hour Biofluid Study, the LRRK2 Detection Consortium, the LRRK2 Biobanking Initiative, and PPMI.

During her academic career, she focused on cellular and molecular neuroscience. A graduate of Stanford University, she obtained her PhD in Neurobiology from the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During her postdoctoral work in the laboratories of Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Joseph Lewcock at Genentech in South San Francisco, California, she studied mechanisms of the neuronal stress response in triggering cell death following neuronal insults."

Jacobs is a distinguished industry expert leading AI and data science strategy and implementation at Deepcell as VP of Data Science and Bioinformatics. Jacobs has decades-long experience in computational methods and large-scale molecular and imaging datasets at several well-known companies such as Progenity, Helix, 23andMe, and Invitae. He earned his degree in computer science from Case Western Reserve University’s School of Engineering.

Dr. Sudhakar Jha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiological Sciences at Oklahoma State University. Dr. Jha is a cancer biologist with interest in deciphering how epigenetic pathways are deregulated during tumorigenesis. His group has identified, purified, and characterized multiple protein complexes that are hijacked by pathogens to promote growth.

"David Julovich completed his bachelor’s degree in Biology from Purdue University and a Master of Science in Data Science from Southern Methodist University. His initial work experience started on the industry side where he gained valuable experience at Abbott Laboratories in an FDA regulated setting and later in Cytogenetics in CLIA and CAP regulated labs (Impath, Genzyme).  

Following his career path on the industry side, Mr. Julovich found his way into academia and supported projects at prominent universities including Purdue, Arizona State University, Indiana University and most recently the University of North Texas Health Science Center. Through his work at UNTHSC, he supports several liquid handlers and automated digital workflows.  

Mr. Julovich years of expertise with multi-plex ELISAs and automated technologies allow him to support and improve Biomarker Screening for neurodegenerative diseases. His current work truly highlights how science and technology can come together to provide a healthcare solution that impacts 10’s of thousands of patients per year and in the future, improve healthcare for millions."

"Magdalena Kasendra is the Director of Research and Development at the Center for Stem Cell & Organoid Medicine (CuSTOM). She leads a multifaceted effort to translate breakthrough discoveries in stem cell biology and organ development into innovative organoid-based solutions to address unmet medical needs. These include organoid-based platforms enabling discovery and development of safer and more efficient drugs, precision medicine applications and organoid-based tissue replacement therapies.

Prior to joining CuSTOM’s leadership team, she managed the multidisciplinary team responsible for developing, translating and commercializing Organs-on-Chips technology at Emulate Inc., a spin-off from Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. This research has led to major advances in bioengineering of intestinal tissue by combining microchip manufacturing methods and organoid technology and demonstrated the utility of this platform in drug development, disease modeling and precision medicine. 
Dr. Kasendra’s career spans industry, academia and the start-up world. She performed her PhD project at Novartis Vaccines and Development, which was followed by post-doctoral research fellowship at the Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. She has authored numerous publications and patents."

I am a scientist-engineer at Merck Research Labs in Cambridge, MA, where I work on scaling and implementing new technologies in an effort to discover and de-risk drug targets. My research often focuses on developing complex in vitro models and systems that can be used for target de-risking. My team uses a variety of core capabilities in microfluidics, screening/automation, 3D culture, microbiology, and chemical/molecular biology to build and validate these systems. Before joining Merck in 2017, I was a co-founder of Empire Biotechnologies, a biotech startup developing therapies for gastrointestinal diseases. I received my Ph.D in Nanoscale Engineering and B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University at Albany, SUNY.

Sam Kean is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Icepick Surgeon, The Bastard Brigade, The Dueling Neurosurgeons, and The Disappearing Spoon. His books have won multiple international awards for literary science writing, and his work has been featured on NPR’s “Radiolab,” “All Things Considered,” and “Fresh Air.” His podcast, The Disappearing Spoon, debuted at #1 on the iTunes charts for science podcasts.

Ian Kerman studied bioinformatics and molecular biology at the University of California, San Diego. Soon after starting as a research associate at a biotech startup, Ian began applying machine learning techniques to his company’s screening and assay data. Ian later joined a life science-focused data science company, helping laboratory scientists process, analyze, and extract insights from their data. More recently, Ian studied machine learning at the Georgia Institute of Technology and is the Director of Customer Success at LabVoice, an AI-powered digital assistant company for scientists. When he isn’t helping scientists analyze and automate their processes, he spends time with his husky-pug or SCUBA diving with sharks.

Christian Kis is a Staff Scientist in Field Applications for the Life Science and Laboratory Products team.  He has worked at Thermo Fisher Scientific for 11 years and has supported the Kingfishers and Sample Prep portfolio for over 10 of those years.  He is currently involved with training and instrument and applications support in the field for the KingFisher Sample Purification Systems, providing an integral connection between sales, R&D and customers.

Cullen Klein received his B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics at The Ohio State University in 2002 and completed his PhD in Organic Chemistry at Indiana University-Bloomington in 2009 under the direction of Professor David R. Williams.  He continued his studies with post-doctoral research under Prof. Dr. Peter Seeberger at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interface Science, and Prof. Tom Snaddon at Indiana University-Bloomington.  He subsequently then worked in the Instrument Research and Development division of Siemens Healthcare Laboratory Diagnostics in Newark, Delaware.  In 2020 he joined the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) to work on the ASPIRE program as an Automation Chemist.

"Dr. Nikita Kolhatkar recieved her Ph.D from the University of Washington, Department of Immunology and is currently a senior research scientist at Gilead Sciences focusing on clinical biomarkers in infectious diseases, specifically Chronic Hepatitis B (CHB). She previously held roles as a clinical immunologist at Vaxart, Inc. where she worked on the development of an oral influenza vaccine. Additionally, she has worked as a scientist in the immuno-safety science group at Amgen working to support toxicology studies within the immuno-oncology space."

"Dr. Robin A. Krüger

Robin studied chemistry and biochemistry at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, where he also conducted his doctoral research on fluorescent biomarkers and bacterial photoreceptors. After a postdoctoral stay at the University in Calgary/Canada, he joined LPKF in 2011, where he held various development positions. Since 2020, Robin is leading the ARRALYZE team."

Takuya Kubo is an associate professor of Analytical Chemistry of Materials, Department of Material Chemistry, Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University.  He received his Ph.D. from Kyoto Institute of Technology in 2004. After working as a Research Assistant in National Institute for Environmental Studies (2001–2004), he joined Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Tohoku University as an assistant professor (2004–2012) and Department of Chemistry, Portland State University, OR, USA a visiting (2010–2011) (JSPS Excellent Young Researcher Overseas Visit Program), then moved to Kyoto University as an associate professor in 2012.

Dr. Kurian is an accomplished scientist with 22 years of research experience and more than 85 published research and review papers.  He is trained in biomarker discovery and genomics of varied disciplines, and in the critical assessment of bio-informatics approaches needed to prioritize and validate biomarkers. He is currently Scientific Director of the Scripps Health/Scripps Clinic Bio-Repository and Bioinformatics Core (SCBBC). Dr. Kurian serves as a scientific advisor for Transplant Genomics, a company specializing in post-transplant care, and as Chief Scientific Officer for MindX Sciences, which focuses on biomarkers of mental health, and was a founding member for both companies.

Brandon Kwan-Leong is an automation engineer at the Laboratory for Genomics Research, where he is standardizing the tools used to build genome-wide guide RNA libraries and perform arrayed CRISPR-based screens. His previous roles in manufacturing and clinical labs produced robust systems used across multiple labs. Brandon has worked as a researcher, engineer, and consultant to develop novel assays and bridge the gap between low and high throughput workflows. He is currently focused on applying automation in an academic setting.

Currently a 5th year Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering at The University of Akron. My research focus is on understanding cancer drug resistance using 3D tumor models i.e. spheroids and organoids and finding effective ways to target them. I have been awarded Tony B Award for the third time in SLAS. 

Meghan is a biochemist with experience ranging from peptide synthesis to SELEX to lncRNA footprinting. While pursuing her PhD at Duke University, she employed each of these with protein biochemistry to explore dynamic interactions of epigenetic complexes. In 2019, she joined the world of DEL and is developing new approaches to the wide variety of biochemical problems in the DEL space. 

Connie Lebakken, PhD, COO and co-founder of Stem Pharm, has 20 years experience in life science companies with roles in manufacturing, operations, and R&D. She has extensive expertise in high-throughput biochemical and cell-based drug discovery assays with a focus on neurology and oncology.

Clarence is leading product development efforts in the digital PCR business at Thermo Fisher Scientific, focused on enabling customers through automation to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer.  He has more than 15 years of experience innovating in the life sciences industry in various capacities, including next-generation sequencing and assay development.  

I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, currently working on mRNA analysis of CAR-T cells in time-lapse. Also working on developing a next-generation image-based cell sorting system. I received my Ph.D. degree at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver. My Ph.D. research focused on developing efficient techniques for single-cell RNA analysis on rare cells and rare cellular events.

Celine Legros is a Drug Discovery Partnership Director at Eurofins Discovery. With extended knowledge of Eurofins Discovery’s expertise and services. She is the primary scientific contact for clients, deeply involved in the design of complex projects, such as HTS, Hit-to-Lead and Lead-Op programs. Prior to joining Eurofins, Celine was Scientific Project Leader in the Screening Department at Institut de Recherches Servier, France, where she was responsible for designing and running screening cascades from Target to Hit/HTS through to Lead Optimization. In close collaboration with chemistry and biophysics teams, Celine led screening projects in neuroscience, cardiovascular & metabolic diseases, immune-inflammation and oncology. In addition, she developed and ran assays on GPCRs, transcription factors, PPi, kinases, Ser-hydrolases and Tyr-kinase receptors, combining scientific relevance with robotics, data quality and throughput. Employing her expertise in HTS and previous experience in platform design, in close collaboration with robotics engineers, she designs automated platforms and implements new HTS technology. Celine holds a Ph.D. in Animal Physiology (melatonin circanual rhythm and melatonin receptors) from the University of Tours, France, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship within the Blood Brain Barrier Group at King's College London, UK.

I am a multi-disciplinary engineer with over 20 years of R&D experience primarily in the areas of laboratory automation and advanced analytical and detection technologies. I started my career at Amgen Inc and am now helping to develop new cancer treatments at A2 Biotherapeutics, a fast-growing biotech startup in the greater Los Angeles area. I completed my undergraduate degree in biomedical and electrical engineering and my master's degree in biomedical engineering, both from the University of Southern California.

Jing Li is a Principal Scientist in the Biochemical and Cellular Pharmacology (BCP) department at Genentech. He is the BCP representative on multiple key pipeline projects at Genentech, providing assay strategy to identify lead molecules for early development. Jing received a medicine degree from Peking University and subsequently obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Technical University in Munich under the direction of Professor Johannes Buchner. His Ph.D. work focused on understanding the molecular mechanism of heat shock protein Hsp90. In 2012, Jing started his postdoctoral research to study proteasome and protein degradation at Caltech under the supervision of Dr. Raymond Deshaies. He developed the first-in-class inhibitor targeting Rpn11/PSMD14, an essential deubiquitinase located on the 19S proteasome. In 2017, he moved to Amgen Inc. to finalize his postdoctoral research, where he identified natural compounds that inhibit JAMM metalloprotease.

Dr Li. Li is a postdoc fellow in the joint laboratories of Dr. Steven Altschuler and Dr. Lani Wu. Currently, she is applying system biology methods to study acute hypoxia. Previous to that, she received her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular biology from the Peking University-National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing joint program, where she applied medicinal chemistry and chemical biology methods to explore human disease related mechanisms and develop new therapeutic approaches.

"Sam is currently a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering at Concordia University with a B.Eng in mechanical engineering from Ontario Tech University. In his research, Sam focuses on applying novel microfluidic paradigms to find solutions not available at the macro-scale. In particular, he is interested in how immune cell engineering can be advanced with creative engineering solutions."

Yue has over 10 years’ experience in drug discovery and has spent majority of her time in the research and development sectors in both large pharma and biotech companies. In her current role as a team lead and project lead, she excels at applying interdisciplinary knowledge of antibody R&D and lab automation to characterize antibody at scale, and in integrating the wet lab and dry lab capabilities to build machine learning technology platform and pipeline programs.

Paul joined SPT Labtech in 2015 as a Product Manager responsible for automated systems for drug discovery and genomic research, such as mosquito and dragonfly which utilise novel patented positive displacement pipetting and non-contact dispensing technologies . Paul works closely with reasearchers and collaborators in developing new solutions for the market, both in terms of new instruments and application dvelopment. Most recently Paul led the introduction of the new firefly platform from initial concept design, through development, culminatiing in its launch at SLAS 2022 in Boston. Paul has over 20 years’ experience in the automation of sample processing across a wide range of application areas in the academic, clinical, environmental, biotech, and pharmaceutical sectors.

Mike is the Global Director of Solution Architecture at TetraScience, bringing over 20 years of experience in the systems integration domain. Previous to TetraScience, Mike honed his expertise at organizations such as MuleSoft, Oracle, and Fastenal Company while somehow also carving out time to play golf. His goal is to shoot Par at least once in his lifetime. He has accomplished this goal on 9 holes, but has yet to accomplish it on 18.

X-ray crystallographer by training at Cambridge University, I moved into using automation to help in the high throughput expression of proteins. Using automation was key to success. Now focusing in automation and digitalization in many aspects of target identification and validation, drug discovery and development across many areas in Novo Nordisk.

Stefan N. Lukianov, AM MS is the first-time JHU student founder of Salve Therapeutics.  He has undergraduate degrees from the University of Maine and masters from the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard University in the biomedical sciences.  He has worked in reputable labs at Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, McLean Hospital and the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. He also has extensive experience in science journalism, having published and edited for ASBMB Today, ACS C&EN Show Daily, the Harvard Medical Student Review and MIT Science Policy Review.  Stefan also loves teaching and has held a diverse array of private and public education roles at various grade levels in STEM fields.

Xiaoyong Lu is a passionate field executor in RNA therapeutics development. He has over fifteen years combined experience in Medicinal chemistry, drug delivery and RNA therapeutics. He got his PhD. in Organic Chemistry from Ohio University and continued postdoc training at The Ohio State University and University of Maryland College Park. He currently holds a Director of Chemistry position at Sirnaomics Inc.. He leads the oligonucleotide drug delivery team and supervised oligonucleotide synthesis lab to develop novel RNA targeting delivery platform for novel siRNA therapeutics. He is the inventor of Peptide Docking Vehicle (PDoV-GalNAcTM) RNA targeting delivery system and siRNA-gemcitabine conjugation for cancer treatment. Lead the precilinical development for pipelines STP135G and STP155G for PCSK9 and HBV targets treatment using PDoV-GalNAc based targeting delivery system. He has published a few dozens of publications and is a key-inventor for over ten patents.   

Jennifer MacFarland is a Global Market Development Manager with Thermo Fisher Scientific, where she works with a team of scientists, product managers, and commercials leaders to understand the needs of customers and how Thermo Scientific  instruments, equipment, and consumables can assist in his/her workflow.  Before starting her career, Jennifer received degrees in Forensic and Anthropology.  She has spent 20+ years working in various roles from bench scientist, project manager, and marketing manger in the life science industry.

Chris MaNaughton is a software architect at DeepCure with over 15 years of experience working in various industries, including education, e-commerce, pharma, precision health, and wellness. Chris works across the software stack to build large-scale, highly-available applications and platform services. (DeepCure is located in Boston, Massachusetts. Visit the website at https://deepcure.ai/)

"Sven studied Bioprocess Engineering at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany and graduated in 2012. During his diploma studies he investigated the interaction of cytomegalovirus protein pp65 against certain antibodies.

In 2012 he joined Sierra Sensors GmbH to start his role as application specialist. After 6 years he became senior application specialist as Bruker acquired Sierra Sensors GmbH. Currently he is involved in the customer support and product development."

Postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Research Institute (California), Division of Infectious Diseases. Research topic: Chagas HTS. Previously Professor collaborator at the Institute of Chemistry of the University of São Paulo (Brazil). Postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Chemistry at the University of São Paulo. Research topic: signaling pathways involved in the interaction between Trypanosoma cruzi and mammalian cells, with special emphasis on the role of second messengers in the adhesion process of trypomastigotes and an extracellular matrix of host cells. Collaborator of the Colombia Science Clubs initiative (2018), program to promote science in children. PhD in Sciences from the University of São Paulo (2017), (Department of Parasitology associated with the Institute of Biomedical Sciences -USP), research topic: biochemical degradation pathways of branched amino acids in Trypanosoma cruzi. Scientific internship at the University of Buenos Aires (2015). Biologist - Universidad del Tolima (2012). Experience in molecular biology, trypanosomatid biochemistry, cell culture, metabolite transport, parasitology, bioinformatics, protein cloning and purification, enzymology and microscopy.

"After 10+ years of cancer research at Fred Hutch in Seattle Dr. Mann joined ucpoming Nortis, Inc. in 2012. There he led Nortis' science team, their model and business development and Applied Sciences of innovative, perfused 3D tissue models. Among others, these models represented vascular and kidney biology and (immuno-)oncology and their use in toxicology, preclinical drug testing and development. Nortis technology is characterized by mostly autonomously running tissue culture vessels optimized for image acquisition and analysis and ideally suited for being merged with scientific imaging technology.

After moving to Nikon Instruments Dr. Mann took over Business Development & Partnerships with the goal to develop Nikons CRO business for North America. Nikon has a large laboratory available equipped for conducting contract research with a focus but not limitation on scientific image acquisition and analysis. Offered are services from general image acquisition and analysis to complex tissue culture and data acquisition."

"Tamsin E. Mansley, PhD, MRSC, CChem, CSci, is an experienced drug discovery scientist, having worked as a medicinal chemist at Eli Lilly and UCB Research. It was here that she developed her passion for applying computational chemistry and predictive modelling approaches for compound selection and design. Her particular interests lie in coupling machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques with generative chemistry approaches to explore chemistry space and guide compound design.

Since 2005, Tamsin has worked with scientific software providers supporting project teams and their use of computational and cheminformatics applications in drug discovery, enabling them to make informed decisions that will improve the efficiency and productivity of the drug discovery process. Tamsin joined Optibrium in 2015 to develop new opportunities for Optibrium’s fully integrated, elegant software for small molecule design, optimization, and data analysis across North America. In October 2022, Tamsin accepted the role of President at Optibrium's new US subsidiary, Optibrium, Inc. She also leads the global Application Science team, supporting the company’s existing client base.

Tamsin holds a PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of East Anglia in the UK and pursued Postdoctoral studies in the labs of Prof. Philip Magnus at the University of Texas, Austin."

Naim Matasci leads the Ellison Institute’s computational lab as the Director of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. In his role, he supports the Institute's researchers by providing analytical guidance and expertise across the entirety of the project life cycle. Dr. Matasci earned his MSc in Molecular Biology from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Later, Dr. Matasci joined the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, to study the evolution of human protein expression for his PhD. He then joined the iPlant Collaborative team at the University of Arizona, now CyVerse, where he helped design and develop a data-centric computational infrastructure for the Life Sciences. His current research areas are digital pathology and genomics, in particular for cancer diagnosis.

Dr. J. Eric McDuffie is Director of Investigative Toxicology group at Neurocrine Biosciences, Inc. located in San Diego, CA, USA. He joined Neurocrine in 2021, after a 14-year tenure at Janssen, where he last served as Global Head of Safety Biomarkers/Clinical Pathology. Dr. McDuffie previously served as the Head of Mechanistic & Investigative Toxicology team at Janssen’s La Jolla site. Earlier, he had a 7-year tenure at Pfizer’s Ann Arbor and Plymouth, MI, USA as well as Mississauga, Ontario, Canada site, where he was responsible for providing Lab Core (necropsy &histology) support as well as investigative pathology and immunotoxicology support for Antibacterial, Cardiovascular/Atherosclerosis, Neuroscience, Dermatology, Inflammation, and Oncology projects. At Neurocrine, Dr. McDuffie’s team provides support to early discovery teams to delivery rapid selection and progression of safe neurotherapeutic candidates for clinical trials. He serves as a regulatory toxicology lead for multiple discovery and late stage drug candidates, for example, the treatment of depression, schizophrenia, motor neuron disease and epilepsy. Dr. McDuffie has 21 years of experience in preclinical toxicology, including applications of mechanism-based toxicity moddels to investigate potentially translatable organ-specific liabilities for late stage drug candidates.

Cole McKnight is the product manager for the µPulse product line. He has been working to create lab automation technology with Formulatrix since 2020 with past experience in 3D bioprinting technology. His training is in mechanical engineering with further graduate studies in product design at the University of Pennsylvania. At FORMULATRIX, he manages engineering R&D and instrument/consumables production while facilitating sales, marketing, and customer support.

Studied analytical chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with Professor Neil Kelleher concentrating on the articulation of non-ribosomal and polyketide synthesis by top-down mass spectrometry. Joined Abbott Laboratories advanced protein characterization group in Fall of 2005. Has worked on advanced characterization of protein and antibody structure by labeling, H/D exchange and limited proteolysis. Was a foundational member of Abbott's phenotypic screening group and worked in target and mechanism identification. Joined AbbVie at its foundation and continued to work in proteomic, genomic and reference database methodologies for target identification. Joined the genomics research center at AbbVie working to identify protein components in areas of SNP-induced open chromatin. Recently working in chemical biology for targeted protein degradation.

"Claire has a MChem and PhD in Chemistry from the University of Sheffield. Whilst studying as an undergraduate she developed an interest in enzymology which lead to a PhD studying the kinetic mechanism of Protein Phosphatase1 (PP1) catalysis and subsequent post-doctoral research positions studying alternative mechanisms of kinase inhibition at AstraZeneca and the role of PP1 in Ischemic cell death at Weill-Cornell Medical School.

Claire is a Senior Principal Scientist at Artios Pharma where she leads the Biochemistry  department. Prior to joining Artios, Claire spent six years at AstraZeneca in the Mechanistic Biology and Profiling group where she specialised in the kinetic characterisation of compounds. Along with the detailed kinetic characterisation of inhibitors, Claire has an interest in developing higher throughput kinetic methodologies to enable the identification of mechanistically differentiated hit series immediately post HTS and how differentiated compound mechanisms may translate into differences in efficacy in both cellular and in vivo systems."

My name is Michael Mellody and I am a PhD student in the department of Bioengineering at UCLA. I am co-advised by Prof. Robert Damoiseaux and Prof. Dino Di Carlo. I have several years of research experience in developing new technologies to facilitate high-throughput drug discovery and screening. My research interests include automation technologies, robotic systems, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and microfluidics.

Lane Milde is a Senior Scientist supporting laboratory automation and liquid handling workflows and instrumentation for Compound Management & Distribution at Pfizer within Worldwide Research & Development under Discovery Sciences in Groton, CT. He has been at Pfizer for 10 years and has over 18 years of experience in highly automated laboratories within academic, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical settings. Lane started his career at the University of Wisconsin working as a scientist in molecular biology and high-throughput screening. He spent several years at a small biotechnology company developing automated in-vitro diagnostic devices before joining Pfizer in 2012. In his current role, he is responsible for managing automated microplate and liquid handling instrumentation in support of sample management for early drug discovery. This includes the management of an instrumentation quality control program, maintenance and troubleshooting, LIMS integration, and equipment succession planning as well as developing and maintaining automated workflows and solutions supporting a wide range of sample management processes.

Chad A. Mirkin, PhD is the Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, Engineering, and Medicine at Northwestern University.  He is a chemist and nanoscience expert, known for his invention of spherical nucleic acids, Dip-Pen Nanolithography and related cantilever-free nanopatterning, materials discovery methodologies, and his contributions to additive manufacturing. He has authored >840 papers and >1,200 patents worldwide (>400 issued) and founded nine companies. Mirkin has been recognized with >230 awards. He served for eight years on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology, and is one of very few scientists to be elected to all three US National Academies. Mirkin has served on the Editorial Advisory Boards of over 30 scholarly journals, is the founding editor of the journal Small, was an Associate Editor of J. Am. Chem. Soc., and is a Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA Editorial Board Member.

Derrick Miyao is the Vice President of Molecular Foundry at DeepCure. Derrick Miyao is a trailblazer in robotic synthesis and automated assays. Derrick joined DeepCure from Neurocrine, where he spent 20 years creating systems for automated drug discovery, including building two systems that can synthesize 10,000 compounds a day and successfully integrate synthesis with affinity binding for closed discovery loop. At DeepCure, Derrick leads the Molecular Foundry, a fully automated synthesis and screening lab in Rehovot, Israel, that will unlock AI and chemistry to get better drugs to patients faster. 

Austin Mogen leads a team of Field Application Scientists that covers West USA and Latin America. Before joining Corning, Austin gained industry experience as a senior scientist of upstream process development and manufacturing supervisor for viral vector production. In these positions he focused on cell line and bioprocess development, closed system solutions for cell culture scale-up, and manufacturing of gene therapies. Austin and the Corning Life Sciences FAS team work extensively with research, development, and manufacturing groups to develop 3D assays and disease models, as well as cellular scale-up conditions for viral production, cellular therapeutics, and biologics.

Dean started his career as a Telecomms design engineer for Nokia, and has since worked in product management roles at Braemac Ltd and Promethean, as well as product marketing roles at NXP Semiconductors and Cooper Bussmann (part of Eaton). He joined Azenta Life Sciences in 2017 as a Senior Product Manager with responsibility for automated sample storage

I joined AstraZeneca in 2018 following the completion of my PhD at the University of Sheffield, where I investigated how endocytosis regulates the JAK/STAT signalling pathway. Since joining AZ I have worked as a Senior Scientist in the global HTS centre, optimising and prosecuting screens across multiple targets and therapeutic areas, using an array of assay technologies. I am particularly interested in developing new methodologies for use against novel targets, including RNA, and for identifying undesirable hits from HTS outputs to aid prioritisation of quality chemical equity.

Shannon Mumenthaler, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California. She is also Chief Translational Research Officer for the Lawrence J Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC, which is a translational institute that bridges research and innovation by bringing together researchers, patients, and physicians dedicated to improving health of the human condition. Dr. Mumenthaler’s research program is centered around the development and utilization of physiologically relevant, organ-dependent tumor models that allow for the characterization of colorectal cancer cellular dynamics, and serve as a platform for testing specific therapeutic modalities to prevent or delay tumor progression. Specifically, she is integrating biologically-inspired 3D model systems (i.e., organoids and organs-on-chips) with dynamic imaging and computational approaches to provide new insights into the significance of the physical and cellular microenvironment on tumor progression.

Leveraging my experience, qualifications, and passion for bioengineering & mechanical design I can accelerate innovative ideas to products for real world applications. I have a talent for linking early stage technologies to address specific market needs and have experience in growing tech platforms from initial concept to commercialization, with unique expertise in micro/nanotechnologies. In 2015, I founded Ferrologix based on my doctoral work at UCLA and currently serve as Chief Operating Officer where I oversee technical development and management of technical staff. Our company mission and vision is to use cutting edge magnetic nanotechnology to accelerate & scale emerging diagnostics & therapeutics.

Merve Mutlu is a postdoc with two years of experience working at Novartis Institute of Biomedical Research. Throughout her academic career, Merve specialized in CRISPR technology and genome-wide phenotypic screening to identify mechanism of action of therapeutic agents. In her PhD, she accomplished unveiling new key regulatory elements of radiotherapy response in breast cancers. In Novartis, she expanded her interest unveiling working principles of agents to the field of targeted protein degradation (TPD). Besides her postdoctoral research, as an early career professional in ELRIG networking group, she organized the first SLAS-ELRIG networking meeting in Basel in June 2022 where she initiated a hub of scientific collaboration in the field of TPD between pharma, academia, and biotech companies. Merve is a passionate researcher with positive attitude and tireless energy to seek the mysteries of cellular mechanisms. She balances her work enthusiasm with outside work activities such as bouldering and dancing.

I have completed my Ph.D in Analytical Chemistry at Iowa State University. Following graduation, I conducted my postdoctoral studies at the University of Minnesota where I developed bioanalytical techniques to understand autophagy biology in mammalian systems. I have started my industrial career at PPD (CRO) and acted as subject matter expert on oligonucleotide analysis for multiple stability programs. After moving to Abbvie, I have worked on developing various LC-MS/MS targeted metabolomics and proteomics workflows to understand disease biology for various early discovery programs.

Kristen Nailor is a Principal Scientific Manager and leader of the Biologics Sample Management Group at Genentech, Inc.  Kristen holds a degree in Biochemistry from Indiana University. She began her career at GlaxoSmithKline where she spent 7 years as a medicinal chemist. She then transitioned into the Sample Management world in 2010 when she accepted a position as the head of Compound Management at Vanderbilt University.  At Vanderbilt, she built a robust compound management facility and workflows that supported a wide variety of academic drug discovery programs and industry collaborations. After almost 5 years at Vanderbilt, she became the leader of the La Jolla based Compound Logistics team at Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson and Johnson in 2014.  In addition to leading her team, she was also a key member of a global core team tasked with implementing a Mosaic Sample Management Software rollout and laboratory infrastructure upgrade across multiple sites. Since 2017, she has been the group leader of the Biologics Sample Management Group at Genentech in South San Francisco, CA.  As interest in biologics and new modalities have grown across the industry, her current passion is to see biological sample management further expanded and elevated to a higher level of throughput, efficiency and impact as small molecule sample management in the drug discovery process. Kristen is also a dedicated advocate and active volunteer in the broader Sample Management Community, and currently serves as one of the Chairs of the SLAS Sample Management Special Interest Group, as well as the program committee for the 2021, 2022 and 2023 SLAS Americas Sample Management Symposia.  She is also the co-chair for the SLAS 2023 International Conference and Exhibition.

Dr. Andrew Napper studied at the University of Oxford and Penn State University before working in the Boston area for Genzyme, Enanta, ArQule, and Elixir Pharmaceuticals. While at Elixir, he played a leading role in the discovery of selisistat (EX-527), which was licensed to Siena Biotech and progressed to Phase II clinical trials as a treatment for Huntington’s disease. In 2005, he joined the University of Pennsylvania to direct one of the labs in the Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network. Dr. Napper joined Nemours in 2009 to establish a lab focused on the discovery of targeted therapies for rare pediatric diseases. After eight years at Nemours, he joined FLX Bio in the San Francisco Bay Area for one year before moving to Evotec as Vice President of Discovery Sciences and Princeton Site Head. From Evotec he joined BMS in March 2021 as Executive Director, Head of Automation and Assay Technologies. Dr. Napper was co-chair of the SLAS 2020 International Conference, and currently he serves as co-chair of the Screen Design and Assay Technology Special Interest Group and a member of the Awards and Grants Committee.

Nicole Nguyen is the Software Product Manager at Artel. She has over a decade of experience with software development teams and is a Certified Software Test Engineer (CSTE). Her commitment to quality user experience and the ability to represent the voice of the customer enable the delivery of  software products that meet the needs of laboratories and scientists across industries.

Dr. Nikolov is a Physician-Scientist with 10+ years of academic and industrial experience in cancer biology and cell imaging. She has a broad background in solid tumor models, tumor microenvironment and immunotherapy.  In her previous experience she led the development of 3D micro-tumor assay from biopsies to predict patients’ response to therapy to improve outcomes. She developed the T cell-based platform for phenotypical screening of a library of new compounds targeting senescence. In her current role at Protein Fluidics, Dr. Nikolov leads the projects on 3D cell-based assay development and automation using microfluidic based PuMA System. Her work involves innovating 3D cell-based applications with the Pu·MA System, high-content imaging and plate-reader based assays.

"As the head of Liquid Handling Product Management and Engineering at Formulatrix, Michael's focus is to ensure that our products continue to move the needle on innovation, efficiency, and transforming the status quo of scientists' and researchers' experience with lab automation.  Our Mantis and Tempest dispensing platforms continue to evolve with new features to address the needs of researchers seeking to miniaturize and simplify workflows.  Our new F.A.S.T. and FLO i8 systems bring to bear some of the easiest-to-use software interfaces that are enabled by the thoughtful and modern use of sensors and imaging systems designed into the instruments.  Our Rover Lab Automation system is helping to close the last mile problem of current state-of-the-art lab automation installations to fully connect islands of automation into truly seamless workflows.

Formulatrix is committed to continually engineering and innovating our existing and new products and projects.  We are constantly deriving new ideas and insights from our customers and their challenges.  Please feel free to stop by our booth to say ""Hi!"" and to discuss your ideal vision for the future of laboratory and pharmaceutical research."

David Nippa is a Doctoral Researcher working on digitalization and automation in Medicinal Chemistry at Roche Innovation Center Basel (RICB) and LMU Munich. His research focuses on combining high-throughput experimentation (HTE), data science and machine learning to accelerate drug discovery. David completed his undergraduate studies at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore and The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) San Diego. In parallel to his studies, he conducted internships at Wacker Chemie and Roche.

Qiankun Niu, Ph.D., is an instructor in the Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology at Emory University School of Medicine. She is interested in understanding how cancer genetic alterations contribute to tumor initiation and progression, and identifying potential therapeutic targets for precision medicine. Her work focuses on interrogating oncogenic mutation-mediated differential protein-protein interactions to inform the molecular basis and functional significance of driver mutations in cancer for therapeutic innovation.

John Nolan is a Professor at the Scintillon Institute, where his group develops new tools for cell and molecular analysis. He received BS degrees in Biology and Chemistry from the University of Illinois and a PhD in Biochemistry from Penn State. He did post-doctoral training at Los Alamos National Lab, where he was later a Technical Staff Member and Director of the National Flow Cytometry Resource. He is also founder and CEO of Cellarcus Biosciences, which offers products and services for extracellular vesicle research. He is on the editorial boards of Cytometry and Current Protocols in Cytometry, past-President of the International Scoiety for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC), and a Fellow of the American Insitute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).

"Studies: 

University of Zurich: Human biology 

Work:
University of Applied science Zurich: 3D cell culture and tissue engineering group 
Department of Oncology, University Children’s Hospital Zurich: Leukemia research group, Drug response profiling team 
since 2021 with Tecan, focusing on the development and support of applications on Tecans liquid handling platforms in cellomics and proteomics area

Expertise:
3D cell culture, tissue engineering, bioprinting, microfluidics, drug screening, personalized medicine"

"Kendra Nyberg is the Group Lead of Lab Automation at Calico Life Sciences. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Oregon in Physics and her Ph.D at UCLA in Bioengineering. 

During her undergraduate studies, she conducted research in membrane biophysics, holographic microscopy, and droplet microfluidics at University of Oregon, Harvard and UC Berkeley. For her dissertation at UCLA, she developed a microfluidic platform for rapid phenotyping of cancer cell mechanical properties. After graduate school, she designed microfluidic components for inkjet printers at HP Inc and built out in-house technology for a synbio startup, Triplebar Bio. 

At Calico, Kendra leads a team that develops custom solutions, ranging from liquid handlers, integrated systems and microfluidic technologies, that enable scientists to deepen our understanding of aging."

Dr. O’Rourke has 30 years of experience in the research, testing and development of tools and therapeutics for the oncology space.  He received his Ph.D. from the Ohio State University and spent 9 years as research faculty at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center. After receiving his MBA from the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Business, John joined Intellicyt/Sartorius.  As Head of Product Development for cell analytics at Sartorius, he led the development and commercialization of reagent, software, and hardware solutions for the high throughput flow cytometry community.  He joined BennuBio as Director of Assay Development where he focused on optimizing workflows and developing new applications for 3D-based flow cytometry. Dr. O’Rourke is currently the CEO and President of BennuBio and leading the company’s commercialization of the Velocyt® LP large particle flow cytometer.

Andrea O’Hara is a technical specialist at Azenta Life Sciences and has over 13 years of experience in next generation sequencing. She earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in genetics and molecular biology and did her postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health.

Bill Ortiz, Principal Sales Specialist, PerkinElmer Life Sciences   Bill Ortiz has over twenty five years of experience in the biotechnology industry developing, selling and supporting multimode plate reader detection technology.  He has spent the last 20 years covering the Northwestern United States supporting PerkinElmer’s assay, screening and plate reader technologies.  

Dr. Pace has over thirty years of experience in the life science field, with 20 years legal and corporate experience and 12 years in biotech research for large and small companies. He is a registered patent attorney with a record of over 40 issued US patents. Since 2001 he has helped many early and development stage companies in the life sciences with their strategic, intellectual property, and transactional activities. Dr. Pace has held executive management positions in several companies, including Novartis Corporation, Gentris Corporation, Quill Medical, Inc., and BASF Corporation. Dr. Pace has a J.D. degree from the School of Law at North Carolina Central University, and his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University. He has been CEO at Cell Microsystems since 2014.

Dr. Chorom Pak launched Lynx Biosciences, Inc. (LynxBio) to commercialize MicroC3™, a multi-omic microfluidic platform developed while earning her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. The technology was born out of an interdisciplinary collaboration between cancer biologists, physicians, biomedical engineers, physicists, and biostatisticians to solve the technical challenge of characterizing suspension cells in a miniaturized manner that would recapitulate individual patients’ disease. LynxBio is partnered with multiple pharmaceutical companies to leverage the MicroC3™ technology for immuno-oncology drug discovery and development. Before creating LynxBio, Chorom was the clinical and R&D lead at Cellectar Biosciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLRB), where she co-developed a drug against hematological malignancies and advanced it to Phase 2 clinical trials. Dr. Pak was awarded the Biocom Catalyst Award, holds seven patents, and has over 13 years of experience with hematological cancers and development of microfluidic platforms.

Chris earned his B.Sc. in Chemistry from Case Western Reserve University (2007). He did undergraduate research in the lab of Philip Garner working on synthetic methodology and the synthesis of alkaloid natural products. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Yale University (2013), under the supervision of David A. Spiegel. During his graduate studies he developed a class of bifunctional molecules that recruit endogenous antibodies to specific disease targets, such as HIV, resulting in their immune-mediated clearance. He carried out postdoctoral studies under the supervision of Ben Cravatt as a fellow of the American Cancer Society at The Scripps Research Institute, where he developed chemical proteomic platforms aimed towards expanding the ligandable proteome. Chris, currently an Associate Professor, started his independent lab at Scripps in August 2018 in the Department of Chemistry where his group develops chemistry-centric strategies to investigate human biology in therapeutic contexts.

Samir Patel is an Application Scientist as part of the Advanced Technology R&D Team at Nexcelom from PerkinElmer, Lawrence, MA. His primary focus is to develop collaborations with a variety of scientific communities, including immunology, microbiology, oncology, and cell/gene therapy. He assists these communities with assay development, experimental design, initial feasibility testing, including on- and off-site support for the Cellometer, Cellaca, and Celigo image cytometry instruments. Additionally, he works with collaborators to author papers for submission to journals. He received his B.S. in Biology from Providence College (2006-2010) and his Ph.D. in Immunology and Microbiology from University of Massachusetts Medical School (2012-2018).

Dr. Pegoraro heads the High-Throughout Imaging Facility (HiTIF), which provides NIH intramural investigators with the expertise and the technology needed to set-up, optimize and implement high-content imaging (HCI) assays. HCI assays are used to analyze large numbers of experimental conditions, such as in functional genomics or chemical compounds screens. In addition, the HiTIF applies HCI in combination with single-cell image and data analysis to quantify exceedingly rare but biologically important events in heterogeneous populations of cells.

Taci Pereira is Chief Executive Officer of Systemic Bio, a 3D Systems biotech company focused on the development of vascularized organ models made out of hydrogels and human cells to be used for drug discovery and development. Ms. Pereira joined 3D Systems as Vice President and General Manager of Bioprinting in May 2021 from Allevi, where she was Chief Scientific Officer and led the company’s exit. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Bioengineering from Harvard University, where she worked at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Ms. Pereira’s research at the Mooney Laboratory for Cell and Tissue Engineering (Wyss) focused on biomaterials for cancer immunotherapy, under the advisory of David Mooney, Ph.D.

Nisha works within Discovery Sciences at AstraZeneca , where she is responsible for building cell-based assays to support early drug discovery projects, primarily against Oncology targets. She received her PhD Biochemistry degree from the University of Sussex , UK and has done a post-doc at the Wellcome Trust funded – Sussex Drug Discovery Centre.

Dr. Carl Peters is a microplate reader senior application scientist with BMG LABTECH. He obtained a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from Northwestern University while studying Protein Kinase C signaling. He also has a B.S. in Biology from Hastings College. Prior to BMG LABTECH, he was an adjunct or assistant professor of Biology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at several different universities.

Timothy Petrie (PhD, MBA) is the Head of Pharmaceutical R&D Tools at Draper (Cambridge, MA), a non-profit engineering innovation company where he guides business development for organ-on-chip, medical devices, and diagnostic technologies.  Prior to this business role, he was Principal Investigator for numerous commercial- and government-sponsored programs within the organ-on-chip, tissue engineerin, and diagnostics space at Draper. Tim received his PhD in Bioengineering from Georgia Tech, MBA from Indiana U, and completed postdoctoral work at the NIH and University of Washington. He has over 35 peer-reviewed journal articles and holds 6 issued patents.

Janette has over 25 years of research and business experience in life science instrumentation and reagent companies. Experienced executive in both small start-ups as well as Fortune 500 companies. Extensive knowledge of the bio-analytic sector, functional expertise in the inbound and outbound aspects of marketing, sales, business development, and launching new technologies into the market. Involved in raising over $100M in corporate and venture funding at five companies. Inventor or co-inventor of 8 issued patents.

Piotr L. Pierog, Ph.D. earned a Ph.D. degree from Rutgers University in Biomedical Sciences. In his decade long professional career, Piotr held roles of increasing responsibilities at global pharmaceutical companies including: Takeda, Novartis, Pfizer, Bristol Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson; ranging from target discovery to late-stage development. In his previous role at Novartis Piotr was responsible for aspects of product development and precision medicine where he contributed to the global regulatory approval of cell therapy product for pediatric patients with acute lymphocytic leukemia. More recently, Piotr built and led a Translational Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology teams in cell therapies responsible Phase 1 and pivotal clinical trials at Takeda. Piotr is currently contributing to a built of a T cell receptor (TCR) startup biotechnology company in Cambridge, MA.

My name is Ashwin Pillai; I currently work at Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston, MA as an Automation Scientist in the High Throughput Screening Group. I graduated from University of Illinois with a B.S. in Ag & Bioengineering with a minor in Integrative Biology. I have also completed a Bioinformatics Certificate from Harvard Extension School. My role involves bridging the gap between Automation, Biology, and Data with a guiding principle of making the lives of scientists easier by enabling the utilization of automation technologies and data tools. I work directly with scientists to onboard new assays onto robotic platforms, to improve data pipelines for new instruments and metadata capture, and enabling new technologies to scientists to execute on their lab work more efficiently. Previously, I have contributed to R&D in Pharma at Bristol Myers Squibb in Lead Discovery (uHTS), supporting Lead Profiling (ADME-Tox) across multiple robotic platforms (HighRes Bio Cellario, Thermo Momentum). In addition, to supporting Pfizer’s Antibody Discovery Group.

"1991 PhD Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Yale University

1991-1995 Postdoctoral Fellow MBB Yale University
1995-1997 Assistant Research Faculty MBB Yale University
Sales roles at ISCO, BMS, Clontech, Cellomics
VP of Sales at Definiens
VP of Sales at GNS
COO at Proveris Scientific
Currently head of Sales and Marketing at Paradigm4"

Dr. Powell has a diverse research background, with expertise in cell and molecular biology, computer science, and lab automation. He graduated from Texas Tech University with a B.S. in Biochemistry and a minor in Biology in 2012. He then went on to obtain his PhD in Medical Science from Texas A&M University, which he completed in 2018. He has continued his academic career as a post-Doctoral research fellow and now as an Assistant Research Professor in the Gulf Coast Consortia’s Combinatorial Drug Discovery Program and High Throughput Flow Cytometry Programs at Texas A&M Institute of Bioscience and Technology. He has developed a wide array of image-based, flow-based, and biochemical high throughput screening platforms, which have been applied to the development and repurposing drugs across multiple disease contexts including cancer, pathogenic infections, and neurologic disorders. Dr. Powell's research interest also include the development and implementation of methods used to contextualize high dimensional data via integrative machine learning approaches that combine genomics, transcriptomics, chemical, image-derived and drug susceptibility data sources. To support these efforts Dr. Powell has built and maintains a distributed computing cluster that is housed between multiple CPRIT funded core facilities.

James Prescott is a Field Applications Scientist for the BioLector XT microbioreactor based in Denver, CO. He conducts trainings and provides support to help BioLector users optimize their microbial screening workflows. Prior to joining Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, James was a development scientist for Aalto Scientific Ltd, a biotech company that manufactures controls and calibrators for in vitro diagnostics. He was responsible for the research and development of manufacturing recombinant proteins as well as designing native protein purification schemes. For his education, James received both his BS and MS in biology from Georgia College & State University where he concentrated his studies in microbiology. He published some of his research on detecting foodborne bacterial pathogens in oysters in coastal Georgia.

"Raymond Price, PhD, MBA, is the Chief Business Officer at Neuroservices Alliance. His role is as a pharma/biotech business development executive responsible for increasing sales and managing collaborative R&D agreements for Neuroservices Alliance as part of the commercial team. 

He has an MBA from INSEAD (2009), and has work experience in Japan, the US, and France. He also has a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Vanderbilt University and extensive R&D experience. Finally, he's the founder and owner of a (profitable!) small business that performs solutions services (medical writing and editing) for non-native English speakers, with global clients in more than 10 countries."

"Laralynne Przybyla received her PhD from MIT where she studied the role of autocrine signaling in mammalian development using custom-engineered microfluidic platforms. Her subsequent postdoctoral work at UCSF expanded on this to investigate how mechanical signaling dictates developmental cell fate transitions. Since then, her research across academia and industry has involved generating model systems based on pluripotent stem cells, setting up custom functional genomics screening platforms for human developmental and disease biology, and developing next-generation high-throughput assays for small molecule and genetic screening applications. 

Dr. Przybyla is currently UC Scientific Director at the Laboratory for Genomics Research and an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Biochemistry and Biophysics Department at UCSF, where her research is focused on applying CRISPR-based functional genomics screening techniques to sophisticated human cell-based disease-relevant models and assays to uncover new biology and identify novel therapeutic targets."

"Emmanuel P. Quevy, Ph.D., is co-founder and CEO of Probius.

Emmanuel applies his expertise in advanced sensor products and technologies and his experience in entrepreneurship and technology transition to a commercial scale. Before founding Probius, he was responsible for engineering and technology at SDI, overseeing product and technology roadmaps of inertial guidance systems and managing strategic customer programs with Boeing, the US Navy, and other key accounts. Prior to that, he was co-founder, president, and CTO of Silicon Clocks, which was acquired in 2010 by Silicon Laboratories (NASDAQ:SLAB) and where he served as director of MEMS engineering for timing products.

Dr. Quevy’s 20 years of experience in the design and integration of complex sensor technologies include co-authoring more than 40 publications, co-inventing more than 40 issued US patents, and serving as a reviewer and committee member of various journals and conferences. 

His engineering degree from ISEN Lille, France, and M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Science and Technology of Lille (USTL), France, preceded his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from UST, with post-doctoral work at Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center where he led the DARPA-funded IMT program."

Luca Raess is a scientist working on the development of mass spectrometry-based proteomics sample preparation workflows. His specific focus lies in the design, implementation, testing and optimization of automated end-to-end protocols with the ultimate goal is to achieve better laboratory efficiency and reproducibility. He received his education in biotechnology from ETH Zurich before joining Biognosys' R&D team.

In my current position of Senior Manager, Flow Cytometry I am building out the FACS and cell sorting capabilities of the Allen Institute for Immunology in support of a multi-center longitudinal human immune system multi-omics study. Previously I served as the FACS and immunology specialist on multiple project teams expediting small molecules and biologics with Gilead Sciences and MedImmune/AstraZeneca and led teams at Wellstat Diagnostics and the NCI.

After completing a Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Chicago, Huw used his expertise in RNA crystallography and the mosquito to join SPT Labtech's application team. With SPT, Huw has become experienced in supporting a wide variety of liquid handling workflows in genomics and drug discovery using the mosquito, dragonfly, and now firefly.

Steve is Vice-President of Discovery Biology at AstraZeneca with responsibility for reagent generation and assay development, functional genomics, and cell and gene therapy. Previously Steve led the Screening Sciences department with accountability for Compound Management, Hit Discovery and Lead Optimisation biology. Prior to joining AstraZeneca, Steve worked at GlaxoSmithKline for 24 years in various roles. He has served in many roles within the Society of Laboratory Automation and Screening most recently as Chair of the European Council. He has also served as Chair of the European Laboratory Research and Innovation Group, and is currently Industry Trustee of the British Pharmacological Society. Steve sits on multiple Scientific Advisory Boards including EU-OPENSCREEN, WCAIR at the University of Dundee and the Centre for Membrane Protein Receptor Research (COMPARE). Steve has authored over 70 research papers and was awarded an OBE in 2021 for services to science and the COVID19 response.

"Gareth Reid is a Senior Automation Scientist at CSL Limited. He studied in the fields of Software Engineering, computational biology and bioinformatics, as well as completed advanced robotics courses, in particular using liquid handling platforms. He has worked in the areas of clinical genomics, core pathology, research, and pharmaceutical development. 

He specialises in implementing laboratory automation solutions using liquid handlers and track arms to support sample preparation. His current work involves implementing automation solutions using ThermoFisher robotics and Momentum software as the core platform. His key focus is leveraging, off these automation platforms, to implement important peripherals such as automated QC pipelines, data and metrics analytics and dynamic liquid handling protocols, as well as creating tools to allow scientists to actively contribute science during the workflow development.
Gareth has presented at several conferences on these topics, including the New York Genomics Centre in 2015, where he presented a self-developed, fully automated Illumina NGS workflow, to an industry audience still coming to terms with the concept of automating complex, long running assays. 
He is highly experienced in the areas of liquid handling robotics, software & process engineering, bioinformatics and scientific instrument integration."

I’m currently an Investigator in the High-Throughput Automation team at GSK with a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry.  The goal of my work is to develop efficient analytical protocols for the rapid screening of GSK therapeutic candidates to determine their physicochemical properties.  Our group utilizes an array of solid and liquid dispensing automated platforms to deliver solubility, forced-degradation, and crystallization screens to aid in small molecule drug development.  My role is to serve as a point of contact for internal and external GSK stakeholders by designing, executing, and communicating the results of our analytical workflows.  Prior to joining GSK, I received my Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh focusing on bioanalytical separations.  My dissertation concentrated on developing capillary-scale UHPLC methods for biochemical applications including sub-minute online microdialysis separations of neurotransmitters and utilizing microfluidic devices to study ectopeptidase activity using electroosmotic perfusion and LC-MS.

Daniel has more than 20 years of experience in the biopharma industry, working across multiple functional disciplines, including phenotypic assay development, high-throughput screening, and software engineering. Before Strateos, he was a Research Investigator at Novartis (GNF) and led multiple drug discovery campaigns. His research focused on developing novel phenotypic assays across various indications. Daniel received a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of California at Davis and a Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Sara R. Rivera, PhD is a Lab Manager and Lecturer at the University of Michigan. Focused on researching harmful algal blooms in the Great Lakes, Dr. Rivera works with many collaborators from the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR), NOAA- Great Lake Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL), and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Her primary work is in Dr. Greg Dick's Geomicrobiology laboratory.

Heaven’s Ph.D. work at Oregon State University focused on mycotoxin biotransformation and immunotoxicity, which ultimately led to a career in the nutritional specialty products industry. In 2020, Heaven’s experience with cytometric analysis of a wide range of sample types led to her current role developing flow cytometry instrumentation at Thermo Fisher Scientific. She now develops detection and analysis solutions for customers wishing to expand their understanding of cellular systems using flow cytometry and imaging.

Yusuf is a PhD student at Stanford University advised by Jure Leskovec and Stephen Quake. He is affiliated with the Stanford AI Lab and the Department of Biomedical Data Science. He works on designing new machine learning approaches for modeling biological systems. In particular, he is interested in how artificial intelligence can inform better experiment design for discovering new medicines. Previously, he worked as a machine learning engineer at GSK where he led a cross-disciplinary team to biologically profile their compound collection.

Paul joined Horizon in 2012 to work on client lead target validation projects utilizing both CRISPR & RNAi based technologies. For the last few years, Paul has developed and performed pooled and arrayed screening platforms to assess the functionality of Horizon's Pin-Point base editing technology platform. Prior to working at Horizon, Paul performed research at the University of Cambridge, where he studied the early BRCA genetics in Breast & Ovarian cancer with Prof Bruce Ponder. Then with Prof Ashok Venkitaraman, he subsequently studied the role of the spindle assembly checkpoint in determining the outcome from a drug induced mitotic arrest.

Ali Safavi, founder, President, and CEO of Grenova, is on a mission to enable laboratories around the world to become sustainable and waste-free. Ali founded Grenova, which is short for Green Innovation, shortly after graduating from college using the firsthand experience he gained working in the lab industry. Today, his award-winning company has created the only technology solution in the industry that enables life sciences and healthcare laboratories to reduce their plastic consumables cost and biohazard waste by over 90%. As a result of his work, Grenova's environmental and economic impact on the life sciences industry has so far resulted in 4,581 metric tons in Carbon Emission (CO2e) reduction, 2,650,848 lbs. of biohazard plastic waste reduction, and $84,135,258 in savings and cost reduction.

"Sarah Sandoz, PhD is the Operational Manager of the Explore Team at Pelago Bioscience, which conducts proteome-wide studies of target engagement with CETSA.

She holds a M.Sc. in Biology with a major in microbiology and immunology from ETH Zurich and a Ph.D. in Molecular Life Sciences from EPFL Lausanne. Her research has involved studying virus and bacterial toxin entry, cell trafficking and endocytosis as well as protein folding.
She has worked with both the targeted and proteome-wide formats of CETSA at Pelago since 2020 as a Senior Scientist. Since 2022 she has been managing the team working on the proteome-wide studies, where CETSA is combined with quantitative LC-MS based proteomics to give unique insights into global compound-induced effects in the living cell."

"Samantha is a Senior Customer Success Manager supporting industry, academic, non-profit and governmental organizations to onboard and fully utilize Quartzy - the world’s #1 lab management solution. Quartzy accelerates science by helping researchers streamline communication, simplify ordering, and track inventory.  Samantha is a dedicated client success advocate and has helped to build the Customer Success program at Quartzy for the last 2 years.  She is an experienced research professional specializing in academic lab management and strategic program development. Samantha has 10+ years experience as a scientist, laboratory manager, community volunteer and mentor. Her passion is to support research groups by applying creative problem-solving skills, knowledge of the field, and attention to detail, while adapting efficiency and organization."

"Jonathan provides advanced robotic, informatics, and operational support across multiple facets of drug discovery within the DTMP group at Janssen.  On any given day he may be found designing or implementing new robotics platforms to accelerate drug discovery, supporting or operating one of our existing automation solutions for 1536w uHTS, Lead Evaluation, Phenotypic screening, Biophysics, or Compound Logistics, or designing or troubleshooting some new custom application or informatics solution to streamline data capture and analysis. Jonathan’s happiest at the intersection of Engineering, Informatics, and Scientific discovery crafting and supporting synergistic solutions to enable drug discovery. 

Prior to joining Janssen in 2014, Jonathan brings 15 years of industry experience with Merck, Schering-Plough, and Bristol-Myers Squibb where he spearheaded the design, implementation, and operation of numerous laboratory automation initiatives in support of high throughput screening, high content imaging, lead evaluation and profiling, cell line development, compound management, molecular biology/genomics, and clinical diagnostic applications.  In addition to his wealth of automation experience, Jonathan also has significance experience and expertise designing, implementing, and supporting screening informatics and compound logistics IT solutions blending commercial solutions with custom application design to accelerate and automate drug discovery sample tracking and data analysis. 

Jonathan earned a Masters of Engineering degree, in Biotechnology, from the University of Pennsylvania, and two Bachelor of Science degrees, in Vertebrate Physiology and Nutritional Biochemistry, from Penn State University."

Chemist converted to engineer.  I have been handling laboratory automation for 20+ years, spanning early discovery to clinical development for both small and large molecule workflows.  Experienced in system integration of commercial systems but really enjoy de-novo design of automated systems.  19 years in big pharma, 2 years at a start-up.

"Prof. Dr. Kathrin Schumann is heading the laboratory ""Engineering Immune Cells for Therapy” at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). She studied biochemistry at the University of Tübingen and obtained her Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried. After a research stay at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, Basel, she continued her research at the University of California, San Francisco. While working in the laboratories of Alex Marson and Jeffrey Bluestone, she developed CRISPR technologies for the engineering of primary human T cells. In 2018, she was appointed Rudolf Mößbauer Tenure Track Assistant Professor at TUM School of Medicine.

Prof. Kathrin Schumann’s research is focused on human immune cell engineering. She uses innovative CRISPR technology to ablate or modify genetic regions in human T cells in order to characterize their role in cellular function and stability. In the long term, this knowledge may help to develop new therapies for the treatment of autoimmune diseases and cancer."

Vishwesh has over seven years of experience in life sciences research. His previous work involved studying cancer cell metastasis, and discovering novel pathways to inhibit cancer cell motility and proliferation. His current work involves building accessible droplet technologies that are compatible with minimal instrumentation for scalable and accessible assays. These are now being combined with low cost readers to enable technologies that are deployable in low-resource settings to improve health in underserved communities.

Kathi Shea is the Vice President of Repository and Innovation at Azenta Life Sciences.  She has been a member of ISBER since its inception in 1999 and served on the ISBER Board for 8 years in various roles, including Director, Secretary Treasurer and President.  She remains active in the Society today through participation in Society meetings, committees and working groups. In 2020 she was awarding the ISBER awarded the Distinguished Leadership award in 2020. Kathi also served on the Advisory Working Group that developed the College of American Pathologists Biorepository Accreditation Program and was an active member of the CAP BAP Committee for 6 years.  She has over 30 years of experience leading biorepository programs and advising government, academia, pharmaceutical and other life science companies on the design of biorepositories, quality systems, and optimal methods for collection, preservation and annotation of biospecimen collections.

A commercially minded biotechnology scientist with over 15 years industry experience in the development/commercialization of immunoassay screening technologies for academics, pharma/biotech's and diagnostics. Lead the team in South Australia and its ongoing investment in the AlphaLISA SureFire Ultra platform for measurement of high value drug targets (kinases) for pharma/biotech drug discovery programs.

Dr. Shen is currently a professor and the chief scientific officer of the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation and the founder and chief executive officer of Xilis Inc, which raised an $89M Series A to advance precision medicine. He was formerly the Hawkins Family Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the director of the Woo Center for Big Data and Precision Health at Duke University. He received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees from Stanford University and the NSF career award at Cornell University. He was the steering committee chair of the NCI Patient-Derived Model of Cancer Consortium, co-chair of the NCI Tissue Engineering Consortium, and cancer track chair of Biomedical Engineering Society 2019. His lab studies precision medicine from a systems biology perspective. Areas of interests include cancer, stem cells, the gut-brain axis, and microbiome.

Graduate of University of Arizona (BSE) with 13 years of lab automation and instrumentation experience in automated extraction, personalized medicine and clinical molecular diagnostics.  Formerly an instrumentation core manager and on-site repair and technical services provider, in his role at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences Ian focuses on applying his integrated sytems hardware & software skills to nascent and novel applications and vendor collaborations.

Prof Simpson Heads the Victorian Centre for Functional Genomics, a technology platform at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. She plays a critical role in driving new research enterprises by actively guiding discovery-based screening projects from concept and funding applications, through the assay development phase, screen execution and data analysis. Her laboratory supports compound, CRISPR and RNAi screens in both 2D and 3D settings with a strong emphasis on quantitative cell phenotyping using high content imaging. Her lab has developed automated 3D screening pipelines using cell lines, PDX and patient derived materials, successfully screening compound libraries and performing 2- and 3-way drug synergy studies. The VCFG team have developed machine learning strategies to analyse patient derived organoids across many individuals and can quantify organoids at whole-well or as single structures, allowing us to dissect tumour heterogeneity and drug response.

Ilyas Singeç is currently the Chief Scientific Officer of FUJIFILM Cellular Dynamics, a global developer and manufacturer of human cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Prior to this role, he served as the inaugural director of the Stem Cell Translation Laboratory (SCTL) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The SCTL was funded by the NIH Common Fund (Office of the NIH Director) with the mission to help advance the iPSC technology into clinical applications and drug discovery by developing innovative foundational technologies that can be broadly utilized. At NIH, he introduced novel methods for iPSC culture, single-cell cloning, and genome editing. He also pioneered industrial-scale robotic cell culture and the development of advanced cell differentiation protocols. Prior to this role, Dr. Singeç held leadership positions at Pfizer and the Sanford-Burnham-Prebys Medical Discovery Institute focusing on cell reprogramming and genetics-based target identification and validation for neurological and psychiatric disorders. Dr. Singeç received his MD and doctoral degree (summa cum laude) from the Universities of Bonn and Freiburg (Germany) and completed training in anatomy and clinical neuropathology.

Avtar Singh is a Senior Scientist in the Cell and Tissue Genomics Department at Genentech, where he develops new approaches for image-based screening and high-throughput biological discovery. During his postdoc with Paul Blainey at the Broad Institute, he established optical pooled screens as a method for high-content screening of genome-scale CRISPR libraries. Prior to that, he specialized in super-resolution microscopy and single-molecule imaging during his PhD in Warren Zipfel's lab at Cornell University.

"Nikhita is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Artificial, a first-of-its-kind lab automation platform that lowers the barrier of adopting automation so labs can accelerate their next breakthrough. Prior to Artificial, Nikhita was a researcher at the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab where she designed and studied socially intelligent robotic and AI platforms.

Nikhita also drove product at Palantir for several Fortune 500 companies and government agencies in the US and Europe. She has worked at various startups including Rypple (acquired by Salesforce), Loose Button, and university research labs such as UC Berkeley AutoLab, Robarts Research and CSTAR.

Nikhita received her M.Sc. in Media Arts & Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at University of California-Berkeley.

Outside of her work, Nikhita mentors founders and companies as a Founder Advisor at the MIT Engine and Climate Capital Bio, and can be found designing disaster relief solutions with the Field Innovation Team, obsessively trying to conquer the Sunday NYT crossword, or building fun projects in the machine shop."

Dr. Sirenko is an established cell biologist and imaging specialist who is an expert in developing assays with complex cell-based models for research and drug discovery. She is a senior scientist at Molecular Devices where she works on development of high-content imaging methods to the analysis of novel cell systems. Dr. Sirenko currently leads a group of scientists developing methods and new tools for automation of 3D cell models – including organoids and organ-on chips – for modeling cancer, neurotoxicity, and toxicology. Dr. Sirenko holds a PhD in Biochemistry/Biophysics, has over 15 years of industry experience, and has authored more than 35 scientific papers.

Zack completed his undergraduate studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Insititute studying Chemistry and Biochemistry/Biophysics. He is currently a 4th-year graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying under Dr. Matthew Lockett. His focus is on developing 3D cell culture models that are more representative of in vivo conditions.

Sara Siwiecki (she/her) is a PhD candidate at Yale University in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and a graduate of Chapman University with a BS in Biochemistry. Sara's thesis focuses on the evolution of jellyfish from a materials science perspective and uses various biochemical and biophysical techniques. Outside of her thesis research, she is a disability advocate for scientists. At Yale, she is a leader of the Graduate Student Disability Alliance, which is a disability advocacy group for graduate students, and a leader of the Disability Peer Mentorship Program, which is a program that facilitates peer mentorship for disabled students on campus. She has also worked with LabVoice to imagine how digital assistants can improve lab accessibility and participated in the SLAS's New Matter podcast about conversations around accessibility in the lab. She envisions a future where scientists feel welcome and successful in their labs through advancements in new assistive technology for lab equipment and improvements in conversations around disability in STEM. She would be happy to chat with anyone about science accessibility (or why jellyfish are super cool!) 

Nikolai Slavov is an Allen Distinguished Investigator and associate professor at Northeastern University in the Bioengineering Department and Barnett Institute. His lab has pioneered several multiplexed experimental methods for quantifying proteins in single cells and is developing new computational methods for analyzing and understanding single-cell protein data. He organizes the annual single-cell proteomics conference (single-cell.net/) and contributes to organizing other leading conferences, including HUPO, Oxford Global, NeurIPS, and others. The Slavov lab obtained direct evidence for a new regulatory mechanism of protein synthesis (ribosome specialization) and continues to drive research in this emerging field. Research from the Slavov lab has been recognized and supported by many prestigious awards, including the Allen Distinguished Investigator Award, the NIH Director’s Award, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Nikolai Slavov received BS from MIT in 2004, a PhD from Princeton University (Botstein laboratory) in 2010 and conducted postdoctoral research in the van Oudenaarden laboratory at MIT.

Andrew Smith is Senior Automation Engineer at AstraZeneca, based in Maryland. He has a background as a scientist at various pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and eventually made the transition into automation engineering specializing in automated analytics and Tecan liquid handlers. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences from Nottingham Trent University.

"Joshua Smith received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 2011 on a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Award, joining the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member.  With a background and training in low-dimensional nanoelectronics, Dr. Smith developed a growing interest in biomedical engineering and biotechnology, and in 2013 he helped establish the Translational Systems Biology and Nanobiotechnology Group at IBM Research and later managed the Molecular Health Solutions Group, overseeing R & D efforts for microfluidic devices aimed at separation and detection of single molecules for advanced biomedical diagnostics and preparative technology solutions.  After serving as the technical assistant to the Vice President of Healthcare and Life Sciences at IBM Research from Nov 2020 to Jan 2022, he joined the Accelerated Discovery team focused on holistic acceleration of scientific discovery workflows for healthcare and materials research.   

Dr. Smith has held an Adjunct Assistant Professor position at Columbia University in the Department of Electrical Engineering and is an IBM Master Inventor with more than 80 filed patent applications and over 50 granted patents.  He has co-authors 22 peer-reviewed journal articles, and his research has been highlighted by Forbes, CNN Money, IEEE Spectrum, and Pharma Technology Focus among other media outlets as well as on-stage at TED."

"Education:

Ph.D. Biochemistry, 1996
University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Biochemistry, College of Medicine, Chicago, IL
Awards: 1993-American Diabetes Association student research award.

MS. Biochemistry and Molecular biology, 1990
Moscow State University, Department of Molecular Biology, Moscow, Russia
Awards: 1990 -""Cum Laude"" Diploma of Moscow State University.
1986-1990 - University Academic Award (Moscow State University)

Professional Experience
1)  11/2018- present: Principal Scientist, HCI/QB, Merck Research Laboratories, 
Merck, Boston, MA ,
2) 6/2013- 11/2018: Senior Scientist, Lead in vitro screening, at Therapeutic Discovery Center, Molecular Translational Sciences Division,  USAMRIID 
3) 3/2010- 5/2013: Sr. Scientist, Director, Center for Core Technologies, IPK (Institute Pasteur in Korea),  Seongnam-si, Korea ,
4) 09/2002- 02/ 2010 . Principal Research Scientist II, Group Leader for Cellular Assay Development, Screeening Sciense, Wyeth research , NY & PA, USA
5) 05/1996– 05/2002: Senior Research Associate. Northwestern University, Laboratory of Dr. Daniel I.H. Linzer, Evanston IL 
05/1996– 05/2000 – postdoctoral fellowship"

Alice Soragni, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, a member of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and of the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute. She has a Bachelor and Master of Science cum Laude from the University of Bologna, Italy and a PhD from the ETH of Zuerich, Switzerland. Her laboratory in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at UCLA couples basic research into mechanisms of disease to the development of novel therapeutic strategies. Her expertise lies in the development of tumor organoid models to investigate the biology of rare tumors and perform screenings for functional precision medicine applications.

"Dr. Souza is the Director of Global Business Development and Innovation, 3D Culture at Greiner Bio-One and former Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He is one of the creators of magnetic 3D cell culture, including magnetic 3D bioprinting. Results using these groundbreaking technologies have been reported in various high-impact scientific journals, including Nature Nanotechnology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Protocols, Biomaterials, and Nature Reviews Cancer. Recently, his work was selected for the Short List of The Lush Prize for outstanding research producing an effective non-animal safety test. Dr. Souza’s research has been funded by grants from National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Health (NIH), Department of Defense (DOD), Center for Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), and Texas Emerging Technology Fund (ETF)."

"Hello, my name is Thomas Spanjers, and I am an accomplished sales manager in the lab automation industry. With over 15 years of experience, I have a proven track record of success in building and leading high-performing sales teams that deliver exceptional results.

I hold a Bachelor's degree in Biotechnology.Throughout my career, I have worked with a wide range of clients in the pharmaceutical and Biotechnology sector, developing and implementing customized lab automation solutions that help them optimize their operations and achieve their business objectives. My extensive knowledge of lab automation technologies and industry best practices allows me to provide expert guidance and support to my clients throughout the sales process. I have a deep commitment to creating a positive, collaborative work environment that fosters success.

I look forward to meet the people visiting the SLAS and am open to all inquiries."

Dr. Spitzer completed his undergraduate degree in Biology from Georgetown University followed by graduate training in Immunology at Stanford University in the laboratories of Drs. Edgar Engleman and Garry Nolan. There, he developed experimental and analytical methods to model the state of the immune system and immune responses to cancer using high-dimensional single-cell data. Dr. Spitzer moved to UCSF as a Parker Fellow and a Sandler Faculty Fellow in 2016. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Departments of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and of Microbiology & Immunology as well as an Investigator of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. His research lab uses systems immunology methods including single-cell analysis to understand how the immune system is altered by and mounts responses against cancer.

Guy is co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of AIQ Global. Guy has over 20 years of commercial software experience, including 14 years as Software Architect and Development Manager for Yahara Software and Stericycle Inc. working in regulated environments and medical devices. He joined AIQ in 2016 and led the efforts toward FDA clearance and subsequent high-scale cloud deployment of the company's novel technology for evaluation of treatment response in complex diseases.

I am a neuroscientist by training with 30 years combined experience in academic neuroscience and drug discovery. In my academic career, I focused my research on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease while in industry I supported identification and validation of new targets for Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and Parkinson’s disease.  While in industry, I developed a passion for public private partnerships and engaged in translational research including biomarker identification and validation across multiple CNS diseases. I joined the Critical Path Institute in 2011 and served as the Executive Director of the Coalition Against Major Diseases (CAMD), a flagship precompetitive consortium focused on streamlining the regulatory path for accelerating treatment of Neurodegenerative diseases.  I presently lead the Critical Path for Parkinson’s, a trans-continental consortium aimed at bringing together Parkinson’s disease data from around the world to accelerate effective delivery of treatments.

Dr. R. Allysa Stern, M.S., Ph.D., is an accomplished cell biologist with extensive experience using cell-based assays to study mechanisms of disease and toxicity. She received her Ph.D. in Physiology from North Carolina State University with a concentration on cellular physiology and disease modeling. She has years of experience developing novel 2D and 3D in vitro models using a variety of cell types from multiple tissues, including primary hepatocytes and stem cells. As a Product Applications Scientist at Cell Microsystems, she leverages her expertise in advanced imaging and cellular and molecular biology techniques for new product and assay development and customer support.

Dr. Janick D. Stucki is currently the CEO & Technical Director at AlveoliX, a Swiss SME providing innovative in-vitro solutions by combining unique microfluidic chip design with complex organ-on-chip modelling. He studied mechanical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) and holds a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Bern. He has more than 10 years of experience in developing and commercializing organ-on-chips.

With 13 years experience in drug discovery, Lorna has worked in both the academic andindustrial fields to gain expertise in high-throughput screening and automation. Shecompleted her PhD in Cancer Therapeutics at the Institute of Cancer Research, London followed by a Postdoctoral research position at Imperial College London where she used automated robotics platforms to develop high-throughput assays for engineering biology. Her current role at GSK includes leading a team to develop cell-based assays, in particular using High-throughput Flow Cytometry, and implementing automation capabilities for complex cell-based screening.

"Johan Sunryd is a Scientific Solutions Consultant at Benchling, the leader in cloud informatics for life sciences R&D.  Johan Sunryd works with R&D organizations to understand their informatics needs and identify best ways to augment scientists’ productivity with software solutions. Prior to Benchling, Johan worked as an interdisciplinary scientist and engineer for various medical devices companies, ranging from early R&D to preclinical animal models. His education includes a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from UMass Amherst and a B.S. in Biochemistry from Michigan State University."

Ansley Tanoto is a Senior Automation Engineer at Metagenomi, where he works to expand the company's gene editing candidate screening capacity. He uses his scientific/programming expertise to design, build, and facilitate workcell buildouts and expansions. He is also heavily involved in design/deployment of connecting automation to Metagenomi's future LIMS system. Before joining Metagenomi, Ansley held engineering roles at PACT Pharma and Intrexon where he onboarded and transitioned workflows onto newly released platforms such as the Biomek I-series and Hamilton Vantage. Prior to that, he worked in operations development on Twist Bioscience's gene manufacturing workflow. Ansley received a B.S. in Molecular Cell Biology and minor in Bioinformatics from UC Santa Cruz.

Mike Tarselli, Ph.D., MBA is the Chief Scientific Officer for TetraScience, a Boston-based start-up building the Scientific Data Cloud. He has held scientific and leadership roles at SLAS, Novartis, Millennium, ARIAD, and Biomedisyn. Mike has received awards and fellowships from IUPAC, Wikipedia, ACS, NSF, and the Burroughs-Wellcome Trust. He volunteers in roles promoting scientific education and diversity, including the National Science Foundation, the Pistoia Alliance, the NIH Assay Guidance Manual, and the UMass College of Natural Sciences Advisory Board.

"I'm a molecular microbiologist committed to combating the notorious ESKAPE pathogens and multi-drug resistance. I am developing technologies that evolve and purify bacteriophage (phage) to rapidly generate and formulate therapeutic cocktails. Co-founding the phage technology service center “TAILΦR” provides a unique opportunity to develop intellectual property assets and treat patients on a compassionate use basis.

As Director of Operations for TAILΦR, I coordinate center development, client projects, research, phage discovery, and patient cases amongst team members. I also liaise between clinical, academic, and regulatory teams, including the FDA, for compassionate use patient cases. We are compiling libraries of pathogens and their corresponding phages to reduce response time to the next case or outbreak.

My many passions/hobbies include science outreach, fishing, stand-up comedy, meditation, and steelers football. Maybe one day I'll get to use the kayak I foolishly bought just before the birth of my daughter."

Peggy joined Plexium in 2020 to lead the targeted protein degradation drug discovery efforts. She has more than 20 years of experience in drug discovery and development in the biotechnology industry. Prior to Plexium, Peggy was a co-founder and Executive Director of Biology at eFFECTOR Therapeutics where she established their technology platform for targeting dysregulated mRNA translation for supporting oncology drug development and lead their eIF4A program (Zotatifin, Phase II) from concept to clinical development in solid tumor malignancies. She previously served as Director of Biology at Anadys Pharmaceuticals, Inc. She held positions of increasing responsibility during her tenure including leading the drug discovery biology efforts as well as supporting the development of Setrobuvir until the company was acquired by Roche Pharmaceuticals.

Jörg Tost received his PhD in genetics from the University of Saarbrücken (Germany) in 2004 devising novel methods for the analysis of haplotypes and DNA methylation patterns. After a postdoctoral stay in the technology development department of the Centre National de Génotypage (CNG, Evry, France), he led the Epigenetics groups from 2006-2012, before becoming Director of Laboratory for Epigenetics and Environment at the Centre National de Recherche en Génomique Humaine (CNRGH). The laboratory is involved in the development and application of technologies to analyze DNA methylation and other epigenetic modifications quantitatively at high resolution at target loci and genome-wide using state-of-the-art sequencing technologies as well as the development of bioinformatic tools for the processing of such data. The laboratory has focused the analysis of epigenetic changes in neurodegenerative and immune-related Jörg Tost (H-index=52) is author or co-author of more than 220 publications and senior editor of the journal “Epigenomics”.

Dr. Bas Trietsch, is the CTO and co-founder of MIMETAS. He is co-inventor of the OrganoPlate®, optimized it towards a mass manufacturable product and enabled the establishment of MIMETAS’ production facility. He developed the initial tissue models on the OrganoPlate and continues to support assay development in the OrganoPlate. As CTO he currently drives product development and grows Mimetas' tissue production, HTS based drug discovery and data science capabilities. Bas holds a Ph.D. in biopharmaceutical sciences from Leiden University and co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications and patents.

Asako is the Head of Drug Discovery at ThinkCyte and is responsible for leading the development of genome-wide and drug screening platform. Prior to ThinkCyte, she was a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo, where she was a member of the University-Social Joint Division and collaborated with Nikon Corporation in the development of image-based screening using confocal microscopy. She was also a research associate at Duke University Medical Center, where she specialized in anatomical and functional analysis of somatosensory neurons. Asako holds a Ph.D. in Bioscience from Kyoto University.

Completed a PhD in chemical biology at University of Sheffield,UK with an emphasis on kinetic characterisation of heme biosynthetic enzymes in 2019. Before joining AstraZeneca in 2019 as a member or Protein Science followed by High Throughput Screening (HTS). Within High Throughput Screening, I have an interest in high throughput mechanism of action (MoA) studies which can be used to annotate biochemical screening outputs. 

Louis is CEO and Co-founder of Saguaro Technologies. He has built extensive experience over the the years in high-tech business management, business development and product development. Before starting Saguaro, Louis was Vice-President - Global Strategy - for a multinational high-tech company that he helped grow from 200 to 1000 employees in 5 years. Having grown through this experience, Louis decided to start Saguaro with his co-founder. Their purpose is to build a company that will become the most powerful leverage in accelerating life science discoveries and improving human health. 

M. Selim Ünlü received his Ph.D. (1992) degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in electrical engineering. Since 1992, he has been a professor at Boston University. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Engineering appointed in electrical and computer engineering, biomedical engineering, physics, materials science and engineering, and graduate medical sciences. His research interests are in the areas of nanophotonics and biophotonics focusing on the development of biological detection and imaging techniques, particularly in high-throughput digital biosensors based on detection of individual biological nanoparticles, viruses, and single molecule counting.

Dr. Ünlü has authored and co-authored >200 journal articles and has over 12,500 citations (h-index of 59); edited one book; and holds 20 US/international patents. In 2021, he was selected as Boston University Innovator of the Year. Dr. Ünlü  is a Fellow of IEEE, Optica, and AIMBE. He was awarded the Science Award (2008) by the Turkish Scientific Foundation.

Fred oversees the biomolecular sciences, screening and lead discovery effort at Remix Therapeutics. He has more than 18 years of experience in a range of roles in drug discovery and held various leadership roles at H3 Biomedicine and Boehringer Ingelheim. Now, Fred is motivated to push the current boundaries of drug discovery with the Remix team. He received his PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of British Columbia and completed his postdoctoral training as a Merck-sponsored Helen Hay Whitney Foundation fellow at Harvard Medical School.

"PhD in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Senior Scientist, Lead Discovery and Characterization, Amgen 2018-present
 Supporting discovery projects including targeted proteolysis for biophysical characterization to identify lead therapeutic candidates
 Representing discovery attribute sciences in various project team meetings
 Evaluating novel technologies to fulfill business needs
Scientist, Discovery Attribute Sciences, Amgen 2015-2018
 Supported discovery projects for binding analysis using multiple techniques (i.e., SPR, DLS and DSF) to understand biology, to validate target, and to identify lead therapeutic candidates (both small and large molecules)
 Developed membrane-protein-focused technologies ranging from novel reconstitution/solubilization strategies to advancing direct-binding assay
 Played a key role in the collaboration with Prof. Richard Murray (California Institute of Technology) in securing the funding from Amgen Chem-Bio-Engineering Award, and co-mentored the graduate student
 Evaluated and implemented novel technologies to fulfill business needs
Research Associate, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, 2013-2015
University of Delaware, and National Institute of Standards and Technology
 Determined membrane protein structural changes in the presence of additives using scattering techniques (i.e., DLS, SANS, and SAXS)
 Investigated role of various surfactants in stabilizing and crystallizing membrane proteins using multiple biophysical techniques (i.e., CD, NMR, ITC, and fluorescence spectroscopy)
 Developed chromatography-based methods (i.e., affinity, ion exchange, and size exclusion chromatography) to purify detergent-solubilized recombinant membrane proteins
 Calculated monoclonal antibody (mAb) interactions based on atomistic models to understanding the solution behavior of concentrated mAbs
Postdoctoral Researcher, National Institute of Standards and Technology 2011-2013
 Developed a surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-based assay to investigate the stability and activity of membrane proteins under different solution conditions (i.e., pH, temperature)
 Designed a membrane-protein biomimetic platform for functional characterization of membrane protein (i.e., ion channels) using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy"

Dave Vance is an automation engineer at the DAMP Lab of Boston University. He has contributed to the campus-wide COVID-19 surveillance testing done in the Clinical Testing Lab as well as ongoing work at the DAMP Lab core facility. His expertise is in laboratory automation, specifically Hamilton hardware and Venus software and in planning and design of automated protcols. 

James Vandegrift is senior research associate in Analytical Development at Takeda in Lexington, MA. His primary focuses are glycan characterization and automation of test methods. He received his BS in chemistry from Ursinus College and has previously worked in DNA synthesis and analytical chemistry. James lives in Boston and enjoys hiking in his free time.

Arne is the Director of Automation, Process and Systems Engineering at Synthego.  Synthego is a genome engineering company with a mission to make CRISPR cell engineering readily available to any scientist or clinicians involved in direct patient care.  Arne has over 2 decades of experience developing and validating scientific instrumentation. He previously worked as product manager at a life science SaaS company, prior to that he was a software engineer at a diagnostics company, and previously a systems engineer at a liquid handling instrumentation company. Arne is passionate about the industrialization of Biology, addressed by multi-disciplinary teams. He holds a PhD in Experimental Physics from Ghent University, Belgium. During his PostDoc at Stanford University, CA, he focussed on Molecular Imaging Instrumentation.

Meghav Verma is currently working for National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences(NCATS/NIH) as a Product Manager, Robotics & Automation. His job is to create the vision and develop a state-of-the-art robotics and automation lab for the various scientific groups at NCATS and manage the ASPIRE program. Meghav works with the engineering team to develop various fixed and mobile robotic systems to automate the labs and create a digital eco-system of lab insturmentation using IoT to help the institute perform faster and more efficient research towards drug discovery and therapeutics development for rare diseases.

Dieter Wagner received his degree in Automation from the THM Friedberg and worked in sales and product management roles in several different industries including vacuum technology, optical disc, semiconductor and organic materials. During this time Dieter developed a passion for biotechnology and this led him to Thermo Fisher Scientific, where he is currently Product Manager for the Cytomat product line.

"Erica graduated from MIT with a BS in Mechanical Engineering in 2017 and began her career as a Rotational Engineer at Brooks Automation, working in various roles throughout the company before landing permanently in the Life Sciences division as a Systems Engineer. She transferred to product management with responsibility for automated cryogenic storage in 2021, looking after the products she used to do the engineering work for."

"Ramona L. Walls, Ph.D. is Executive Director of Data Science at the Critical Path Institute (C-Path). She oversees multiple efforts including the development of C-Path’s Data and Analytics Platform, expansion and modernization of C-Path’s data integration pipeline to encompass new data types, and development of a rare disease knowledge graph. Walls joined C-Path in December 2020 as a Data Scientist in Ontologies, Standards, and Metadata. In 2021 she was promoted to Associate Director of Data Science. Walls retains an appointment in the Bio5 Institute of the University of Arizona, where she has been Principal Investigator on multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and other funders. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in fields as diverse as rare diseases, environmental health, evolution, biodiversity, sustainability, and space situational awareness. Walls received a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Resource Management and Horticulture at Penn State and a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from Stony Brook University and did a post-doc at the New York Botanical Garden. Google scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/cit..."

"My name is David Walsh, Ph.D. and I am an Assistant Group Leader at MIT-Lincoln Laboratory.  I manage a team of biologists and engineers focused on developing and transitioning innovative biotechnologies to government, academia, and industry partners.  The enabling capabilities of additive manufacturing, rapid prototyping, and integrated sensors have led to the development of high-throughput platforms for interrogating various human physiologies such as: the gut microbiome, the blood-brain-barrier, and liver.  My passion is to deliver the capabilities to improve accuracy, speed, and cost of drug discovery by improving throughput, scalability, and user-friendliness of advanced in vitro models (e.g. organ-on-chip)."

Jenny Wang has a master’s degree in Pharmacology and Physiology from McMaster University. She has over 20 years of experience with assay development and implementation in automation using different software. She has managed over 100 screens using Momentum, such as ELISA, numerous cell assays and LUMIER, against chemical libraries and siRNA libraries.

Jill is an accomplished bench scientist specializing in NGS and spatial transcriptomics. She started her NGS career in single cell genomics when only a handful of labs in the world had knowledge in this field. Jill comes from a background heavy in early R&D bringing cutting edge technology to the forefront. Her work has spanned across academia at MD Anderson through larger companies such as Ilumina, but really found her nitch in the smaller start up culture. She has taken this creativity cultivated from this background, and applied it to the art of supporting customers in the Field.

"Dr. Watrous is an analytical chemist and engineer with more than a decade of experience using mass spectrometry for small metabolite measures and associated informatics, both in academia and industry environments. Prior to co-founding Sapient, he was a postdoctoral researcher and subsequently an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Jain Laboratory at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). During this time, he was responsible for developing fully automated, high throughput mass spectrometry-based workflows for global small molecule analysis in biological fluids. Dr. Watrous was also previously a scientist at Watson Pharmaceuticals, where he developed cGMP analytical testing methods for emerging generic drugs. At Sapient, Dr. Watrous is responsible for the generation, optimization, and standardization of Sapient’s rLC-MS systems and other innovative instrumentation and lab automation infrastructure.

Dr. Watrous earned his undergraduate degree in Bioanalytical Chemistry from California State University-San Bernadino and received his MS and PhD in Bioanalytical Chemistry from UCSD."

I lead a biomedical data science lab with a mission to reduce human suffering. We develop software and machine learning methods and approaches using genomics and microscopy data to study disease, improve clinical decision making, and perform innovative drug discovery. I received my PhD at The University of Pennsylvania in Genomics and I performed a postdoc at The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in image data science for drug discovery.

"Andrea is a Senior Director within the Discovery Sciences Group at Pfizer, where she oversees four teams, Functional Genomics, Cell Model Generation, Protein Homeostasis, and Protein Sciences.   She joined Pfizer in 2016, and prior to that she spent 10 years in the Lead Discovery Group at Bristol-Myers Squibb.  In both roles, Andrea has been involved in driving the evolution of cell models and assay screening methods to enable improved physiological relevance.  This includes the development and use of iPSCs and primary cells for target ID and lead generation.  Andrea’s teams have leveraged phenotypic screening for close to 15 years, with several lessons learned along the way. 

Andrea holds a PhD in Physiology and Molecular Biology from the University of Western Ontario."

Riley Whalen received a BS in biology from the University of Washington in 2020 and works as a research assistant in a cancer research lab at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, OR. Currently, she studies a novel population of circulating cancer cells that possess both cancer and immune cell characteristics, known as hybrid cells, that have been implicated in the metastatic cascade. Riley is also interested in novel cell populations and how their unique features affect living systems and has accepted an offer to attend a biomedical sciences PhD program at OHSU in the fall. 

Ceri Wiggins (PhD) is a Director in the Functional Genomics department at AstraZeneca, leading the Phenotypic Screening group. Her team is responsible for identifying novel targets to support AstraZeneca’s clinical pipeline, by coupling perturbation technologies such as CRISPR with complex cell models to screen at scale. Prior to AZ, Ceri spent 9 years at Horizon Discovery where she lead their R&D team in the development of Horizon’s CRISPR screening platform and internal target discovery initiative. She also led the scientific development and commercialisation of Horizon’s novel base editing platform Pinpoint™.  

John P. Wikswo is the University Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, and Physics and A. B. Learned Professor of Living State Physics at Vanderbilt University, and founding Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education (VIIBRE). He received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. His group’s current work focuses on the development of intelligent well plates that serve as perfusion controllers, microclinical analyzers, and microformulators, and the refinement and use of tissue-chip models of the blood-brain barrier, blood-CSF barrier, airway, and engineered cardiac tissue constructs. He is merging multichannel microfluidic pumps and valves, sensors, mass spectrometry, computational systems-biology models, and artificial intelligence/machine learning software to create robot scientists operating as self-driving biological laboratories for microbial and mammalian cells. Dr. Wikswo has published more than 230 peer-reviewed papers, is a fellow of seven professional societies, and holds 44 patents.

I graduated from the University of Bath in 2020 with an Integrated Masters in Pharmacology. Now based within AstraZeneca's Global High Throughput Screening Centre, I have experience in a variety of biochemical- and cell-based assays to identify chemical equity for drug discovery across a range of therapeutic areas. I am interested in high-content imaging approaches, such as Cell Painting, to generate unbiased morphological profiles of chemical or genetic perturbations. 

"Sarah Williams is a Associate Research Leader at Charles River Laboratories working at Chesterford Research Park, Cambridge. Sarah is passionate about electrophysiology and in vitro assay development, with 12 years ion channel experience. 

Sarah’s interest in ion channels started in 2009 during a summer placement, following this she completed her PhD at the University of Southampton. After her PhD, Sarah did postdoctoral research at Brandeis University. Sarah moved back to the UK in 2016 to work for a Cambridge based contract research organization (CRO). In 2018 she moved to Charles River, where she has worked with both manual and automated patch clamp platforms. Sarah has worked on a range of voltage and ligand gated ion channel targets at Charles River, successfully delivering profiling projects and leading HTS projects from assay development into potency phases."

Scott Wolkenberg is Scientific Director in Janssen Global Discovery Chemistry and serves as Global Head of Parallel Medicinal Chemistry.  Scott’s focus is driving acceleration in all discovery pipeline stages through novel capabilities, to deliver high quality clinical candidates faster.  This includes high throughput experimentation, novel reactions, prediction, and lab automation.  Scott is a member of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry Editorial Advisory Board, is past Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on High Throughput Chemistry and Chemical Biology, is a past member of the National Medicinal Chemistry Symposium SAB, and is an ACS Division of Organic Chemistry Mid-Career Investigator awardee.  He has co-authored more than 50 publications and numerous patents.  Prior to joining Janssen, Scott held positions in Medicinal Chemistry, Technology-Enabled Synthesis, and Chemical Biology at Merck & Co., Inc.  He received his B.A. from Cornell University and completed his Ph.D. with Dale L. Boger at the Scripps Research Institute.

Antony completed his PhD at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, studying the role and regulation of cell death processes in vertebrate ovarian development. He then pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of Michigan, examining the role of insulin-like growth factor signaling in vertebrate embryonic development. He subsequently joined a research group at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he employed genetic approaches to study embryonic and postnatal germline development and regeneration. He joined Cell Signaling Technology, Inc. in 2011, where he now serves as the Senior Director of Product Design and Strategy. 

Paul Wylie, PhD has a long and robust commercial history of developing and commercializing multiplexed assay solutions primarily to Pharma and Biotech companies. He has a lot of extensive experience, working closely with research scientists to understand their problems and requirements to effectively help to provide robust multiplexed assay solutions. 

Dr. Xiao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy at Rutgers University. He is also a principal investigator at the Rutgers Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute (EOHSI). Dr. Xiao and his research team focus on female reproductive biology, disease, and toxicology, including (1) the adverse effects of classic and emerging environmental contaminants on women’s reproductive health, in particular of women’s ovaries and associated ovarian functions, menstrual cycle, and fertility; (2) engineering an ovary-on-a-chip and a female reproductive-tract-on-a-chip using microfluidic and organ-on-a-chip technologies; (3) developing novel women’s birth control pills; and (4) investigating the effects of environmental exposure on women’s reproductive diseases such as polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). Dr. Xiao’s research is supported by EOHSI at Rutgers, NIH, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Health and Environmental Sciences Institute (HESI), and New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP).

"2018-present: VP, Therapeutic and Translational Science at A2 Biotherapeutics, leading immuno-oncology projects from target ID to IND filing.

1997-2018: Amgen; varies scientist and group leader positions in Discovery Research; experienced in antibody and small molecule drug discovery as well as technology development
Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from Rice University"

Dr. Yao is a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Nancy Allbritton at University of Washington. They have developed a picoliter thin layer chromatography (PicoTLC) technology that can be used to assay lipid signaling pathways in ultra-small samples, and even in single cells. If you are interested, please contact us at: yaoming@uw.edu

Viktoria Zieger started her bachelor's degree in physics in Heidelberg in 2015 and completed it with her thesis about simulations of the accuracy of dose delivery for particle radiation in cancer therapy. In 2018 she continued her studies with a master's degree in Muenster with a focus on nanophysics and biophysics. For her thesis, she constructed a novel optical setup that combined a light sheet microscope with optical tweezers and used it to carry out microrheological measurements while simultaneously acquiring 3D microscopic images. In March 2021 she started her PhD in the Laboratory for MEMS Applications at the University of Freiburg. As part of her project, she is developing a platform for automated 3D microtumor analysis for personalized therapy. In this context, she designs and tests different methods for both automated microtumor production and automated single microtumor deposition to enable and facilitate high-throughput drug screening.

Bhagyashree Khunte Director, Compound Management and Distribution Pfizer Worldwide Research, Development, and Medicine Shree Khunte heads the Pfizer Compound Management and Distribution (CMD) group in Groton, CT specializing in data handling, automation, compound QC, and material logistics to curate compounds in the Pfizer corporate collection and ensure they are made available wherever they are needed across the Pfizer enterprise and externally. Shree has over 25 years of experience in separation sciences and automation seeking opportunities for continuous improvement, driving innovation, and technology development. She joined Pfizer in 2001 and prior to transitioning to Compound Management led the Discovery Separations Group responsible for providing separation and purification support to the Discovery Chemistry Synthesis early and late-stage portfolios maximizing efforts in exploratory chemistry and lead optimization. Shree holds an undergraduate degree in Chemistry, Master’s degree in Analytical Chemistry, and MBA.

Marcus Oxer is a Product Manager at Titian Software. He joined Titian Software in 2012, where he specializes in addressing the needs of biological sample management.. Prior to joining Titian, Marcus worked for GSK and its legacy companies for 23 years. During this time he held roles in molecular biology research, bioinformatics and R&D IT.

Elizabeth (Lisa) Nixon has been working with GlaxoSmithKline in Sample Management for 19 years. In those 19 years, she has focused on incorporating innovative ideas and methods into Sample Management's daily operations. She presented at the 2006 SBS conference in Seattle and published papers on Adaptive Focused Acoustics in 2007, Screening Pools in Chemoproteomics Assays in 2015, and Next-Generation Compound Delivery Platforms to Support Miniaturized Biology in 2019. She us an Millersville University Alumni, receiving degrees in Environmental Biology, Chemistry, and Geology.

Wilfredo Pinto is an Assoc.Principal Scientist for the Discovery Sample Management Analytical QC Group at Merck & Co., where he performs high throughput analysis utilizing UPLC/MS/UV fast chromatography for compounds in DMSO solution by assessing identity and purity, confirming stability, and corelating chemical trends such as impurities, degradants, or solubility issues.

With 23 years of experience in sample management, Dan Hascall has started and managed sample management, automation, and informatics groups at Genentech, Syrrx/Takeda, and Eli Lilly. Prior to joining Lilly’s research division in 1999, Dan spent 6 years as automation control engineer at Eli Lilly with expertise in chromatography and lyopholization control systems. Dan’s background in software, automation and engineering has enabled opportunities in leading teams that focus on Sample Management, Automation, and Informatics. He is currently the leader of Genentech’s compound management group. He also the leader of an informatics team that supports large molecule pharmacology and compound management. Dan’s most recent sample management endeavor was forming a new satellite compound hub in Shanghai China. The satellite hub in China is fully integrated into the South San Francisco operations; thus making the system transparent to Genentech researchers. The Shanghai hub enables researchers to manage compound storage and distribution of project compounds to CROs and partners in China as well as globally.

David Winarta, MS, Lab Head - Biologics Sample Management, AbbVie A passionate and dedicated sample manager, David has been working to better connect samples with scientists for over ten years. David is a key part of AbbVie’s sample management network and is currently working as a lab head at AbbVie Bioresearch Center in Worcester, MA. David holds an M.S. in Pharmaceutical Biochemistry from UMass Lowell and brings a broad background in bioconjugation, purification, analytics, and software expertise, along with a drive for solving problems and closing gaps, to address the task or overcome the challenge at hand.

Manny Ventura is Senior Director and Site Head of ChemPartner-San Francisco. Before becoming Site Head in 2021, Manny was the Director of Analytical Chemistry for ChemPartner. His responsibilities entailed providing analytical support to ChemPartner Medicinal Chemistry, US clients and co-located incubator tenants. Simultaneously he provided scientific leadership and direction to ChemPartner’s Analytical department in China. As one of the founding members of ChemPartner’s first US site, his role grew to include the responsibility of site Safety Officer. He continues to play a key role in managing laboratory infrastructure, logistics, and management of the South San Francisco scientific incubator where ChemPartner resides. Prior to joining ChemPartner, Manny was the Separations Group leader for Amgen’s Medicinal Chemistry department in South San Francisco. There he implemented this central synthetic chemistry support function with a special focus on chiral separations by supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC.) Previous to his employment at Amgen, Manny worked for Pfizer at their La Jolla site. By the end of his tenure there, he led the Separations group supporting Medicinal Chemistry. Manny began his journey at Pfizer making critical contributions to the design, development and utilization of high-throughput SFC/MS for the analysis of chemical libraries. Manny earned his PhD in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin, and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from UC Berkeley.

Oksana Orel received MA from Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Soon after that she started her career as a Sales manager at FCH Group, a local chemical provider in Kyiv. In about 5 years Oksana joined Chemspace LLC as an Account manager to contribute to developing Ukrainian business. Now Oksana serves as Head of sales operations at Chemspace, a marketplace for small molecules with the largest catalog to search and buy from.

Eric Williams, Assoc Prin. Scientist, Merck Quantitative Bioscience, Discovery, 17-year career at Merck is focused on assay operations, automation, LIMS and sample management. Eric works on a team of scientists at Merck focused on the integration of innovative technologies to enable robust and efficient execution of a wide range of In Vitro assays. The team works together to drive efficient workflows to enable compound and assay management, data capture and reporting, fit for purpose instrumentation and robotic platforms, and a variety of automation. These workflows primarily support the small molecule drug discovery efforts and are expanding to include other modalities (antibodies, biologics, etc..). Eric enjoys working with and on teams where he can share the Information Technology knowledge, he has accrued over 30+ years with a goal to enable scientists to innovate and impact Merck's pipeline. Eric is a leading a small group of scientists working with IT to reimagine how a LIMS system could help scientists, from assay creation to sample requests to assay execution in the lab, through very modern and integrated software. Eric has had the pleasure of working on teams that discovered Belsomra® the first-in-class Orexin Receptor Antagonist approved for insomnia and many other innovative medicines.

Nancy Wang, Ph.D. is Group Leader, Pharmacology at Cleveland Clinic Center for Therapeutics Discovery (C3TD) since 2019. She oversees the Screening and Target Validation group of C3TD which encompasses high throughput screening, assay development, and compound management for therapeutic development programs at LRI. Dr. Wang has developed her career in biopharma industry including 15 years at Athersys, Inc where she worked in the areas of cell biology and in vitro pharmacology for small molecule drug discovery programs. Her area of expertise from her time at Athersys included GPCR biology for the development of small molecule therapeutics for CNS centric therapeutic areas. She also worked at HD Biosciences as Associate Director of Pharmacology where she led a team focused on development of plate-based in vitro pharmacology in support of client driven small molecule development programs. Her time at HD Biosciences was focused on assay development, automation, and compound management to support programs from small biotech to large pharma. Dr. Wang received her B.S. in biochemistry from SUNY-Stony Brook and completed her Ph.D. in biology at UC San Diego. She went on to complete her post-doctoral studies CWRU School of Medicine in cancer biology.

Thu Thai is a principal scientist from Bristol Myers Squibb, San Diego, CA. She obtained her undergrad in Biochemistry/Cell Biology at the University of California, San Diego. Thu started out her career working in the lab of Dr. Ogata studied on complement proteins at the Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies for 7 years. In 2005, she joined compound management team at Celgene, now Bristol Myers Squibb. Since then, she has helped the team to grow and expand the support for testing in high-throughput screening and profiling assays not only to the San Diego sites but also to other sites of BMS and collaborators as well as CROs. Her focus is compound management and how to utilize automation to help compound management team in their daily tasks.

Nicolas Zorn is currently the head of the Compound Library Enhancement and Logistics team at Roche pRED in Basel within The Small Molecule Research, Lead Discovery organization. Nicolas is an Organic Chemist by training (Ph.D. at the University of Paris 6, PostDoc at Indiana University, US) and has worked for 10 years supporting and driving projects in several disease areas as medicinal chemist and computational chemist at Merck MDS in the USA, then Roche in Switzerland. In the last four years, he has led the Compound Library Enhancement and Logistics team in Basel where all samples are processed and distributed for Small Molecule Research in pRED.

Jared Epstein, MS, Inventory Manager, has worked in the healthcare or Pharmaceutical industry for the past 13+ years and has been with AbbVie for the last 6 years in the Global Compound and Logistics Organization. As inventory manager of the primary global compound repository, Jared has been responsible for supporting major efforts of Discovery and Development Sciences across a wide array of projects requiring small molecule research materials. Specifically, Jared has overseen the organization, storage, and reformatting of research material for delivery throughout AbbVie an its collaborators.

Multifaceted, cross-functional leader who seamlessly meshes his scientific and automation background with his top-notch business education. Innovative visionary with 20 years of successive career advancement in the life sciences industry, focused on automated platform development, process improvement, and value chain optimization. Specialties: - Technology development and implementation - Automation systems, including design & fabrication - Innovative solutions, efficiency, and value creation - Compound management operations - Biobank operations - Staff development and cultivation - Cross-functional team building - Change management leadership - Lean Sigma analysis and implementation - Project Management - Product Development - Self-motivated innovation - Creative problem solving - (Calculated) risk taking - Thinking outside the box - Being able to see the big picture

Cara Sutcliffe, MS, is the Senior Project Manager in the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. With over twenty-five years experience in DNA extraction, analysis, and biobanking, she has overseen the purchase and installation of multiple automated sample storage systems in an academic environment.

Matt Rasmussen, Ph.D., serves as the vice president of software engineering at Insitro, a machine learning-driven drug discovery and development company, where his team develops data pipelines and infrastructure for machine learning and high-throughput biology to transform the way medicines are created. Previously, as the vice president of engineering for Myriad Genetics, Rasmussen led engineering teams focused on software automation and genomic data pipelines to make high complexity genetic testing routine in clinical practice. During his time at Counsyl, he developed and scaled the software behind several successful prenatal genetic testing products. In 2010, Rasmussen acquired his Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he developed efficient bioinformatic algorithms with applications in evolutionary genomics and population genetics.

Naim Matasci leads the Ellison Institute’s computational lab as the Director of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. In his role, he supports the Institute's researchers by providing analytical guidance and expertise across the entirety of the project life cycle. Dr. Matasci earned his MSc in Molecular Biology from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Later, Dr. Matasci joined the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, to study the evolution of human protein expression for his PhD. He then joined the iPlant Collaborative team at the University of Arizona, now CyVerse, where he helped design and develop a data-centric computational infrastructure for the Life Sciences. His current research areas are digital pathology and genomics, in particular for cancer diagnosis.

Kevin C Cassidy Ph.D Application Scientist BIOVIA Kevin Cassidy has a scientific focus in computational biophysics, biology, and chemistry. He is a part of the biosciences technical sales group at Dassault Systèmes BIOVIA and supports several solutions within Small Molecule Therapeutics Design, including Generative Therapeutics Design, Discovery Studio Simulation, and Insight.

Dr. Ilya Goldberg has spent the majority of his career at the intersection of biology and imaging, and played a leading role in the development of image informatics and machine learning for bio-medical imaging since the emergence of these fields in the late '90s. At ViQi, Ilya leads development of high-throughput imaging assays using AIs. Prior to ViQi, Ilya co-founded a company that developed the first medical device to receive regulatory clearance that uses an AI to help diagnose lung cancer in CT screening exams. Prior to this, Ilya led a research group at the NIH National Institute on Aging, where his group developed machine learning software for image processing in biology and medicine, and studied the molecular mechanisms of aging in humans and model organisms. As a postdoc at MIT, Ilya co-founded the OME project, which continues to be used for imaging infrastructure in large image repositories. Ilya has over 60 peer-reviewed scientific articles from his years at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, MIT, and NIH in molecular and cell biology, pattern recognition, image informatics and the basic biology of aging.

As Vice President, Head of Business Development EU and RoW, Iktos AI, Sree leads strategic business development outreach, alliance management, marketing & communication activities. Sree has a successful track record in Strategic Business Development, Technology Commercialisation and Alliance Management positions with increasing responsibility in the bio-pharma industry. Sree was instrumental in securing and managing partnerships with biotechs and pharma as well as maximising the value of AI-based technology platforms and the growth of the business. Sree also held senior research management positions at biotechs and virtual biotechs. Named author of multiple patents and publications, delivered numerous invited talks at international conferences. Sree holds PhD in Medicinal Chemistry, and MBA with merit from Lancaster Business School.

Berke Buyukkucak is the CEO and Co-founder at Superbio.ai. He received BSc & MSc degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University. He was part of a research group that won the Healthcare Design Competition at Johns Hopkins University. He is passionate about democratizing machine learning for life sciences and decreasing the cost of adoption.

Dr. Beth Cimini is a Senior Group Leader, CZI Imaging Scientist and head of the Cimini Lab in the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA.  She obtained a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn at UCSF, studying splicing variants of the telomere master scaffolding protein TIN2.  This work honed her interests in image analysis, leading her to postdoctoral and staff scientist roles with Dr. Anne Carpenter's lab at the Broad, leading a team collaborating with ~30 outside scientists per year on custom image analysis projects.  The Cimini lab focuses on bioimage analysis tool creation (Piximi) and maintenance (CellProfiler), as well as on applying open source tools to novel biological problems.  She created and directs the Platform's Postdoctoral Training Program in Bioimage Analysis, and also leads the Broad efforts towards community engagement and driving biological projects for the Center for Open Bioimage Analysis (COBA).

Ian Kerman studied bioinformatics and molecular biology at the University of California, San Diego. Soon after starting as a research associate at a biotech startup, Ian began applying machine learning techniques to his company’s screening and assay data. Ian later joined a life science-focused data science company, helping laboratory scientists process, analyze, and extract insights from their data. More recently, Ian studied machine learning at the Georgia Institute of Technology and is the Director of Customer Success at LabVoice, an AI-powered digital assistant company for scientists. When he isn’t helping scientists analyze and automate their processes, he spends time with his husky-pug or SCUBA diving with sharks.

Steven van Helden studied chemistry at Utrecht University and, after obtaining his Ph.D. , worked in various roles in pharmaceutical industry for 20 years. Since 2003 he has been responsible for High Throughput Screening (HTS) operations and strategy at Organon/MSD. After the closure of those research facilities he developed a business plan for continuation of the screening activities in Oss, The Netherlands. This led to the formation of the Pivot Park Screening Centre (PPSC) and a central role of this company in the European Lead Factory. Steven is now Chief Technology Officer at PPSC.

Jie (Jerry) Li is a 5th year PhD student from Teresa Head-Gordon Lab in University of California, Berkely. During his PhD he has developed several machine learning models that encompass multiple fields of theoretical and computational chemistry, including predicting NMR chemical shifts of crystaline small molecules and aqueous proteins, developing equivariant message passing neural networks for molecular energies and forces prediction, and designing generative model - reinforcement learning workflows for proposing small molecule inhibitors that have strong interactions with a given protein. He is broadly interested in applying cutting edge AI technology to solve chemical biology questions that are difficult to tackle.

During his DPhil at the University of Oxford, and postdoc at University of California, Dr. Dodkins applied machine learning to exoplanet imaging with single-photon cryogenic-detectors. At ViQi, Inc, he develops machine learning algorithms for high-content virology assays. Dr. Dodkins jointly owns the Guinness World Record for Most Skateboard Heelflips in One Minute.

Paul Jensen an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan. Paul earned bachelor’s degrees in chemical and biomedical engineering from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia. His research group studies the oral microbiome using artificial intelligence, laboratory automation, and high-throughput genomics.

Toby Blackburn serves as the Head of BD and Strategy at Emerald Cloud Lab (ECL), a physical laboratory which scientists can access remotely via the internet that allows them to run, analyze, and interpret experiments without setting foot in the lab. He holds an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from North Carolina State University.

Leah McGuire is the tech lead for the Automation and Analytics teams at Benchling, working on integrating with laboratory equipment and providing tools to analyze the results of scientific experiments. Before joining Benchling, Leah was a Machine Learning Architect at Salesforce, building AutoML capabilities for Salesforce Einstein. She got her start in datascience at LinkedIn, after completing a PhD and a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Computational Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco, and at University of California, Berkeley, where she studied the neural encoding and integration of sensory signals.

Mike Tarselli, Ph.D., MBA is the Chief Scientific Officer for TetraScience, a Boston-based start-up building the Scientific Data Cloud. He has held scientific and leadership roles at SLAS, Novartis, Millennium, ARIAD, and Biomedisyn. Mike has received awards and fellowships from IUPAC, Wikipedia, ACS, NSF, and the Burroughs-Wellcome Trust. He volunteers in roles promoting scientific education and diversity, including the National Science Foundation, the Pistoia Alliance, the NIH Assay Guidance Manual, and the UMass College of Natural Sciences Advisory Board.

Sidler is the director of field automation scientists at Unchained Labs. He enjoys working with scientists to design systems and workflows, and to provide user training and support. Prior to joining Unchained Labs, he spent over twenty years in the Process Research Department at Merck Research Labs, where he was a user of Symyx and Freeslate automated workflows for twelve years.

Manuel studied Biotechnology and obtained his PhD from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich and the Biozentrum in Basel. For his postdoc, he joined the group of Steven Dowdy at the University of California in San Diego, where he became interested in gene editing technologies. Since December 2015, Manuel is an independent group leader at the Medical Faculty of the Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. His laboratory develops gene editing technologies and applies them to understand the various aspects of cellular transformation and drug resistance. A major achievement of his lab is the development of the 3Cs technology that recently accumulated in the foundation of the university spin-off Vivlion for which Manuel is the Chief Scientific Officer.

Dr Graham Belfield, Director NGS & Transcriptomics, AstraZeneca.
I lead a research-orientated Nucleic Acids Omics laboratory that partners pre-clinical/clinical projects across the whole of AstraZeneca and with our academic collaborators. Focussing on NGS and associated technologies, generating transcriptomic, epigenetic and genetic smart data for both single and multi-omic projects. To this end we employ bulk, single cell, spatial, short and long read technologies together with automation. We aim to stretch these technologies to increase the value they bring to drug discovery, and enhancing our understanding of disease and the fundamental processes of biology.

I have over 35 years experience across Pharma, Biotech and academia, applying Transcriptomics, Bioinformatics, orthogonal functional genetics and biotechnology to the discovery of new medicines.

Amel Bendali, PhD, is the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of Inorevia, a Paris-based startup providing new tools for life science research and diagnostics.

After graduating as an engineer in Physics and Biotechnologies, she joined the Vision Institute in Paris to participate in an ambitious research project to develop retinal prosthetic implantable devices, helping to restore functional vision to blind patients. Once graduated with a PhD in Neurosciences, she decided to move to microfluidics and microsystems, and joined Dr JL Viovy's lab at Curie Institute in Paris. After developing technologies based on microfluidics and magnetic particles, she co-founded Inorevia with Julien Autebert, CEO and CTO, and 3 researchers from CNRS who invented the technologies.
Since the creation of Inorevia in 2016, Amel has gained extensive experience in entrepreneurship, market approach for innovation, and taking patents and invention to meet market needs and solving actual users challenges.

Inorevia's vision is to unlock next-generation life science solutions, by combining highly efficient miniaturization and full automation to support reasearchers and clinicians dealing with complex workflows and challenging samples.

Tijmen studied Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences at Leiden University, during which he worked on the establishment of 3D cell culture models for drug screening. His studies were eventually awarded with the Suzanne Hovinga Award for best internship project. After his graduation, Tijmen did his PhD studies at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) where he developed 3D cell culture-based high-throughput screening platforms for polycystic kidney disease (PKD), as well as several neoplastic disorders. His work was presented at several scientific conferences as well as several publications. Tijmen obtained his PhD degree in 2017 and is currently working as screening specialist at NEXUS personalized health technologies, a technology platform of ETH Zurich, to develop organoid-based screening methodology. Tijmen's main interests are in high-content screening with 3D tissue cultures in the context of neoplastic disorders, ultimately aiming to help discover new therapeutics.

Joseph (Joe) works at Mosa Meat, a Netherlands based startup that’s leading the way in developing laboratory cultured beef for a kinder and less environmentally detrimental way of meat consumption. A former massage therapist turned scientist originally hailing from a small town in Upstate New York, he now holds a master’s in Applied Biotechnology from Uppsala University in Sweden and is eager to make scientists' lives easier and more ergonomic via laboratory automation.

Dr Conner George Craigon BSc MRes PhD
University of Dundee
Conner has just completed his PhD in the lab of Professor Alessio Ciulli, where he worked on the development of the BromoTag technology as a cell biologist. Conner currently holds an academic postdoctoral position in the Ciulli group where he continues his study of the BromoTag technology.

Madiha Derouazi, PhD, is the Scientific Founder and CEO of AMAL Therapeutics, a Swiss biotech company developing first-in-class therapeutic cancer vaccines derived from its technology platform KISIMA and part of Boehringer Ingelheim since July 2019.
Madiha has been working on vector engineering and vaccine design for over 15 years. She has a strong background in applied molecular and cellular biotechnology, in virology and in immunology, with research interests at the interface of fundamental and translational research, the so-called bench-to-bedside. She especially focuses on immune stimulation and immune modulation, both in the oncology and infectious disease fields. She designed and characterized a CPP-based multi-epitopic cancer vaccine in the Laboratory of Tumour Immunology of the University of Geneva, which is the basis of the KISIMA platform.
Madiha holds a PhD in Biotechnology from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland and a Master in Biotechnology Engineering from the University of Technology of Berlin, Germany. She now continues to lead the AMAL team in Switzerland, and excitingly drives the integration into the Boehringer Ingelheim oncology research and development family.

Fredrik Edfeldt is a Director of Mechanistic and Structural Biology at AstraZeneca in Gothenburg, Sweden. Fredrik is currently managing a team of very talented and highly motivated enzymologists and cell biologists responsible for SAR-screening and mechanistic profiling of compounds in drug discovery projects. After obtining his PhD in Structural Biology from the University of Washington, USA, Fredrik joined AstraZeneca where he has worked for more than 20 years with a strong focus on the application of biophysical techniques to drive chemistry.

Wolfgang is the Director of the European Research Infrastructure for chemical biology, EU-OPENSCREEN. He obtained his PhD in 1994 at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf on the function of protein complexes in mitochondria. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, he worked for the next 20 years as scientist and group leader for Novartis and UCB as well as for two biotech companies. During that time in Germany, the UK and Italy, he was involved in drug discovery programs for cancer, CNS and inflammatory disease therapeutics, always with the focus on assay development, high throughput screening and lead profiling. He returned to academia in 2015, supporting the translational Discovery Science group at the VIB institute in Belgium. In 2018, he was appointed director of EU-OPENSCREEN in Berlin. He is also the coordinator of a large EU-funded project and as chair of the European Life Science Research Infrastructure Strategy Board.

Sakshi Garg joined Merck Healthcare KGaA in 2016. She has expertise in image based readouts both in 2D and 3D cell culture, allowing her to lead several technology based collaborations in the field of advanced cellular assays. Most recently she has been actively involved in the JUMP Cell Painting consortium.

Erik Gatenholm is a dynamic American/Swedish entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of BICO – the world’s leading Bio Convergence company. Under Gatenholm, BICO has built one of the world’s most expansive portfolio of life science products that spans bioprinting, diagnostics, lab automation and biosciences. Today, BICO and its 13+ subsidiaries operate development, sales and distribution in 65+ countries to over 3,000 laboratories, across 1,200+ employees. Gatenholm is a member of the prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2018 and has also been awarded numerous accolades including Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Innovator of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year 2019, MIT Technology Review’s prestigious 35 Under 35 List and Founder of the Year 2020. www.bico.com

Dr. Anne Carpenter is an Institute Scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Her research group develops algorithms and strategies for large-scale experiments involving images. The team’s open-source CellProfiler software is used by thousands of biologists worldwide (www.cellprofiler.org). Carpenter is a pioneer in image-based profiling, the extraction of rich, unbiased information from images for a number of important applications in drug discovery and functional genomics.

Carpenter focused on high-throughput image analysis during her postdoctoral fellowship at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and MIT’s CSAIL (Computer Sciences/Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). Her PhD is in cell biology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Carpenter has been named an NSF CAREER awardee, an NIH MIRA awardee, a Massachusetts Academy of Sciences fellow (its youngest at the time), a Genome Technology “Rising Young Investigator”, and is listed in Deep Knowledge Analytics’ top-100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Advanced Healthcare.

Dr. Sammy S. Datwani is an influential senior executive, entrepreneur, and innovative technology leader with a demonstrated history of developing emergent technologies and commercializing disruptive revolutionary life science tools and medical device products. Dr. Datwani has over 20 years of executive and leadership experience building teams and developing solutions that allow customers to meet their biotechnology research and commercial objectives in the fields of microfluidics, genomics, proteomics, analytical chemistry, molecular diagnostics, synthetic biology, and cell engineering.

His current and recent roles include Vice President, Development – Synthego Corporation, a venture-backed startup. President – SSD Advisors, LLC., a boutique consulting firm. Head of Technology Development – Inscripta Inc., a venture-backed startup. Sr. Director, R& D, Principal Scientist at Labcyte Inc., which was acquired by Beckman Coulter Life Sciences (a Danaher company). Sammy was the founding Board of Directors and Angel Investor for CombiNATi Inc. (a microfluidic digital PCR company), which was acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific. He also serves on the Board of Directors and as a Scientific Advisor for several startups. He was formerly on the Board of Directors for SLAS (2019-2022) and at his alma mater - The Johns Hopkins University, Whiting School of Engineering.

Dr. Datwani is an author and inventor on numerous scientific publications and patents and is actively involved with scientific programming at international meetings and conferences. Dr. Datwani received his B.S. (with honors) and Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, and his M.S. in chemical engineering from Columbia University, New York, New York.

Dr. Datwani was inducted to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers (AIMBE) for his contributions to leveraging microscale phenomena to enable label-free and high-throughput experimentation, screening and precision medicine.

Markus Gershater is the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Synthace. Markus has been applying DOE to biological problems for over 15 years to a wide range of biological problems, and is focussed on how we can provide biologists with tools that will enable them to perform dramatically more powerful experiments. He has a PhD in biochemistry and experience in academia and industry that spans biochemistry, synthetic biology, pathway engineering and bioprocess development.

Henriette Harmse, Ontology tools project lead at European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI)

Henriette has worked in the software industry for 20+ years as a software developer, architect and consulting architect across various industries like mining, publishing, finance, healthcare etc. As the ontology tools project lead at EBI she oversees the design and development of the ontology tools used extensively by EBI and other life science organisations to harmonise and enrich life science data and to enable semantic searches.

Henriette has a PhD in Description Logics, the mathematical logic basis of ontologies that enables artificial intelligence reasoning.

Kerstin Hermuth-Kleinschmidt holds a PhD in chemistry. After several years in the life sciences industry as account manager and in technical customer support, she turned her attention to the topic of sustainability and obtained an additional qualification in the field of "Environmental Management and Environmental Economics" at the University of Koblenz-Landau. The focus of her work is the implementation and monitoring of sustainability processes in the life sciences – in the lab as well as in life sciences companies. As a speaker and author of publications, she focuses on various aspects of sustainability, especially on the topic "Sustainability in research and laboratory". She also participated in the development of EGNATON-CERT, the first certification system for sustainable laboratory technologies, and is now part of the auditing team.

Dr Tim Hohm, MBA, is Director of Commercial Strategy and Business Development at Optibrium, a software company providing solutions supporting small molecule drug discovery from early hit to clinical candidate nomination. Founded in 2009, Optibrium's solutions are used by more than 170 organisations worldwide including global pharma companies, biotechs and academic and not-for-profit research centers, accelerating discovery and increasing success rates. Tim obtained his PhD in computational biology from ETH Zurich and an MBA from Copenhagen Business School. Tim held positions in academia and large pharma and joined Optibrium in 2020 from Novo Nordisk.

Catherine (Katy) Kettleborough leads one of LifeArc’s Translational Challenges focused on Chronic Respiratory Infections. Translational Challenges are long term collaborative programmes shaped by patient need and working with multiple partners, connecting scientists, resources and investment. Until January 2022 Catherine was Head of Biology at LifeArc (formerly MRC Technology ). LifeArc is an independent life science technology transfer charity, offering professional services to organisations within the academic, charity, biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors globally. The Biology group is responsible for conducting target validation, reagent generation, assay development, screening (100-250K screens) biochemical, biophysical and cell based assays to support prosecution of hit to lead and antibody discovery projects for novel drug targets sourced from academic research groups worldwide.
Catherine has 25 year plus of working at the interface between academic research and pharma/biotech, as a bench scientist, project manager, Team leader and start-up Director.

Jan Lichtenberg, Ph.D., is Co-Founder and CEO of InSphero AG. InSphero is the pioneer of 3D-cell-based assay solutions and scaffold-free 3D organ-on-a-chip technology. The company’s robust, precisely engineered suite of 3D InSight™ human tissue platforms are used by major pharmaceutical companies worldwide to increase efficiency in drug discovery and safety testing. InSphero specializes in solutions for liver toxicology, metabolic diseases (e.g., T1 & T2 diabetes and NAFLD & NASH liver disease), and oncology (with a focus on immuno-oncology and PDX models). The scalable Akura™ technology, which underlies these 3D InSight™ Discovery and Safety Platforms, includes 96- and 384-well plate formats as well as the Akura™ Flow organ-on-a-chip system. Dr. Lichtenberg started InSphero in 2009 and grew the company to 60+ employees in offices in Switzerland and the US. InSphero counts most of the global top 15 pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies amongst its customers. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Neuchâtel and had a research group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. Jan serves also Vice President of SLAS.

Stefan N. Lukianov, AM MS is the first-time JHU student founder of Salve Therapeutics.  He has undergraduate degrees from the University of Maine and masters from the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard University in the biomedical sciences.  He has worked in reputable labs at Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, McLean Hospital and the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. He also has extensive experience in science journalism, having published and edited for ASBMB Today, ACS C&EN Show Daily, the Harvard Medical Student Review and MIT Science Policy Review.  Stefan also loves teaching and has held a diverse array of private and public education roles at various grade levels in STEM fields.

Stefan Luzi, Ph.D, Partner, Gilde Healthcare

Stefan Luzi, Ph.D. joined Gilde Healthcare in 2015. He focuses on venture and growth capital investments in the biopharmaceutical sector. He led several investments and currently represents Gilde on the boards of LAVA Therapeutics N.V. and Amphista Therapeutics Ltd. Prior to joining Gilde, Dr. Luzi worked at Merck KGaA where he completed international assignments in the global business intelligence and M ventures divisions. Dr. Luzi received a bachelor of science degree in biology and master of science degree in biotechnology from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) and a master of philosophy degree in bioscience enterprise from the University of Cambridge. He completed his doctor of philosophy degree with Nobel Laureate Sir Gregory Winter at the MRC laboratory of molecular biology in Cambridge, where he developed a bicyclic peptide-based drug discovery platform.

Andrew Lynn PhD FREng
CEO, Fluidic Analytics

Andrew Lynn is an entrepreneur and executive who has led three VC-backed deep-tech businesses from concept to commercialisation.

He is CEO of Fluidic Analytics, a Cambridge, UK company that provides instrumentation and services that characterize protein interactions for customers in the tools and diagnostics industry. Fluidic Analytics’ microfluidic diffusional sizing technology extends the traditional capabilities of protein interaction analysis a) beyond traditional drug targets to challenging targets such bispecific antibodies, PROTACs and fibrillar targets; and b) beyond purified environments to complex backgrounds such as cell lysate, serum, plasma and saliva.

Previously, Andrew founded Orthomimetics, a developer of regenerative medical implants for sports medicine and orthopaedic applications. During his tenure as CEO, Orthomimetics developed its flagship product from lab-scale production to a CE-marked device distributed in multiple territories across Europe. Orthomimetics was acquired by TiGenix (now a Takeda company) in 2009. Andrew was then appointed CEO of CamGaN, a Company whose gallium-nitride-on-silicon technology has developed from the technology-concept stage to producing micro-LEDs that power some of today’s most cutting-edge virtual reality and augmented reality devices. CamGaN was acquired by Plessey Semiconductors in 2012.

His experience guiding companies through eight equity financings, four product launches and two trade sale exits give him a unique perspective on funding cycles, company evolution and the process of scaling businesses. His efforts have earned him recognition in Europe as an inaugural winner of a Science|Business Academic Enterprise Award and in the US as a member of Technology Review Magazine’s TR35 list of the world’s top young innovators, leaders and entrepreneurs. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2021.

Laura MacDonald, Chief Executive, ASTP, Leiden, The Netherlands
Laura has headed up the HQ of ASTP (the pan-European members association for knowledge transfer professionals) since September 2016. Her role there combines responsibility for professional training events, conferences and advocacy to enhance capacity-building of the Knowledhge /Technology Transfer sector. Originally qualified as a Scots lawyer, specialising in EU and IP law, her transition to the world of academic/industrial collaborations started in 1992 when she established the first in-house legal function in a UK university to support these collaborations. Then followed a career across different UK universities (Dundee then Edinburgh) before moving to the Netherlands, spending 10 years at Leiden University and Medical Centre, with responsibility across all aspects of knowledge transfer activities. She has been active in key professional organisations which bring together players in this ecosystem, such as Licensing Executives Society and AUTM as well as ASTP.

Jennifer McMahon is a Partner at Seroba. She graduated from UCD with an honours degree in Pharmacology in 2010. Jennifer then entered a Master’s degree programme in Biotechnology and Business to further her interest in the interface of biomedical science with commercialisation.

Having placed first in her Master’s degree in 2011, Jennifer then joined Seroba’s Investment Team as an Investment Analyst, progressing to Partner in 2022.

In 2019, Jennifer joined the Advisory Board for the European healthcare Businesswomen’s Association. She is Chair of Level20 Europe and was a founder member of the Ireland Chapter of Level20. She guest lectures on venture capital at University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. She is also in high demand as a speaker at Investor/Entrepreneur life science partnering conferences across Europe.

Jennifer sits on the boards of Endotronix and Palliare, is a Board Observer to Shorla Pharma and was previously on the Board of Biosensia prior to its merger with Kypha Diagnostics.

Prof. Patricia Maguire is an interdisciplinary scientist passionate about the intersection of Artificial Intelligence with Biomedical Science.
She is Professor at the UCD College of Science and the current Director of the UCD Institute for Discovery, which builds and cultivates interdisciplinary connections in emerging research themes, such as ‘AI for good’, ‘Plotting the Future’ and ‘Data for Healthcare’. She recently launched the UCD AI for Healthcare hub (AIHH) utilising the latest SAS Viya platform on Microsoft Azure. The mission of the AI Healthcare Hub is to democratise AI/ML approaches, making them accessible to non-coding researchers to accelerate their projects and deliver translational, meaningful outcomes across UCD, Ireland and globally in both, academic and industry settings.
As Principal Investigator at the UCD Conway Institute, Patricia is Scientific Director of the ConwaySPHERE research group investigating various inflammatory diseases including preeclampsia, multiple sclerosis, venous thromboembolism and covid19.

After completing a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, Brian worked within the Abagyan lab at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA, devising novel methods for proteins structure superimposition and also implementing high performance compute and storage clusters. He then worked as part of the Computational Chemistry group at BioFocus PLC before joining the SGC in Oxford, now the Centre for Medicines Discovery, where he continues to be responsible for data management and research computing. Since 2013, Brian has been a member of the Kennedy Institute in Oxford where he is responsible for the provision of research computing and translational informatics capabilities.

The development of novel technologies for data management and dissemination within the context of early stage drug discovery are a key focus of interest. In particular, managing structural and chemical biology data capture, curation and deposition along with interactive approaches to dissemination form the core part of work at the Centre for Medicines Discovery. Recent COVID-19 related work included the rapid development and deployment of LIMS capabilities to underpin serological assays for the rapid testing of patient samples. Methods for the rationale selection of novel targets for reagent and know-how generation in the context of disease-gene associations are also an interest. At the Kennedy Institute, work focuses on the provision of research computing capabilities to underpin the Institute’s computational biology, multiplexed imaging and mechanistic modelling interests. In parallel we specialise in the provision of data management solutions for basic science through to translational informatics in experimental medicine settings.

Barry McMahon is an Associate Clinical Professor in Medical Physics and Bioengineering in the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin. He holds an M.Sc. in physical sciences in medicine from Trinity College Dublin and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from Aalborg University in Denmark. Currently he holds the position of Innovation Practice Lead for Children's Health Ireland. He also runs his own consultancy business. Previously, he was Chief of Medical Physics and Clinical Engineering at Tallaght University Hospital for 18 years and has wide experience in medical device applications and invention, particularly for diagnosis and treatment in the gastrointestinal tract. He has collborated widely in Europe, the United States, South America and Asia, including subatticals in the U.S., China and Hong Kong. Is current main interest in innovation practice linking, people, process and technology to solve the multifaceted problems faced in Healthcare.

Eva Molero (EM), Project Director; Founder and CEO of Teamit Research and Teamit Institute
University degree in Law (University of Barcelona, Spain), Master Degree in Communications Management (University of Toulouse, France).
Eva has developed her career initially in the field of marketing and technology transfer, first as product manager for mass market products at Arbora&Ausonia (a Procter&Gamble joint venture) and, from 2001 to 2012 at the University Pompeu Fabra and Fundació IMIM (the Barcelona Municipal Institute of Medical Research), where she was responsible for technology transfer and quality procedures at the Research Group on Biomedical Informatics. She has worked as project manager of the European Projects Coordination Office at Fundació IMIM. She was the founder and CEO during 12 years of Synapse Research Management Partners, a project management company created in 2008 specialising in the management of European Commission funded projects.
Besides the general project management aspects, her participation in European projects has focused on legal matters, governance, intellectual property rights and communication and sustainability aspects. She has participated in several initiatives to commercialize results from research projects, including the creation of alliances and spinouts. She has wide experience in teaching courses in European projects management and acts as an advisor for public and private institutions in projects evaluation and assessment. Eva has been recently appointed as member of the Executive Board of VAC4EU.

Dagmar Monett is Professor of Computer Science at the Berlin School of Economics and Law (HWR Berlin), Director of the Department of Computer Science (April/2022–), Co-Director of the Master's study programme Digital Transformation (12/2020–), and Co-Founding Member of the Institute for Data-Driven Digital Transformation (d-cube). She is also Co-founder of the AGI Sentinel Initiative, AGISI.org; AI expert at Ms.AI, “Artificial Intelligence for and with Women;” Board member of the Berlin Federation of Professors, hlb LV Berlin e. V.; and professional member of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery. With over 30 years of research and teaching experience in different countries, her current research fields include AI, digital ethics, software engineering, and computer science education, among others. Her most recent research work focuses on intelligence research, particularly on defining and understanding both machine and human intelligence. She is also interested in machine learning, robotics in education, metaheuristics, knowledge-based systems, and software design and development including Agile.

George is currently the Global Director in Computational Biology and Digital Sciences Department and leads the Healthcare Data and Analytics Unit at Boehringer Ingelheim (BI) in Biberach, Germany. In this role, George leads a team of genetic, biomarker and data scientists that utilises healthcare datasets to derive novel insights aimed at transforming and personalising drug development. Prior to BI, George has >30 years’ experience in Pharma R&D (SmithKline & French/SKF, SmithKline Beecham/SB and GlaxoSmithKline/GSK) holding Director/Senior Director roles in Drug Discovery/Pre-clinical Development for global scientific due diligence, innovation seeking/incubation/delivery, pre-clinical/CMC consultant, global emerging biology platforms, entrepreneurial thinker/leader, and drug development project leader. George holds a BSc (Joint Honours, Chemistry and Biochemistry), a PhD in Chemical Carcinogenesis, both from Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto, Canada. George has established a successful track record of seeking, incubating, and implementing innovation in drug discovery and development across multiple areas in chemistry and biology. George has led numerous R&D projects from discovery to IND/MAA/NDA regulatory submissions and is an expert in Scientific Due Diligence (>40 due diligence opportunities). George has an extensive publication track record (~60 scientific papers, 4 books, 2 patents and invited speaker at numerous international scientific conferences). George has been active in many external organisations (Associate Member of the Royal College of Sciences, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Society for Chemical Industry (formerly Chair of the Separation Sciences Committee), Science and Innovation Advisory Committee for the UK Bio-Industry Association (SIAC, UK BIA) and STEM ambassador).

Dr Lucy O'Keeffe is the co-founder and CEO of CroiValve, a medical device start-up that has developed a device to repair the tricuspid valve in the heart without the need for open heart surgery. She worked as a cross-functional lead at Medtronic, managing R&D programs from concept to launch, including an early transcatheter aortic program. Additionally, she worked in Nypro Healthcare, managing multiple complex, cross-functional, global projects developing drug delivery devices for top tier pharmaceutical clients and in a CRO, ICON PLC, where she developed an understanding of clinical trials. She holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from University College Dublin, a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from University of Limerick and a Diploma in Project Management from University College Cork.

I’m a cell biologist with focus on early drug discovery. I develop cell assays, screening strategies and drive projects in early discovery and technology development. I have a passion for the science behind the drug discovery process and love to see what I work with in the lab can translate into value for patients. In addition, I thrive in the collaborative spirit of working together in a global company with a common goal.

Steve is Vice-President of Discovery Biology at AstraZeneca with responsibility for reagent generation and assay development, functional genomics, and cell and gene therapy. Previously Steve led the Screening Sciences department with accountability for Compound Management, Hit Discovery and Lead Optimisation biology. Prior to joining AstraZeneca, Steve worked at GlaxoSmithKline for 24 years in various roles. He has served in many roles within the Society of Laboratory Automation and Screening most recently as Chair of the European Council. He has also served as Chair of the European Laboratory Research and Innovation Group, and is currently Industry Trustee of the British Pharmacological Society. Steve sits on multiple Scientific Advisory Boards including EU-OPENSCREEN, WCAIR at the University of Dundee and the Centre for Membrane Protein Receptor Research (COMPARE). Steve has authored over 70 research papers and was awarded an OBE in 2021 for services to science and the COVID19 response.

Nicola trained as an algebraist up to Ph.D. level then moved into chemoinformatics via a two year role in the Statistics and Modelling Group at Unilever R&D. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship with Prof. Peter Willett at the University of Sheffield, Nicola joined GSK’s then Cheminformatics group in 2004, where she focussed on developing methodologies for chemical database searching and hit identification in the presence of process error for high-throughput, high-content screening, and both supporting and leading early, small molecule, drug discovery programmes. Nicola then joined one of GSK’s fledgling data science groups and led the Biopharm Digital, Data and Analytics focus area, overseeing a number of high-impact projects and continuing with methods development. Nicola then moved into GSK's newly-formed AI and Machine Learning team where she built up and led the GSK.ai Fellowship Programme, carried out causal machine learning research and oversaw academic collaborations. After nearly 18 years at GSK, Nicola then decided to join Ladder Therapeutics, a start up focussing on discovering small molecule modulators of RNA, where she leads the AI function.

Elena Rivas. Partner and CEO
She is Vice-president of the Spanish Biotechnological Companies Association (ASEBIO) sin 2020.
Biology Graduate by the University of Jaén and and MBA Biotechnology
With more than 23 years of experience in Biotechnology Sector leading the go to the market of innovative solutions of emerging companies and helping them to become affordable business. She started her professional career in the foodtech segment achieving high experience transforming the statetment of the food companies. After this, she was working for nanotechnological field to develop new diagnostic tools enhancing the sensitivite and accuracy of the rapid test for many application by the gold nanoparticles used
In order to improve private companies' performance, she is very committed to making the transfer of technological knowledge a reality.
With this expertise, she has now achieved her dream of entrepreneurship and has become a leading woman in the biotechnology sector in Spain, especially in the field of single cell analysis.

Ali Safavi, founder, President, and CEO of Grenova, is on a mission to enable laboratories around the world to become sustainable and waste-free. Ali founded Grenova, which is short for Green Innovation, shortly after graduating from college using the firsthand experience he gained working in the lab industry. Today, his award-winning company has created the only technology solution in the industry that enables life sciences and healthcare laboratories to reduce their plastic consumables cost and biohazard waste by over 90%. As a result of his work, Grenova's environmental and economic impact on the life sciences industry has so far resulted in 4,581 metric tons in Carbon Emission (CO2e) reduction, 2,650,848 lbs. of biohazard plastic waste reduction, and $84,135,258 in savings and cost reduction.

Gary Saunders is the EATRIS Data Director. He is responsible for leading the EATRIS data strategy over the next scientific programme (2023-26). As part of this work Gary will lead the EATRIS core data team and work with key data focussed initiatives such as the Horizon Europe Mission Areas, European Open Science Cloud, and the 1+ Million Genomes.

Gary joined EATRIS from ELIXIR where he was the Human Data Coordinator responsible for the implementation of the ELIXIR-wide strategy to enable responsible sharing of human data consented for reuse in scientific research. Previous to ELIXIR Gary was based at EMBL-EBI where he was the data manager for the European Variation Archive (EVA), and the Database of Genomics Variants Archive (DGVa). Gary has a PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Glasgow, UK, and has a background in comparative genomics.

She received in 2005 the Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the University of Genoa, Italy.

Since 2010 Silvia Scaglione is permanent Researcher at National council of Research (CNR).

She is founder and chief scientist of React4life s.r.l., an innovative biotech company that develops organ on chip technologies for accelerating the human disease understanding and novel personalized therapies development; React4life has won several international awards and projects, such as H2020 SME Instrument Phase 1, seal of Excellence SME phase 2, Innovation Radar (2021) as best Health technology.
Scaglione is author of more than 80 international peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, author of 7 patents.

Srijit is a PhD student in his second year at the Andreas Bender group at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in research in chemoinformatics and is currently working on modelling and interpretation of Cell Painting assay in predicting bioactivity and toxicity data. Srijit uses machine learning techniques like Random Forest, Deep Neural Network, Convolutional neural networks to link chemical structures and Cell Painting features to biological activity.

Bharath is a mechanistic enzymologist with extensive experience in the steady-state kinetic characterization of enzymes. For his Ph.D., he studied the structure-function relationship in members of the HAD superfamily of enzymes. He pursued an NIH-sponsored postdoctoral fellowship at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working at the interface between enzyme kinetics and computational sciences. Subsequently, he was awarded the Marie-Curie Actions fellowship to study the substrate specificity of deaminases acting on dsRNA at the IGC, Portugal. In 2019, he joined MBP at AstraZeneca, contributing actively to several oncology projects. Bharath is on the editorial board of two prominent pharmacology journals and is a faculty at facultyopinions. Additionally, Bharath has been nominated to the honorary membership of BPS, ACS and SLAS and ISE. Bharath has published 35 peer-reviewed publications and 1 patent. He is passionate about enzyme kinetics with particular emphasis on studying the spatio-temporal evolution of kinetic systems and non-Michaelian kinetics.

Dr. Sirenko is an established cell biologist and imaging specialist who is an expert in developing assays with complex cell-based models for research and drug discovery. She is a senior scientist at Molecular Devices where she works on development of high-content imaging methods to the analysis of novel cell systems. Dr. Sirenko currently leads a group of scientists developing methods and new tools for automation of 3D cell models – including organoids and organ-on chips – for modeling cancer, neurotoxicity, and toxicology. Dr. Sirenko holds a PhD in Biochemistry/Biophysics, has over 15 years of industry experience, and has authored more than 35 scientific papers.

Jeremy Simpson obtained his BSc and PhD from the University of Warwick (UK). After post-doctoral work at the Scripps Research Institute (San Diego, USA) and the ICRF (London, UK), a long term EMBO fellowship took him to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany), where he developed and applied novel high-throughput imaging approaches to study protein localisation and membrane traffic in mammalian cells. In 2008 he was appointed as Full Professor of Cell Biology at University College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland). His lab applies high-throughput imaging technologies to study intracellular trafficking pathways, diseases associated with the endomembrane system of cells, and the internalisation routes taken by synthetic nanoparticles as drug delivery vehicles. In recent years his lab has pioneered the use of 3D cell models in UCD, specifically developing a number of methodological approaches that allow their high-throughput production suitable for cell-based assays. The lab also designs innovative image analysis approaches for the volumetric analysis of these 3D models at multiple scales, allowing detailed assessment of nanoparticle localisation and toxicity. He has authored over 120 peer-reviewed articles, including articles in Nature Cell Biology, Nature Communications, Nanoscale and Scientific Reports. He oversees the UCD Cell Screening Laboratory (www.ucd.ie/hcs), which provides infrastructure and technical support for collaborators and other users who wish to access the high-content screening platform. He is currently also serving as the College Principal and Dean of Science in the UCD College of Science.

Javier Terriente is a Biochemistry graduate from the University of Granada (2000) and Phd in Molecular Biology from the University Autonoma of Madrid (2006). He has 15 years of research experience in different academic institutions in Spain and the UK. He has published 25 research articles (h = 18). From 2013, he is co-founder and Chief of Drug Development (CDD) (and former CSO) at ZeClinics, a vibrant biotech exploiting zebrafish as a model for drug discovery and understanding human diseases. More recently, he co-founded, and has a CSO role, at ZeCardio Therapeutics (ZeCardioTX), a biotech company spun out from ZeClinics, focusing on the discovery of therapies to treat cardiovascular diseases. As ZeClinics CDD, he is in charge of supervising every scientific aspect regarding the drug discovery and "crazy-projects" activities: bringing new ideas and collaborations, assessing the quality of our drug discovery platforms, asking for public and private funding, managing our growing and talented R&D scientific team. At ZeCardioTX, he devises and supervises the science and preclinical work plan to bring therapeutic drugs into the clinic. Beside his activities at ZeClinics and ZeCardioTX, he is Vice President of ASEBIO, the Spanish Association of Biotech Companies, where he hopes to bring his expertise to help the biotech sector to gain public awareness, promote networking and increase its political leverage.

Dr Mark Truesdale, Former CEO of Solentim graduated with a degree in Biochemistry and a PhD in Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics from the University of London. After spending several years in research in the field of Plant Molecular Genetics he has amassed over 20 years of commercial and leadership experience within the Life Science and Diagnostics sectors. Mark spent 14 years with Genetix PLC in several roles, including Head of Global Marketing, prior to and through its acquisition by Danaher. Mark went on to join the Microbiology division of Thermo Fisher Scientific where he held a number of roles including Senior Director of its Global Food Safety Diagnostics business. For the past 2+ years until Feb 2022 Mark has been CEO of Solentim, leading the expansion of the business, culminating is a successful acquisition by Advanced Instruments.

Paul Trusty Ph.D. (University of Surrey) is a Senior Technical Director in the Quality Supply Chain for GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Health, UK. He is a Materials Scientist by training, with over 30 years’ experience of applying this approach to different manufacturing industries.
Most of his early research focused on the fabrication and properties of engineering ceramics for aerospace applications. He then worked for 9 years in the Food Industry (Unilever Research) where he headed Product Characterisation and Development groups in both the UK and Latin America.
For the past 15 years Paul has been working in the Pharmaceutical Industry for GSK in various positions in New Product Development, Process Design and Development, and HIV Supply Chain. More recently, in 2021, Paul joined the Consumer Health Division of GSK, in a Global Technical role that ensures Business Continuity of Consumer Products.

Vesna Vetma, PhD is a cell biologist investigating PROTAC drug discovery in Alessio Ciulli's collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim at Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation, University of Dundee, UK. She got her BSc and MSc degree in Molecular biology from University of Zagreb, Croatia and a doctoral degree in Cancer biology from University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Manfred Voglmaier is an Executive Manager in Sales and Business Development of Enterprise-Class Technology Solutions for Life Sciences. Manfred, a native resident of Austria brings over 30 years of industry experience in Life Sciences and innovative enterprise technology. His experience and passion lies in introducing innovative technologies and consulting that help companies in LifeSciences to successfully execute their digital transformation programs.

He worked with companies like Stada (CMC), Kontron, Waters, Documentum, NuGenesis, Definiens, IDBS, Tracelink and the OSTHUS Group. Manfred joined Tetrascience as VP Sales EMEA, responsible to deepening its pan-European presence and to develop localised Team Tetra, dedicated to serving the life sciences industry.

Tetrascience is one of the leading companies providing an open Scientific Data Cloud (E2E) and helps Pharmaceutical companies, Biotech’s and CDM/CDMOs on their digital transformation journey. The Tetra Scientific Data Cloud provides life sciences companies with data-centric capabilities, they help to connect and collect data from any source (instruments and applications), they help to engineer and harmonize data to enable easy access to centralized, harmonized, and actionable scientific data which can be actively deployed across an enterprise.

Manfred holds a Diploma in Analytical Chemistry from the Technical College of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt.

Glyn Williams joined DeepMatter as Chief Product Officer (CPO) in April 2022.
Working collaboratively with the leadership team, Glyn bridges between external parties (customers; technology and laboratory equipment providers etc.) and the Group’s technical team, to deliver material product enhancements, and connectivity, positioning the platform as the dominant digital interface for chemists globally. Glyn is passionate about scientific companies; collecting, managing and using their data. He joined DeepMatter with 30 years’ experience of informatics in pharma, life sciences and chemical industries, having started his career as an analytical chemist at Shell. He has worked with a number of companies, but spent the bulk of his career at IDBS, where he worked with all major pharma and helped IDBS become a brand leader in ELN with a customer base of >250 customers world-wide and >40,000 users. Glyn joined IDBS when it had just 7 employees, and was instrumental in its growth to over 250 globally, before it was sold to Danahar. He has previously led Product Management, Marketing, Sales, Development and Business Development and has a broad knowledge of HTS software, ELN and data management for chemical and biological data.

Viktoria Zieger started her bachelor's degree in physics in Heidelberg in 2015 and completed it with her thesis about simulations of the accuracy of dose delivery for particle radiation in cancer therapy. In 2018 she continued her studies with a master's degree in Muenster with a focus on nanophysics and biophysics. For her thesis, she constructed a novel optical setup that combined a light sheet microscope with optical tweezers and used it to carry out microrheological measurements while simultaneously acquiring 3D microscopic images. In March 2021 she started her PhD in the Laboratory for MEMS Applications at the University of Freiburg. As part of her project, she is developing a platform for automated 3D microtumor analysis for personalized therapy. In this context, she designs and tests different methods for both automated microtumor production and automated single microtumor deposition to enable and facilitate high-throughput drug screening.

"David Egan is the co-founder and CEO of Core Life Analytics, a Netherlands-based company that helps biologists to analyze their own data. Born in Carrickerry, Ireland, he completed his undergraduate training in Industrial Chemistry at the University of Limerick. He received his Ph.D. in 1997 from Cornell University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in New York, NY. 

After a post-doctoral fellowship at The Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA, and a position at OSI Pharmaceuticals in NY, he returned to Europe in 2003. In Utrecht, The Netherlands, while managing the Cell Screening Core at the Department of Cell Biology, he encountered the challenges of data analytics in phenotypic screening. This led to the development of the StratoMineR data analytics platform with Wienand Omta and the subsequent establishment of Core Life Analytics in 2016. Since then StratoMineR has been widely adopted in big pharma, biotech, and academic centers.

As part of the next stage of its development Core Life Analytics is launching the StratoVerse, a complete end- to-end, cloud-based, high-content analysis platform. It offers image storage in StratoMineR, high-performance image analysis in StratoScale, and downstream data analytics in StartoMineR, the current product."

Nicolas Zorn is currently the head of the Compound Library Enhancement and Logistics team at Roche pRED in Basel within The Small Molecule Research, Lead Discovery organization. Nicolas is an Organic Chemist by training (Ph.D. at the University of Paris 6, PostDoc at Indiana University, US) and has worked for 10 years supporting and driving projects in several disease areas as medicinal chemist and computational chemist at Merck MDS in the USA, then Roche in Switzerland. In the last four years, he has led the Compound Library Enhancement and Logistics team in Basel where all samples are processed and distributed for Small Molecule Research in pRED.

Toby Winchester spent 17 years at Pfizer, first as a senior scientist and then as sample logistics manager supporting diverse SAR project requirements. He joined Titian Software in 2011 and is now product manager for automation integrations and Mosaic SampleBank. Mosaic is the leading sample management software solution for life science laboratories.

Dr Charlotte Baker, Senior Scientist, Compound Synthesis and Management, Discovery Sciences, AstraZeneca, Gothenburg, Sweden. Eight years of experience developing and driving drug discovery projects in an industrial and academic setting. Currently optimising existing compound management processes for small molecules by creating tools and queries with SQL as well as setting up new work flows on our aqueous platform for oligonucleotides and synthetic biology. Specialist user of Mosaic (LIMS), Beckman Access, Beckman Biomek, Azenta Sample Store and Tecan Fluent. In my free time I enjoy running, cycling, swimming and outdoor adventures.

Ronny Baber (PhD) is the Head of the Leipzig Medical Biobank and works in the Institute of Laboratory Medicine, Clinical Chemistry, and Molecular Diagnostics at the University Hospital Leipzig. Since 2010 he is the head of the LIFE-Biobank (now part of the Leipzig Medical Biobank) and the LIFE-Preanalytical laboratory (since 2014) in the Leipzig Research Center for Civilisation Diseases (LIFE). Dr. Baber is a member of the working group in the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) which supports the ISO TC 276 responsible for the ISO norm 20387 on biobanking and BBMRI-ERIC workgroups for the evaluation of CEN standards. He is also member of the Steering Committee and different working groups (e.g. education, stakeholder, public relations) in the “German Biobank Alliance” (GBA) initiated and coordinated by BBMRI.de trying to link GBA biobanks to the BBMRI-ERIC infrastructure. As chair of the Education Committee he is also part of the executive board of the European, Middle Eastern & African Society for Biopreservation and Biobanking (ESBB).

Mike Gray, B.Sc. (Hons) GlaxoSmithKline, UK Principal Investigator, Sample Management UK Team Leader Mike Gray received an honours degree in Applied Biology (Pharmacology) from the University of Hertfordshire in 1996. He joined the Compound Management group at SmithKline Beecham in 1997 and over the past 25 years has performed a variety of roles in support of GlaxoSmithKline’s drug discovery initiatives from early discovery to clinical candidate selection. For 12 of these years Mike managed the solid compound collection and shipping operations in the UK. He was co-author of the book, Management of Biological and Chemical Samples for Screening Applications (edited by Mark Wigglesworth and Terry Wood). Mike is a qualified Project Manager (Prince2) and has been involved in numerous modernisation and development projects during his career, he is currently the Team Leader for Lead Optimisation at the GlaxoSmithKline Medicines Research Centre in the UK.

Wolfgang is the Director of the European Research Infrastructure for chemical biology, EU-OPENSCREEN. He obtained his PhD in 1994 at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf on the function of protein complexes in mitochondria. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, he worked for the next 20 years as scientist and group leader for Novartis and UCB as well as for two biotech companies. During that time in Germany, the UK and Italy, he was involved in drug discovery programs for cancer, CNS and inflammatory disease therapeutics, always with the focus on assay development, high throughput screening and lead profiling. He returned to academia in 2015, supporting the translational Discovery Science group at the VIB institute in Belgium. In 2018, he was appointed director of EU-OPENSCREEN in Berlin. He is also the coordinator of a large EU-funded project and as chair of the European Life Science Research Infrastructure Strategy Board.

Steven van Helden studied chemistry at Utrecht University and, after obtaining his Ph.D. , worked in various roles in pharmaceutical industry for 20 years. Since 2003 he has been responsible for High Throughput Screening (HTS) operations and strategy at Organon/MSD. After the closure of those research facilities he developed a business plan for continuation of the screening activities in Oss, The Netherlands. This led to the formation of the Pivot Park Screening Centre (PPSC) and a central role of this company in the European Lead Factory. Steven is now Chief Technology Officer at PPSC.

Greg Prikler received his Master’s degree at the Budapest University of Technology as a Pharmaceutical Engineer. Before joining Mcule, he worked as an organic chemist in Budapest, Hungary, and in Zlin, Czech Republic. Greg is the Director of Business Development at Mcule and leading the Custom Solutions Engineering team of chemists, biologists, and cheminformatics professionals. He is managing the business aspects of internal and external development projects related to cheminformatics and compound sourcing. He is responsible for developing strategic solutions to business challenges across a wide range of relationships in drug discovery, research, development, and commercialization.

Yurii Moroz received PhD from Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University. He did a postdoc at Tufts and Syracuse University. After returning to Ukraine, Yurii joined Enamine as a scientific advisor to leads their efforts in building synthetically accessible chemical space. Yurii also serves as the CEO of Chemspace, a marketplace for small molecules with the largest catalog to search and buy from.

Nila is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto. She received her BSc in Cell Biology at McGill University in Montreal. Under the supervision of Professor Alison McGuigan, Nila’s research focuses on developing an easy-to-use, higher-throughput 3D-engineered tumor model and complementary image-based assays, to interrogate the dynamics of patient-derived organoids upon standard-of-care chemotherapy treatment, and the impact of the tumor microenvironment on treatment response. Nila was recently awarded the PRiME Fellowship, where she is co-supervised by Dr. Cheryl Arrowsmith from the Toronto Structural Genomics Centre, and has received support from NSERC CREATE graduate scholarships, the Barbara and Frank Milligan Graduate Fellowship, and the BME Doctoral Completion Award. Nila is an active member of the graduate student community and is Programming Co-chair for the student and young investigator section at the upcoming TERMIS-Americas Conference.

Shannon Mumenthaler, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California. She is also Chief Translational Research Officer for the Lawrence J Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC, which is a translational institute that bridges research and innovation by bringing together researchers, patients, and physicians dedicated to improving health of the human condition. Dr. Mumenthaler’s research program is centered around the development and utilization of physiologically relevant, organ-dependent tumor models that allow for the characterization of colorectal cancer cellular dynamics, and serve as a platform for testing specific therapeutic modalities to prevent or delay tumor progression. Specifically, she is integrating biologically-inspired 3D model systems (i.e., organoids and organs-on-chips) with dynamic imaging and computational approaches to provide new insights into the significance of the physical and cellular microenvironment on tumor progression.

Sarah Moss is a Staff Scientist at Advanced Solutions Life Sciences. She joined the Advanced Solutions teams in early 2018 and has since contributed to various projects related to 3D tissue design and automation. Specifically, her focus is on studying isolated human microvessels and developing strategies for their incorporation into various 3D tissue environments. She previously completed her graduate work at The Ohio State University with a focus in microfluidics and cancer biology.

Dr Fabio Stossi, Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Baylor Collge of Medicine, Houston, TX; is a native of Milan, Italy. He completed his BS and PhD studies at Universita’ degli Studi di Milano, in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology, and in Endocrinology and Metabolism. He then moved to the US as a postdoc in Dr. Benita S. Katzenellenbogen’s laboratory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he became interested in gene transcription and its modulation by steroid receptors, particularly focusing on estrogen receptor in breast cancer. He joined Dr. Michael A. Mancini’s group at Baylor College of Medicine, as an Assistant Professor, to explore the use of imaging technoques and high content analysis in steroid receptor biology. He is currently Associate Professor, Technical Director of the Integrated Microscopy Core and group leader for imaging in the GCC Center for Advanced Microscopy and Image Informatics. His interests are imaging and analysis of single cell gene transcription, development of novel analysis methods for single cell measurements, and assay development in environmental toxicology.

Tim Spicer joined Scripps early on at its onset in Jupiter Florida and has been working there for 10 years. Prior to that he was employed at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. for nine years as a Research Scientist in the Department of Lead Discovery and Profiling, Discovery Technologies and Infectious Diseases. Tim received an MS in microbiology at the SUNY Health Science Center at Syracuse. He has authored 75 publications and 4 patents. Tim works across multiple organizations and currently co-directs the Scripps Molecular Screening Center. He leads a team that implements assays and supports screening on fully automated platforms. He has experience developing anti-microbial, GPCR, kinase, protease, nuclear receptor, and/or ion channel assays in a variety of HTS-compatible formats (reporter-gene, TR-FRET, HTRF, fluorescence, luminescence, and absorbance). He is recognized at Scripps and by collaborators as a leader in evaluating new assay technologies for the purpose of making UHTS the standard.

Hans Clevers obtained his MD degree in 1984 and his PhD degree in 1985 from the University Utrecht, the Netherlands. His postdoctoral work (1986-1989) was done with Cox Terhorst at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute of the Harvard University, Boston, USA. From 1991-2002 Hans Clevers was Professor in Immunology at the University Utrecht and, since 2002, Professor in Molecular Genetics. From 2002-2012 he was director of the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht. From 2012-2015 he was President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). From June 2015-2019 he was director Research of the Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology. As of March 18th, 2022 Hans Clevers is the Head of Pharma Research and Early Development and a Member of the Enlarged Corporate Executive Committee of F.Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd , in Basel Switzerland.

Jason Yim is a first year PhD student at MIT studying Computer Science and advised by Regina Barzilay and Tommi Jaakkola. His research interests are in using machine learning to understand the natural sciences, particularly biology. Jason graduated with a Bachelor of Sciences in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 2018 and was employed by DeepMind between 2018-2021, working on topics ranging from AI for medical imaging and protein structure modeling.

Dr. R. Allysa Stern, M.S., Ph.D., is an accomplished cell biologist with extensive experience using cell-based assays to study mechanisms of disease and toxicity. She received her Ph.D. in Physiology from North Carolina State University with a concentration on cellular physiology and disease modeling. She has years of experience developing novel 2D and 3D in vitro models using a variety of cell types from multiple tissues, including primary hepatocytes and stem cells. As a Product Applications Scientist at Cell Microsystems, she leverages her expertise in advanced imaging and cellular and molecular biology techniques for new product and assay development and customer support.

Stefan N. Lukianov, AM MS is the first-time JHU student founder of Salve Therapeutics.  He has undergraduate degrees from the University of Maine and masters from the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard University in the biomedical sciences.  He has worked in reputable labs at Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, McLean Hospital and the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. He also has extensive experience in science journalism, having published and edited for ASBMB Today, ACS C&EN Show Daily, the Harvard Medical Student Review and MIT Science Policy Review.  Stefan also loves teaching and has held a diverse array of private and public education roles at various grade levels in STEM fields.

Betty is currently the facility manager for the High Content Cellular Analysis (HiCCA) Lab at Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Toronto. Her Ph.D. was in developing a novel 3-dimensional invasion assay in a microfluidic platform called Digital Microfluidics.

Roman studied Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and graduated after a research stay at the University of East Anglia, UK, in 2015. During his doctoral studies in the group of Prof. Manfred Jung, University of Freiburg, Germany, he developed in vitro assay systems and chemical probes for the screening and characterization of novel small molecule inhibitors of epigenetic targets with special focus on lysine acetyltransferases. In 2019, he obtained his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry from the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg, Germany. Subsequently, he started his postdoctoral work in the High-Throughput Biology group at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co.KG in Biberach, Germany, where he was responsible for the establishment and technological advancement of MS-based technologies to enable label-free high-throughput screening and to provide insights into drug-protein interactions beyond the generic potency readout. Since November 2021, Roman continues his work with Boehringer Ingelheim as a Scientist within the department of Drug Discovery Sciences.

Jefferson Chin is a Senior Scientist in the Compound Management & Distribution at Pfizer located in Groton, Ct. Jeff has a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the University of New Haven.  Jeff has over 30 years of experience in analytical chemistry, organic synthesis and finally compound management. He uses his experience to be the “voice of reason” while interacting with the chemists or biologist and developing new analytical workflows to extend CMD’s capabilities.

Dr. Elias is a board-certified gynecologic oncologist and the Director of the Gynecologic Oncology Laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Harvard Medical School. His lab focuses on early detection strategies for gynecologic cancers and novel therapeutic development using a combination of artificial intelligence and cancer nanotechnology applications.

Dr Robert Plumb is the Director of Omics and Small Molecule Pharma in the Waters Scientific Operations Division, based in Milford, Massachusetts. 

Dr Plumb has published over 100 papers on the subject of HPLC/MS and NMR for bioanalysis, metabolomics and metabolite identification.  He is a recognized expert in the use of liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry, capillary scale LC, purifications scale LC and metabonomics, giving many invited papers at international meetings around the world.

After obtaining an honors degree in Chemistry from the University of Hertfordshire in 1992, he started work in at Glaxo Research and Development Drug Metabolism Department. During his time at Glaxo and later GlaxoWellcome he continued his research in liquid chromatography combined with NMR and mass spectrometry for metabolite identification and bioanalysis obtaining his PhD in 1999.

Jonathan Shrimp, PhD in chemistry from Cornell University, Research Scientist at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences/National Institutes of Health (NCATS/NIH). As a research scientist at NCATS, my research aligns with the vision of NCATS, which involves collaborations with disease-focused laboratories. Together, we perform small molecule screening projects for disease targets, which involves assay development, screening and validation to help characterize the underlying biology. Additionally, we pursue new technologies for target-based and phenotypic screening in additiona to downstream validation.

Bradford Casey, Ph.D. leads the Michael J. Fox Foundation’s Genomics, Computational Biology, and Data Science research portfolios, working with other Foundation scientists to develop the Foundation’s research strategy. He collaborates with researchers, clinical leaders, as well as industry partners to develop new resources, apply new technology, and ensure that MJFF research priorities reflect and best serve the ultimate needs of patients. Bradford completed his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he applied new approaches in next-generation sequencing to study the activity of DNA-binding transcription factors in gene expression networks. His postdoctoral research focused on the development and application of novel computational genomics strategies in neuroscience to apply “big data” approaches to biological data sets. Bradford also serves as a scientific liaison to the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP-PD), a public-private consortium focused on leveraging strengths of federal, academic, and industry partners to develop shared research tools and resources for the community. In addition to academic research, Bradford has broad experience working with researchers, legislators, and government agencies on policy initiatives to advocate for patients and neuroscience research.

Don's graduate work, carried out at the University of California ,San Diego, combined microbial natural products chemistry with many facets of mass spectrometry.  He then took a postdoc at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany focusing on combining optical microscopy with LC-MS and imaging MS in single cell and sub-cellular metabolomics.  After completing his postdoc, Don was not ready to leave Europe and joined the Bioassay Automation team in the department of Discovery Pharmacology at Merck Healthcare (Darmstadt, Germany).  Here he is working on developing and integrating new high throughput mass spectrometry technologies for screening approaches.

Prof Matthias Trost is a Professor of Proteomics at Newcastle University, UK. He is a proteomics expert with over 20 years of experience in mass spectrometry. He studied chemistry in Freiburg, Germany, and Manchester, UK, completing his PhD in Cellular Microbiology and Proteomics at the Helmholtz-Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig, Germany and his postdoctoral research at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer in Montréal, Canada. In 2010, he became Group Leader and Head of Proteomics at the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit (MRC PPU) at the University of Dundee. In 2016, he was appointed Professor of Proteomics at Newcastle University. Since 2019, he has been a Wellcome Trust Investigator. Matthias’ main biological interest is in phagosome and macrophage biology and particularly signalling events in innate immunity driven by phosphorylation and ubiquitylation. In recent years, his lab has additionally focused on clinical proteomics and using mass spectrometry for drug discovery. For this, the lab pioneered the usage of high-throughput MALDI TOF mass spectrometry for drug screening which has attracted significant industry interest. He was just awarded the Biochemical Society's Industry and Academic Collaboration Award. 

Martin studied pharmacy in Heidelberg and Munich. He is the head of the Metabolomics group at the Center for Proteomics and Metabolomics at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). He holds a PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry obtained from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich (Germany) . With a postdoctoral fellowship (DAAD stipend), he joined the group of Prof. Hubertus Irth at the VU University Amsterdam. Following a research stay in the laboratory of Prof. Charles Serhan at Harvard Medical School, he moved to the LUMC where he today heads the Metabolomics group. He is editor of the book “Clinical Metabolomics”. Martin is a permanent committee member of the inter-disciplinary panel of the FWO and served in several EU committees. His main interests lie in clinical and fundamental disease-related research, using metabolomics-based approaches and notably lipidomics.

Aarti  was trained as an organic chemist, obtaining her M.S. from the UGA at Athens in 2005 with Prof. Geert-Jan Boons. She started her industrial career as a medicinal chemist at Vertex, and  she moved to AstraZeneca as a lead chemist in both oncology and the fragment based lead generation group contributing to the discovery of several clinical candidates. In 2013 she joined AstraZeneca’s newly created Chemical Biology group, focusing on small molecule target deconvolution and target engagement, supporting multiple drug discovery projects at different stages.    
In the chemical biology group, Aarti has championed the application of the CETSA and in-cell Chemoproteomics to measure cellular target engagement and target validation for multipass transmembrane protein receptors. Aarti’s efforts in studying difficult targets was recognized in 2017 with AstraZeneca’s Breakthrough Scientist of the Year award. Again in 2020, she was awarded for finding the target of a small molecule modulator of inflammation.

Dr. Maria Emilia Dueñas, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Newcastle University, Biosciences Institute

I completed my B.S. in Chemistry at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador) in 2013. In 2018, I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Analytical Chemistry from Iowa State University (United States) after working in Dr. Young Jin Lee’s group. My research focused on advancing the field of metabolomics using high-spatial resolution MALDI mass spectrometry imaging. I am currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at Newcastle University (United Kingdom) in Dr. Matthias Trost’s Laboratory of Biomedical Mass Spectrometry. I am developing high-throughput MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry metabolite screening cellular assays for drug discovery in human disease. Moreover, I have expertise in quantitative proteomics investigating inflammatory disease, and implement thermal proteome profiling mass spectrometry techniques to identify protein targets and off-targets of drugs. 

Virneliz Fernández Vega is an Assay Development Scientific Associate in the Lead Identification/High Throughput Screening Division in the Department of Molecular Medicine at the Scripps Research in the Florida Campus since 2008. Her main focus involves the implementation and validation of physiological relevant 3D cell culture models of pancreas, brain and lung cancer for drug target screening using HTS automation. Also, she develops and implements biochemical and cell-based assays compatible for uHTS campaigns to screen large compound libraries for drug discovery of a multidisciplinary range of therapeutic areas including cancer, autoimmune diseases, neurological disorders and infectious diseases.

Before joining Scripps Florida, Mrs. Fernández Vega worked at the University of Miami studying the gene expression of transcription factors involved in breast cancer and tumor growth development. Prior to joining University of Miami in 2002, she worked in the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases in the Epidemiology Section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institute of Health in Bethesda, MD. Her primary focus was the characterization of the Norwalk virus N-terminal protein. Mrs. Fernández Vega graduated from the University of Puerto Rico with a major in Microbiology in 2001.

Tetsuhiro Harimoto is a doctorate candidate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University. His current research in Dr. Tal Danino’s laboratory focuses on developing synthetic biology and bioengineering technologies to utilize bacteria for the detection and treatment of cancer. His recent works include developing multicellular platform for rapid characterization of tumor-targeting bacteria and constructing engineered biosensors for precision bacterial targeting in the body. Tetsuhiro received his BS in pharmacology and toxicology from the University of Toronto and earned his MS in biomedical engineering from Columbia University. Prior to graduate school, Tetsuhiro worked at Morgan Stanley as an equity research associate, analyzing the financial markets of pharmaceutical and medical device industries. Tetsuhiro joined the Danino lab in 2016 and is currently a NIH F99K00 Fellow.

Professor Scott E. Fraser has a long-standing commitment to quantitative biology, applying the tools of chemistry, engineering, and physics to problems in biology and medicine. His personal research centers on imaging and molecular analyses of intact biological systems, with an emphasis on early development, organogenesis, and medical diagnostics.  His innovations have spawned start-up companies, and have been integrated into instruments and FDA approved diagnostics. After training in physics (B.S., Harvey Mudd College, 1976) and biophysics (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1979), Fraser served on the faculty at UCIrvine.  In 1990 he moved to Caltech to serve as the Anna Rosen Professor of Biology, and founded several multidisciplinary centers.  In 2012, he moved to USC to take a Provost Professorship.  He remains active in interdisciplinary research and serves as the Director of Science Initiatives for the USC campuses as well as co-directing USC’s Bridge Institute.

John Doench is the director of research and development in the Genetic Perturbation Platform of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard,. He provides expert guidance on the design, execution, and analysis of genetic screens. He has contributed to numerous publications in fields such as infectious disease, cancer biology, and immunology. Additionally, Doench leads a group focused on the development of functional genomic techniques, first with RNAi and more recently with CRISPR technology. Here, his team demonstrated the potential of genetic screens with CRISPR and has since developed leading bioinformatics tools and screening libraries to enable community-wide usage of this powerful technology. Importantly, their efforts emphasize not only staying on the cutting edge of the newest approaches, but also focusing on making technologies widely available and useful, which is critical for enabling collaboration with a broader community of researchers working in diverse and challenging model systems.

Christina M. Woo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, and an affiliate member of the Broad Institute. Christina’s research focuses on the design of chemical approaches to alter post-translational modifications and the signaling outcomes they produce in cells. She obtained a BA in Chemistry from Wellesley College (2008). She obtained her PhD in 2013 from Yale University under the guidance of Professor Seth Herzon as an NSF predoctoral fellow in the synthetic and chemical biology studies of diazofluorene antitumor antibiotics. In 2013, Christina joined the laboratory of Professor Carolyn Bertozzi at the University of California Berkeley as a Jane Coffins Child postdoctoral fellow and continued at Stanford University (2015) as a Burroughs Wellcome Fund postdoctoral fellow, where she developed a mass-independent chemical glycoproteomics platform for the identification of non-templated post-translational modifications. Christina joined the faculty at Harvard University in 2016. Her research has been recognized by the David Gin Young Investigator Award, Camille-Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Sloan Research Foundation, NSF CAREER, Bayer Early Excellence in Science Award, the NIH DP1 Avenir Award, and the Ono Pharma Foundation Breakthrough Science Award. 

Betty joined Auron Therapeutics in January 2021. She is a data-driven and motivated scientific investigator with 15 years of experience building and leading biochemistry and lead discovery capabilities. Betty’s interest and expertise include advancing small molecules from various hit finding approaches (including DNA-encoded library screening) to IND filing, developing innovative assays to interrogate new modalities and their biochemical mechanisms of action, and working collaboratively to build infrastructure for supporting new R&D programs. Prior to joining Auron, she worked at Civetta Therapeutics, Kymera Therapeutics, X-Chem Pharmaceuticals, H3 Biomedicine, and Galenea Corporation. Betty has a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology from Harvard University, a M.S. in Molecular and Cell Biology from Brandeis University, where she also received bachelor’s degrees in Biochemistry, Biology, and French Language and Literature.

Shan Yu works as a Senior Scientist in the Early Target Discovery group at Takeda Development Center Americas. She received her PhD in physiology from the Pennsylvania State University. She started her drug discovery career as a postdoc fellow at Calibr/Scripps Research, where she led and participated in a wide-range of drug discovery programs covering inflammatory and metabolic diseases. Since joining Takeda, she led a team to develop automation platform and incorporate machine learning and AI approaches into high throughput screens.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ma...

Markus Schirle received his master’s degree in biochemistry at University of Tuebingen, Germany and received his Ph.D. there in 2001 for his work with H.G. Rammensee on the identification of disease-associated MHC peptide by mass spectrometry-based approaches. After postdoctoral studies in proteomics with Alfred Nordheim, he joined Cellzome (now GSK, Heidelberg, Germany) from 2001 - 2007, where his work focused on protein and small molecule affinity proteomics for target identification (ID) and mechanism of action (MoA) studies. Joining Novartis in 2007, he established an independent platform for chemical and affinity proteomics for target ID and MoA studies in what is now the Chemical Biology and Therapeutics department. He is currently leading a group that is dedicated to identification and characterization of compound-protein interactions using proteomics, chemical biology, in vitro biophysics and biochemistry as well as structural biology and co-leads the Novartis-Berkeley Center for Proteomics and Chemistry Technologies (NB-CPACT). With his team he is responsible for affinity-based approaches to target ID/MoA as well as applications of covalent chemoproteomics and complementary approaches to the identification of ligandable pockets and chemical starting points for Novartis projects globally as well as the exploration of new modalities. 

Patrick McDonough, Ph.D., Chief Research Officer at Vala Sciences Inc.,  is a Cell and Molecular Biologist with > 30 years experience in developing and performing cell based assays.  Specialities include cardiac myocytes, neurons, and CNS glial cells.  A particular interest is the differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) to excitable cell types (e.g., cardiac myocytes, neurons, and skeletal muscle) to enable research on diseases of the heart, brain, and skeletal muscle systems.

Dr. Cyrill Brunner is a trained pharmacist and obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich in the group of Prof. Gisbert Schneider. His main background are numerous biophysical assays including SPR and computational drug design. He joined Bruker as application specialist in April 2020 and heads the SPR application lab in Fällanden, Switzerland.

Brendon Kapinos is a Principal Scientist in Hit Discovery and Optimization (HDO) at Pfizer in Groton, Connecticut and oversees the group’s high-throughput bioanalytical operations. He joined Pfizer in 2007 after obtaining a BS in Biotechnology from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and accepted a position in the department of Pharmacokinetics, Dynamics and Metabolism. He later joined HDO, developing high-throughput in vitro ADME screens, LC-MS/MS platforms and workflows while completing his MA in Biology from Brown University. Brendon is a member of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and has presented on various high-throughput LC-MS/MS technologies and workflows.

Dr. Xiaoyu Li received his B.S. degree from Peking University in 1997 and Ph.D. degree in 2002 from the University of Chicago. After a postdoctoral training at Harvard University, he conducted research in several biotech firms. In 2009, he joined Peking University as Associate Professor and in 2015, Dr. Li joined The University of Hong Kong and currently is a Professor at Department of Chemistry. Dr. Li’s research focuses on DNA-encoded chemical library, protein labelling and profiling, and target identification.

Noel de Miranda is a PI of the Cancer Immunogenomics group at the Leiden University Medical Center. His group combines the use of high-end genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic technologies for the study of cancer genetics and immunology. The main aim of the group is to support the development of novel therapies to enrich the immunotherapy toolbox for the treatment of advanced cancers. The group’s activities are subdivided into two major pillars: 1) the discovery of immunotherapeutic targets in cancer patients that are not amenable to state-of-the-art immunotherapies and 2) the characterization of cancer microenvironments and of immune cell subsets with anti-cancer activity by applying high-dimensional technologies on cancer tissues.

I completed my first degree in Chemistry at Oxford University followed by a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge.  During my early career I held a number of molecular biology and protein biochemistry roles. I have worked within the Biopharm Discovery Departments within GSK for the past 15 years.  I have held roles of increasing responsibility leading both functional lines and matrix discovery project teams including Team Leader of the High Throughput Expression group, accountable for delivering all IgG material for hit screening supporting campaigns.  In 2019, I moved in to my current role where I am accountable for delivering the automation strategy and deploying, maintaining & maximising value of all automation across GSK’s small and large molecule Medicine Design organisation. In particular, the delivery of a key enabling project within our strategic Biopharm modernisation project.  Most recently, working in partnership with external collaborators to deliver fully automated DNA generation and protein expression & purification platforms to support all antibody material generation across the discovery process.

Daniel joined Strateos in March 2019.  Prior to Strateos he was the Director of Advanced Automation Technologies at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF).  In this role Daniel ran an innovative technology development group at the intersection of science and engineering.  Responsibilities included development, implementation and operation, as well as commercialization, of new technologies.  His most recent work focused on automation to support more complex readouts such as single-cell gene expression and droplet microfluidics.  Prior to working at GNF Daniel held various positions at Kalypsys, Inc, Ligand Pharmaceuticals and Genentech, Inc.  Daniel graduated with a BS in Molecular Biology from California State University, Sacramento and an MS in Immunology from University of California, Davis.  Daniel has served many volunteer positions within the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening including a term on the Board of Directors from 2013-2015 and as President in 2014-15.

Guy Oshiro, Ph.D., is a Senior Product Manager at Dassault Systemes BIOVIA in San Diego, California. Guy is driving the efforts at BIOVIA to develop solutions that support and accelerate drug discovery research efforts. Guy is a multi-disciplinary scientist with broad experience in drug discovery and a strong background in research informatics. He has over 20 years of industry experience generating, analyzing and managing scientific data. As a bench scientist, he led multiple drug discovery projects from concept into clinical studies. As a informatics consultant, Guy developed custom solutions to address small molecule and biologics drug discovery needs. At Pfizer, he supported translational research projects that depended on large 'omics data sets. He obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, Colorado. He completed his postdoctoral training in functional genomics and high throughput automation at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation in San Diego, California.

Biography: Dr Patrick Courtney has 20 years industrial experience in technology development. He worked as Director for global firms such as PerkinElmer, as well as at Sartorius and Cap Gemini. He leads a European working group on analytical laboratory robotics and is member of board of directors of SiLA (Standards in Laboratory Automation). He holds an MBA with a PhD in Robotic Engineering/Molecular Biology, and has 100 publications and holds ten patents.

Dario Caramelli is a Research Fellow in the Cronin group at the University of Glasgow, currently leading the cheminformatics section of the group. His research involves building and programming of autonomous robots for reaction discovery and reaction screening as well as the development of software for chemical space modelling, data processing and cheminformatics. He obtained a Master degree in Organic chemistry in Rome (2015) and a PhD in the Cronin group (2019).

Charles-Hugues Lardeau is a Senior Scientist in the High Dimensional & Computational Biology team at Janssen (Beerse, Belgium), having previously held roles at AstraZeneca (UK) and CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine (Vienna, Austria). He has an interest in high-throughput screening and high-content imaging assays. Charles-Hugues Lardeau holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leeds (UK).

Vishakha Goyal is an Automation Engineer at NCATS, NIH. She has a Master of Engineering in robotics from University of Maryland, College Park. She works on developing systems for automating chemistry processes using Internet of Things and Robotics. Her primary focus is on building software to integrate various laboratory devices with sensors and developing in-house automated benchtop devices for product purification and isolation by incorporating techniques like computer vision.

Judi Wardwell-Swanson is a Senior Scientist at InSphero and the 2021 president of the Society of Biomolecular Imaging and Informatics (SBI2). At InSphero her work is focused on the development of high content imaging and microphysiological system applications utilizing 3D human microtissue models. Judi also has accumulated more than 25 years of experience in the pharma industry and has a long-standing interest in the utilization of genomics and imaging technologies to help drive drug discovery. As Principal Investigator in the Applied Genomics Department at Bristol-Myers Squibb, her team conducted phenotypic screens in physiologically-relevant cell models with an emphasis on the identification and validation new drug targets. Judi is also the author of several journal articles and a book chapter on imaging-related topics such as HCS data management, analysis of multidimensional imaging data, and 3D imaging/analysis of heterocellular spheroids.

Formerly, as a senior research chemist, I worked at a worldwide research reagent supplier Combi-blocks for 10 years. I have synthesized more than 1000 different kinds of compounds with different reaction types, such as Suzuki Coupling, Amide Coupling, Buchwald-Hartwig Amidation, Grignard Reaction, Sulfonylation., etc. I am proficient in new compound synthesis, analysis, and purification. 

As the high throughput automated chemistry will be the future. I joined ASPIRE team of NCATS/NIH as an automation chemist in 2019. I am dedicated to the development of both hardware and workflow for automated chemistry synthesis with different vendors and pharmaceutical companies. In the NCATS automated cloud lab collaboration with Eli Lilly and Strateos, I lead the hardware development, concurrent workflow development, chemistry vilidation of Indigo reactor in L2S2 since 2019 , and fully intergrating of Indigo with Chemspeed SWING XL in Eli Lilly L2S2 for automated production chemistry.

Janne Wiedmann is a second year PhD candidate at Institute of Biological and Chemical Systems - Functional Material Systems at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. She achieved her Bachelor's and Master's degree in Chemical Biology at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and is now working in the group of Prof. Pavel Levkin in the field of miniaturized, high-throughput organic synthesis. The PhD projects include collaborations with Mannheim Center for Mass Spectrometry and Optical Spectroscopy and Sanofi-Aventis Germany GmbH.

Robyn Laskowski, a Senior Research Associate at Corteva Agriscience, has been aiding in the success of farmers in one way or another her entire life. Born in Wisconsin, she was raised on and contributed to her family’s farm, which spurred her to explore a career in Agricultural Biotechnology. With a decade of experience evaluating, developing, and deploying new technologies, Robyn helped successfully implement multiple platforms advancing genotyping capabilities to support the production of the highest quality seed. In 2020 she used her experience to help establish Corteva’s COVID-19 diagnostic testing laboratory and the creation of an ultra-high throughput COVID-19 testing platform with newly engineered automation. 

Robyn has an undergraduate degree in Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and completed her master’s degree in Organic Chemistry at Iowa State University. She lives in Des Moines, Iowa with her partner. 

Sakshi Garg joined Merck Healthcare KGaA in 2016. She has expertise in image based readouts both in 2D and 3D cell culture, allowing her to lead several technology based collaborations in the field of advanced cellular assays. Most recently she has been actively involved in the JUMP Cell Painting consortium.

Dr. Roman Affentranger obtained his Ph.D. in 2006 from the Institute of Biochemistry at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, then joined the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, as postdoctoral researcher. From 2010 to 2013 he engaged in software project management activities in the areas of predictive toxicology, drug discovery and formulation research. In 2013 he joined Roche Pharma Research and Early Development (pRED) as Head of Small Molecule Discovery Informatics. In 2019 he transitioned to the Roche pRED Lead Discovery department to lead the Automation Technologies section, which covers high-throughput screening, compound management, and automated cell culture and cell banking.

Dr. Katrina Wisdom is a Bioengineer, Bioscientist, and Investigator of Complex In Vitro Models at GlaxoSmithKline.  Prior to her postdoctoral fellowship at University of Pennsylvania in Bioengineering, she received her doctorate and master's degrees from Stanford University and her bachelor's degree from Duke University.    She was awarded the University of Pennsylvania Provost's Postdoctoral fellowship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and a Stanford Bio-X Interdisciplinary Biosciences Fellowship.  Her expertise includes mechanobiology, biomaterials, cell-matrix interactions, and 3D cell migration and vascularization in immuno-oncology and epithelial barrier models.

I am an automation engineer interesting in the combination of science, engineering, and information technology.

Dr. R. Allysa Stern, M.S., Ph.D., is an accomplished cell biologist with extensive experience using cell-based assays to study mechanisms of disease and toxicity.  She received her Ph.D. in Physiology from North Carolina State University with a concentration on cellular physiology and disease modeling.  She has years of experience developing novel 2D and 3D in vitro models using a variety of cell types from multiple tissues, including primary hepatocytes and stem cells. As a Product Applications Scientist at Cell Microsystems, she leverages her expertise in advanced imaging and cellular and molecular biology techniques for new product and assay development and customer support. 

Having obtained my BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Manchester UK,  I have worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 29 years. I am an experienced drug-discovery bioscientist, working in the fields of Biochemical & Cell Assay Development, High Throughput Screening and  Laboratory Automation. In 2009 I joined the AstraZeneca Global High Throughput Screening centre as a senior scientist, with a responsibility for delivering screening data to a global internal & external customer base. Over the years I have developed an interest and depth of experience in lab automation  and in 2020 I was promoted to Associate Director, leading an AZ automation team and matrix managing a multidisciplinary team of external automation engineers. The team ensures delivery of automated high throughput screens to AstraZeneca drug projects and academic collaborators, focusing on the architecture, design, and data management of robotics and high-throughput systems to drive efficiency, inform decisions and enable discovery.

Dr. Dennis Sheberla brings to his role of Kebotix’s chief technology officer (CTO) an impressive multi-disciplinary background and passion to not only automate and discover fast new materials, but to apply these uses of AI, machine learning and robotics for a better world. Prior to Kebotix, Dennis’ interdisciplinary expertise is in synthetic organic chemistry, device fabrication and characterization, in addition to computational chemistry, machine learning and computer science. Dennis was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, as well as MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dennis earned his Ph.D. in Physical Organic Chemistry from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He also holds an associate electrical engineering degree and certificate in computer science.

Emma Chory is a postdoctoral fellow in the Sculpting Evolution Group at MIT, advised by Kevin Esvelt and Jim Collins. Emma's research utilizes directed evolution, robotics, and chemical biology to evolve biosynthetic pathways for the synthesis of novel therapeutics. Emma obtained her PhD in Chemical Engineering in the laboratory of Gerald Crabtree at Stanford University where her work revealed the fundamental mechanisms governing chromatin regulation. She is the recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a pre- and postdoctoral NIH NRSA Fellowship.

Dr. Anna Popova is a head of biological sub-group in the Multifunctional Materials Systems research laboratory at the Institute of Biological and Chemical Systems (IBCS-FMS) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany led by Prof. Pavel Levkin. She graduated from the department of Cell Biology and Immunology of the Biological Faculty, Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia and obtained her Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology in at University of Heidelberg, Germany. Since January 2014 Dr. Popova started at KIT as a project leader and head of the biology sub-group. Dr. Popova is the co-founder of Aquarray GmbH.

Kyle Loh is an Assistant Professor and The DiGenova Endowed Faculty Scholar at Stanford University. His lab is interested in generating different types of human cells—ranging from bone to blood vessels to brain—in a Petri dish from embryonic stem cells. Recently, his lab has used these human cell-types to study deadly biosafety level 4 (BSL4) viruses, such as Ebola and Nipah viruses. Kyle has received the NIH Director's Early Independence Award and Forbes 30 Under 30, and has been named a Packard Fellow, Pew Scholar, Human Frontier Science Program Young Investigator, and Baxter Foundation Faculty Scholar.

Dr. Thomas E. Angelini is an associate professor in the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida.  His research background includes the study of protein, lipid, DNA and virus self-assembly; collective cell migration and force transmission in cell monolayers; bacterial biofilm growth and spreading associated with biosurfactants and extracellular polysaccharide. Currently, his work focuses on cell-assembly and collective motion in 2D and 3D cell populations, and 3D printing of soft and biological matter. Since 2017, Dr. Angelini has served as an Associate Editor for the journal Soft Matter, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

I am a biomedical engineer and scientist with expertise in developing microphysiological human organ-on-a-chip platforms. I received my BS and MS degrees in Chemical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea and PhD degree in Biomedical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Now, as a postdoctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, I am trying to answer pressing questions in biomedical research and clinical settings by taking the engineering principles.

Athanasia (Nasia) Apostolou,Ph.D., former Research Scholar at Emulate, Inc., has led the effort for developing and implementing the biopsy derived Colon Intestine-Chip in studying mechanisms that drive leaky-gut syndrome in humans. Prior to joining Emulate, Athanasia studied the role of the adaptive response to stressors on maintaining intestinal homeostasis in animal models. 

Athanasia has received her Ph.D. in Experimental Physiology from the Medical School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and has first or co-authored several research articles and patents.

Caroline Sartain is a Senior Scientist in Fulcrum Therapeutics' Target Discovery group where she specializes in next-generation sequencing-based assays for drug discovery. Caroline holds a PhD in Genetics from Cornell University and completed her postdoctoral work at Washington State University. Caroline's academic work focused on genetic regulation of reproductive biology; in her industry work she pivoted toward NGS assay development. She has worked in Boston-area diagnostics and therapeutics companies since 2017, holding positions at Good Start Genetics and Torpedo Diagnostics before landing at Fulcrum Therapeutics, where she has led NGS lab efforts since 2019. Caroline was awarded Fulcrum Therapeutics' Innovation Award for her contributions toward the development of the FulcrumSeek™ screening platform.

Dr. Nicholas Geisse is the Chief Science Officer at Curi Bio, a leading developer of human stem cell-based platforms for drug discovery. Dr. Geisse graduated from Boston University in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and completed his graduate studies (Ph.D.) in Pharmacology at Cambridge University in England under Dr. RM Henderson, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in cardiac cell and tissue engineering at the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences under Prof. Kevin Kit Parker. After his postdoc, he went into industry and worked for Asylum Research (a manufacturer of Atomic Force Microscopes) as a scientist and project manager. At Curi, Dr. Geisse is part of the executive management team and is responsible for guiding the overall scientific strategy of the company in addition to developing and bringing to market Curi’s next-generation of innovative products aimed at increasing the predictive power of in vitro cell based assays.

Dr. Shuibing Chen is the Kilts Family Associate Professor and the Director of Diabetes Program in the Department of Surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine, New York. The major research interest in the Chen Laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine focuses on studying the role of genetic factors and environmental factors on pancreatic beta cell in type 1 and 2 diabetes. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Chen created a panel of hPSC-derived cells/organoids to study SARS-CoV-2 infection. Dr, Chen has published more than 40 papers on peer-reviewed high impact journals, such as Nature, Nature Medicine, Cell Metabolism, Cell Stem Cell, Nature Chemical Biology, etc. She has received many awards including New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Investigator, ADA Junior Faculty Award, ADA Innovative Award, NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, American Association for Cancer Research Career Development Award, and ISSCR Dr. Susan Lim Award for Outstanding Young Investigator, etc.

Seungil Kim, Ph.D., is a Staff Scientist and Microscopy Team Manager at the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine. Dr. Kim completed his B.S. and M.S. degrees in South Korea. He then moved to WashU and received a doctoral degree in Developmental Biology. He carried out his postdoctoral research in the department of Cell and Tissue Biology at UCSF. Seungil has over 10 years of experience working with various in vitro/in vivo models and advanced cellular imaging techniques. His current research focus is to understand the contributions of the tumor microenvironment to drug response, using patient-derived 3D organoids as a model system. Moreover, he is developing high-throughput automated imaging methods to screen novel drug compounds in colorectal cancer.

Dr. Saiph Savage is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University  in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences where she directs the Civic A.I. lab. She is one of the 35 Innovators under 35 by the MIT Technology Review, a Google Anita Borg Scholarship recipient, and a fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Her work has been covered in the BBC, Deutsche Welle, the Economist, and the New York Times, as well as published in top venues such as ACM CHI, CSCW, and the Web Conference, where she has also won honorable mention awards.  Dr. Savage currently also collaborates with the Civic Innovation lab of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation, the United Nations, industry, and has also formalized new collaborations with Federal and local Governments where she is driving them to adopt Human Centered Design and A.I. to deliver better experiences and government services to citizens. Dr. Savage students have obtained fellowships and internships in industry (Facebook Research, Twitch Research, Twitter, Snap, and Microsoft Research) as well as academia (Oxford Internet Institute).  Saiph holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and a master's and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Dr. Savage has also worked at the University of Washington,  and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Additionally, Dr. Savage  has been a tech worker at Microsoft Bing, Intel Labs, and a crowd research worker at Stanford.

Rohit Arora is an Application Scientist at Iktos where he works on collaborations with, and deployment of Iktos software to, pharmaceutical and biotech clients. Prior to Iktos, he was a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Harvard Medical School where he developed and applied Machine Learning methods to develop diagnostic biomarkers. Rohit has a PhD in structural bioinformatics from École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay where he applied in-silico methods to understand inhibition mechanism of therapeutically relevant proteins. He has also conducted related research at Université d'Orléans, in collaboration with Janssen Pharmaceutica.

"Tamsin E. Mansley, PhD, MRSC, CChem, CSci, is an experienced drug discovery scientist, having worked as a medicinal chemist at Eli Lilly and UCB Research. It was here that she developed her passion for applying computational chemistry and predictive modelling approaches for compound selection and design. Her particular interests lie in coupling machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques with generative chemistry approaches to explore chemistry space and guide compound design.

Since 2005, Tamsin has worked with scientific software providers supporting project teams and their use of computational and cheminformatics applications in drug discovery, enabling them to make informed decisions that will improve the efficiency and productivity of the drug discovery process. Tamsin joined Optibrium in 2015 to develop new opportunities for Optibrium’s fully integrated, elegant software for small molecule design, optimization, and data analysis across North America. In October 2022, Tamsin accepted the role of President at Optibrium's new US subsidiary, Optibrium, Inc. She also leads the global Application Science team, supporting the company’s existing client base.

Tamsin holds a PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of East Anglia in the UK and pursued Postdoctoral studies in the labs of Prof. Philip Magnus at the University of Texas, Austin."

Jeroen Overman received his PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia, where he investigated the role of transcription factors in aberrant cardiovascular growth and developed drug discovery projects against novel targets. He then joined Charles River Laboratories to drive mechanistic pharmacology and in vitro safety screening with a strong focus on high content imaging strategies. In 2020, he joined the department of Mechanistic Biology and Profiling at AstraZeneca, where he delivers profiling data with a deep mechanistic understanding for a wide range of early drug discovery projects across TAs.

Neil is co-founder and Managing Director of Ziath.  Since 1994, Neil has experience with a range of companies; GlaxoSmithKline; Cambridge Antibody Technology, Cenix Bioscience GmbH and the Max Planck Institute of Cell Biology and Genomics. Within these companies Neil has been responsible for the development, maintenance and implementation of laboratory automation and associated software with a focus on process control and information management.

Neil has served on the board of the European Laboratory Robotics Interest Group (ELRIG) in both Germany and the UK. He was the informatics chair for Lab Automation 2009, has edited for the Journal for the Association for Laboratory Automation and also served on the board of The Journal for Laboratory Automation. Neil has a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and a Master’s degree in Computer Science.

Having spent seven years in life science software services and then biotechnology leadership roles, Kate understands the varied needs of biotech companies and has learned a thing or two about how high quality data and user-friendly technology enable research discoveries and business intelligence. User success has always been central to her methodology and she is passionate about driving engagement across all levels of an organization, from bench researchers to business leadership.

After consulting with Third Rock Ventures portfolio companies for a year and helping launch companies with integrated and highly adoptable informatics platforms, Kate accepted a full time role at the Boston-based biotech startup MOMA Therapeutics as their head of informatics and technology. Her goal is to be a trusted advisor to both the business and the research sides of the company while deploying and supporting innovative technology solutions that are just as cutting-edge as MOMA’s ambitious research goals. Kate holds a BS in chemistry from Northeastern University and has completed multiple graduate level courses in topics spanning organic and bioanalytical chemistry to executive leadership and management.

Amanda Paulson, PhD is a Specialist in Informatics in the Arkin Lab at the University of California, San Francisco. She earned her PhD in Biomedical Sciences at UCSF modeling the population dynamics of heterogeneous tumor cells. She then worked as a data science fellow at Frederick National Labs for Cancer Research where she was affiliated with the ATOM Research Alliance. As a fellow she built machine learning QSAR models for drug-induced liver injury (DILI) using phenotypic data from high content imaging screens. Currently, Amanda is still affiliated with ATOM and continues her work on DILI. She also works closely with experimentalists in the Arkin lab to process, analyze and manage the data generated from high throughput screening at the Small Molecule Discovery Center at UCSF.

Garrett Peterson is the Chief Strategy Officer for Yahara Software, and has a BA in Computer Science from Lakeland University and an MBA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Mr. Peterson has more than 35 years of IT management experience focusing primarily on the verticals of laboratory operations and scientific instrument integration. During his career, he has worked for both private and public-sector organizations, including a stint as the CIO of the State Public Health Laboratory in Wisconsin, and has been directly involved with countless LIMS implementations and system integrations for a wide variety of laboratory operations. In his role at Yahara Software, Mr. Peterson leads teams that provide innovative software solutions to support life science clients including efforts such as implementing laboratory systems at the CDC and working with organizations worldwide to support and enhance laboratory automation initiatives.

When he is not spending time working on laboratory informatics, Garrett spends his free time operating pinball machines for various establishments in Madison and playing keyboards in a band.

Sridhar Iyengar, a serial entrepreneur, has revolutionized multiple industries. Sridhar’s first company, Agamatrix, developed the first medical device, the iBGStar (a glucometer), to connect to the iPhone, setting the stage for connected health. AgaMatrix established partnerships with Apple, Sanofi, Walgreens, Amazon, and Target. His second company, Misfit, maker of elegant wearable products, was sold to Fossil for $260M. Sridhar’s current company, Elemental Machines, leverages Industry 4.0 technologies such as AI, data science and IoT to accelerate scientific innovation. Sridhar holds over 50 patents and received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar. Beyond Elemental Machines, Sridhar has been known to run 13.1 miles on occasion and has been spotted on stage behind a wall of drums.

Dr Bayraktar is a neuroscientist interested in studying human brain development and disease. His technical interests are focused on high-throughput spatial genomics. Omer was a postdoctoral fellow in David Rowitch’s lab, where he developed new spatial genomic pipelines for mapping large tissues and discovered astroglial layers in the cerebral cortex. Omer started his research group in the Cellular Genetics Programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in 2018. His group has developed new computational tools to integrate single cell and spatial transcriptomics data for comprehensive mapping of cell types across complex tissues. Currently, Omer is leading the Sanger-EBI High-Throughput Spatial Genomics Team to develop experimental and computational platforms to map human tissue architecture at scale. 

Dr. Song-Lin CHUA is an Assistant Professor in Microbiology from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Associate Director of Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Food Biological Safety Control. He was awarded the Interstellar Initiative Early Career Investigator in 2021 and Lee Kong Chian Medicine Fellowship in Singapore in 2015. He had published in 30 publications and filed 3 US patents, with expertise in microbiology, diagnosis of infections, and antimicrobial discovery.

Professor Wee Joo Chng is Director of the National University Cancer Institute, Singapore and Group Director of Research, at the National University Health System. He is the Provost’s Chair Professor and Vice-Dean of Research of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and Deputy Director and Senior Principal Investigator of the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, at the National University of Singapore. 

He is a member of many international professional committees, such as the International Myeloma Working Group and the Asian Myeloma Network. He is also involved in a number of Grant Review Committees, Conference Organising Committee, Advisory Boards and Steering Committees of Global Clinical Trials. He has authored more than 300 publications in many reputed journals, and actively participates in clinical trials and has delivered talks in many national and international conferences. He has won multiple awards for his outstanding achievements in translational research both locally and internationally including the International Myeloma Foundation’s Brian GM Durie Outstanding Achievement Award, the National Medical Excellence Outstanding Clinician Scientist Award, the National Medical Research Council Senior Translational Research (STaR) Award, the National University of Singapore Young Researcher Award, and the Celgene Future Leaders in Haematology Award.

Dr. Yu received her PhD in Physical Chemistry and Biophysics from Carnegie Mellon University. Right after that she started her career at BD Biosciences, a division of Becton Dickinson, located in San Jose, California. In her 12-years career at BD, Dr. Yu focused on innovation and technology development. She has been an active inventor herself with six issued patents and more than 10 pending. Dr. Yu joined Applied Cells in 2018 leading the activities in application development.

Scientist in the Molecular Biology R&D team at 10x Genomics, who helps develop NGS technologies to enable high-throughput, low-throughput and multi-omic single-cell sequencing.

Dr. Rong Fan is Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. He received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley and conducted the postdoctoral research at California Institute of Technology prior to launching his own research laboratory at Yale University in 2010. His current interest is focused on developing microtechnologies for single-cell and spatial omics profiling to interrogate functional cellular heterogeneity and inter-cellular signaling network in human health and disease (e.g., cancer and autoimmunity). He co-founded IsoPlexis, Singleron Biotechnologies, and AtlasXomics. He is the recipient of a number of awards including the NCI Howard Temin Career Transition Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), elected a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and elected to the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE).

Dr. Wang is currently the Associate Director of Research at the Center for Epigenomics at UC San Diego. Dr. Wang specializes in the application of epigenomic technology platforms and interpretation of large-scale datasets to investigate human development and disease. He was previously a JDRF postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego where his research focused on understanding pancreatic beta-cell development and diabetes by combining human genetics, stem cell differentiation, and epigenomics in the laboratory of Dr. Maike Sander. At the Center for Epigenomics, he currently oversees – including experimental design and data interpretation - multiple collaborative projects with investigators both in and out of San Diego, including projects focused on understanding human brain function using functional organoids, the molecular basis of human diseases such as diabetes and macular degeneration, and investigating lung cell-type diversity in the context of pedatric diseases such as BPD as part of LungMAP.

Yuchen Fan, senior scientist, gRED, Genentech. My academic and industrial expertise is focusd on drug delivery, nanomedicine, immunoengineering, and high-throughput analytical techniques for pharmaceutical and biotech applications. Currently I lead the high-throughput screening (HTS) and lab automation efforts to support the development of emerging drug delivery platforms and pharmaceutical formulations.

I received my PhD from UCSD in the lab of Katherine Jones (Salk), working on identifying factors required to initiate transcription on reconstituted chromatin. For my postdoc in the lab of Johannes Walter at HMS, I studied replication initiation in vitro using Xenopus egg extracts. Since then I've been at Novartis, where my recent work has been focused around targeted protein degradation / targeted protein stabilization.

Ben is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at PhoreMost, a target identification and drug discovery company based at the Babraham campus, Cambridge. He joined in 2019 to lead the evolution and development of the SITESEEKER® screening platform which uses PROTEINi® to discover new drugs to unprecedented targets. Prior to joining PhoreMost, Ben founded and led a CRISPR-based functional genomic screening department at Horizon Discovery, the leading UK gene editing biotech company based in Cambridge. As an academic, Ben’s training was in chemical genetics and mechanisms of proteostasis, working where Ben uncovered new modes of inhibition in the unfolded protein response.

Aram Chung is an associate professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering at Korea University. He received his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Seoul National University, completed a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, and carried out postdoctoral studies in bioengineering at UCLA. He then joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at RPI as an assistant professor until he moved to Korea University. His lab investigates microscale flows to develop a new class of microfluidic systems for biomedicine. He is a founder/CEO of MxT Biotech, which is focused on developing transformative microfluidics-based cell therapies for cancer patients.

Tuyen Nguyen is a Senior Scientist at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc., a biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development, and commercialization of RNA interference (RNAi) therapeutics for genetically defined diseases.   She manages the target discovery and validation, and overseas the in vitro high throughput screening pipeline.   She also leads the CNS and Ocular assay development efforts in the development of human translational models using 2D/3D platforms.  In addition, she has extensive knowledge in building, optimizing, and validating high throughput in vitro screening automation system.  She received a B.S. in Biology from Emmanuel College and a master’s degree in Biotechnology from Harvard University.

Benedikt von der Heyde is a senior scientist at Pelago Bioscience. He is primarily developing high-throughput CETSA assays, as well as acting as a project accountable lead and performing internal R&D work. Before that, he absolved his PhD at Uppsala University (Sweden), investigating how findings from genome-wide association studies can be translated using a high-throughput imaging & CRISPR-Cas9 based approach in zebrafish.

Dr. Anastasia Velentza is currently Senior Director, Platform Technology at Plexium, a Targeted Protein Degradation company focusing on the discovery and development of degrader drugs to address significant unmet medical needs. Anastasia is a leader with multidisciplinary science background and more than 20 years of experience in Drug Discovery, with expertise in Assay Development, Screening, Pharmacology, and direction of cross-functional teams. Anastasia has worked in a variety of therapeutic areas spanning multiple molecular targets. Prior to Plexium, she worked at Ferring Pharmaceuticals serving as a Molecular Pharmacologist, Team Leader, and Head of Assay Development for lead generation in various disease areas, including Endocrinology, Hepatology and Gastroenterology. Before Ferring, Anastasia was a Senior Scientist at Dart Neuroscience where she joined Project Teams as a pharmacology expert, established new assay technologies, and led HTS campaigns to identify small molecules for CNS diseases. Prior to that, she was a Research investigator at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF), where she led biology and pharmacology efforts of scientific projects for multiple targets mainly in Oncology and Metabolic disease.

Anastasia was a T32 NIH National Research Service Award scholar under a postdoctoral drug discovery training program at Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, IL. Her interdisciplinary postdoctoral studies focused on kinase drug discovery in CNS diseases and Acute Lung Injury. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Chemistry at the University of Patras in Greece, and a Ph.D. from the same institution in Bioorganic Chemistry, working on the synthesis and SAR of insect neuropeptides, funded by a competitive Greek State Scholarship and a European Union program. Anastasia has received awards at national and international conferences for her research, which has been documented in more than 25 publications, patents, and abstracts.

Jesse Chen, Ph.D is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at RA Capital Management.  In this role he works closely with RA’s Venture Team to evaluate various drug discovery platforms and initiate novel therapeutics programs. Jesse has more than a decade of discovery research and management experience, from early discovery through preclinical development. Most recently, Jesse co-founded Avilar Therapeutics and led discovery research until its $60M seed financing. Prior to joining RA, Jesse was Senior Director of Discovery at Kymera Therapeutics. As the first and founding member of Kymera’s scientific team, Jesse was responsible for building the company’s industry-leading targeted protein degradation platform and pipeline, and he helped secure the company’s Series A and B financings as well as a partnership with Vertex. Jesse also held research leadership roles at Moderna Therapeutics and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, where he was responsible for developing novel platforms and leading discovery programs. Jesse earned his Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from MIT and was a Harvard Origins Research Fellow.

Dr. Kleiger began his career as a structural biologist in the laboratory of Dr. David Eisenberg (UCLA). Dr. Kleiger then joined the laboratory of Dr. Ray Deshaies (formerly Caltech and now Vice President of global research, Amgen) focusing on the ubiquitin system and the application of biochemical and enzymological techniques to uncover enzyme mechanism. Dr. Kleiger is an expert in targeted protein degradation and a leader in the application of enzyme kinetics to the ubiquitylation reaction. Dr. Kleiger's research is at the nexus of understanding how ubiquitylating enzymes function at the molecular level and how to harness the power of these enzymes to treat various human diseases such as cancer. He is  involved in both academic and industry collaborations seeking insights into the targeted degradation of disease-causing proteins.

Kalli is a Principal Scientist at Mersana Therapeutics working on bioconjugation and antibody drug conjugates. She received her bachelors from UC San Diego and has a PhD from Northeastern University. Kalli has spent the past 15 years making antibody conjugates of all kinds at companies such as ImmunoGen, Amgen, and Mersana. There is a very good chance that she arrived here on a bicycle.

Science Director at Charles River Labs where I oversee small molecule Early Discovery drug discovery projects particularly in the area of Huntington's Disease.  Prior to joining CRL in 2016 I was a senior group leader at Takeda Cambridge with responsibility for assay development, in vitro pharmacology and hit ID activities.  I'm a biologist by training with degree in Biochemistry from the University of Liverpool and PhD in Molecular Biology from the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) London. My career in drug discovery started in a Wellcome Foundation funded lab at the ICR cloning novel kinase as potential breast cancer targets.   Since then I've  gained  over 20 years drug discovery experience in  academia, biotech, pharma and CRO environments and been a member of project teams that have been fortunate enough to transition small molecules to pre-clinical & clinical development.

Greg M. Thurber is Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan and Associate Chair of Graduate Education in ChE. His work focuses on applying fundamental biotransport principles to design novel therapeutics and molecular imaging agents including antibody drug conjugates. Prof. Thurber received his training in protein therapeutics at MIT and in vivo molecular imaging at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He has authored over 50 papers and delivered 60 invited talks at major pharmaceutical companies, national and international conferences, and university departmental seminars. He also has consulting/research contract affiliations with more than 15 different companies. Prof. Thurber’s work has been featured in popular news outlets including NPR’s “All Things Considered” and Smithsonian Magazine, and he has received several awards including an NIH K01 award, the National Science Foundation CAREER award, and the World ADC George R. Pettit Award for contributions to the field of antibody drug conjugates.

Arjun went to UC Berkeley, where he majored in math and physics, earned his PhD in math from the Courant Institute at NYU, and did his postdoctoral training at MIT before joining the faculty at Penn Bioengineering in 2010. He is currently a professor of Bioengineering.  His research focus is on the developed experimental techniques for making highly quantitative measurements in single cells and models for linking those measurements to cellular function.  His ultimate goal is to achieve a quantitative understanding of the molecular underpinnings of cellular behavior.

Dr. Nathan Price is Chief Scientific Officer of Thorne HealthTech (NASDAQ: THRN). Previously he was CEO of Onegevity, an AI health intelligence company that merged with Thorne prior to the IPO in 2021. In 2019, he was named as one of the 10 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine by the National Academy of Medicine, and in 2021 he was appointed to the Board on Life Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He spent much of his earlier career as Professor and Associate Director of the Institute for Systems Biology (now on leave), co-director with biotechnology pioneer Lee Hood of the Hood-Price Lab for Systems Biomedicine, and is Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington in Bioengineering and Computer Science & Engineering. He is a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, received the 2016 Grace A. Goldsmith award for his work pioneering ‘scientific wellness’, was a co-founder of Arivale, and received a Healthy Longevity Catalyst Award from the National Academy of Medicine in 2020. He has co-authored more than 180 peer-reviewed scientific publications and given over 200 talks and keynotes. He also served as Chair of the NIH Study Section on Modeling and Analysis of Biological Systems (MABS).  

Caroline Uhler is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT. In addition, she co-directs the newly-launched Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute. She holds an MSc in mathematics, a BSc in biology, and an MEd all from the University of Zurich. She obtained her PhD in statistics from UC Berkeley in 2011 and then spent three years as an assistant professor at IST Austria before joining MIT in 2015. She is a Simons Investigator, a Sloan Research Fellow and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. In addition, she received an NSF Career Award, a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, and a START Award from the Austrian Science Foundation. Her research lies at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and genomics, with a particular focus on computational models of genome packing and regulation.

Dr. Jessilyn Dunn is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Biostatistics & Bioinformatics at Duke University. Her primary areas of research focus on biomedical data science and mobile health; her work includes wearable sensor, electronic health records, and multi-omics integration and digital biomarker discovery. Dr. Dunn is the Director of the BIG IDEAs Laboratory, whose goal is to detect, treat, and prevent chronic and acute diseases through digital health innovation. She is also currently PI of the CovIdentify study to detect and monitor COVID-19 using mobile health technologies. Dr. Dunn was a NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Georgia Tech and Emory, as well as a visiting scholar at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cardiovascular Research Institute in Madrid, Spain.

Dr. Derek Janssens PhD is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Dr. Steven Henikoff in the Basic Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. After completing his graduate thesis at the University of Michigan, Derek joined the Henikoff lab in 2017 and has been developing novel chromatin profiling tools to understand the epigenetic heterogeneity of cancer. Both the automated CUT&RUN and CUT&Tag platforms Derek developed are currently available as core services through the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute. More recently, Derek has been optimizing CUT&Tag for single cell applications and is working to increase the number of single cells profiled in each experiment, while minimizing the cost.

Diana Azzam, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Florida International University. She has a PhD in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology from the University of Miami, Florida. Her lab focuses on implementing functional precision medicine approaches in clinical trials to improve treatment outcomes of cancer patients. Her research also investigates cancer stem cells and their role in therapy resistance and metastasis.

Alice Soragni, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, a member of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and of the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute. She has a Bachelor and Master of Science cum Laude from the University of Bologna, Italy and a PhD from the ETH of Zuerich, Switzerland. Her laboratory in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at UCLA couples basic research into mechanisms of disease to the development of novel therapeutic strategies. Her expertise lies in the development of tumor organoid models to investigate the biology of rare tumors and perform screenings for functional precision medicine applications.

Thomas P. Conrads, PhD is the Director of Women’s Health Research in the Inova Health System and the affiliated Women’s Health Integrated Research Center in Northern Virginia. He is also the Chief Scientific Officer of the Department of Defense Gynecologic Cancer Center of Excellence. His efforts are focused on developing and applying cutting-edge applications and workflows in proteomics for cohort-scale analysis of clinically derived specimens. The overarching goals of these efforts are toward identifying and validating protein biomarkers and surrogates for enhanced cancer patient management through improved early detection, patient stratification, and monitoring for therapeutic efficacy, outcome and recurrence.

René received his PhD in Biology from the Leiden University Medical Center on a molecular study of DNA damage repair. He subsequently moved to University Medical Center Utrecht to do his Post Doc studying Ras/Rap cancer signaling. During this period, he started working with adult stem cell derived Organoid Technology and developed the first drug screens together with the group of Hans Clevers. He continued this work in the newly formed ‘Hubrecht Organoid Technology’ (HUB) where he became responsible for development of new assays and high throughput screening.

"Magdalena Kasendra is the Director of Research and Development at the Center for Stem Cell & Organoid Medicine (CuSTOM). She leads a multifaceted effort to translate breakthrough discoveries in stem cell biology and organ development into innovative organoid-based solutions to address unmet medical needs. These include organoid-based platforms enabling discovery and development of safer and more efficient drugs, precision medicine applications and organoid-based tissue replacement therapies.

Prior to joining CuSTOM’s leadership team, she managed the multidisciplinary team responsible for developing, translating and commercializing Organs-on-Chips technology at Emulate Inc., a spin-off from Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. This research has led to major advances in bioengineering of intestinal tissue by combining microchip manufacturing methods and organoid technology and demonstrated the utility of this platform in drug development, disease modeling and precision medicine. 
Dr. Kasendra’s career spans industry, academia and the start-up world. She performed her PhD project at Novartis Vaccines and Development, which was followed by post-doctoral research fellowship at the Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. She has authored numerous publications and patents."

Heather Colvan is the cofounder and Director of Operations for Simplicis. Simplicis provides expert sample management solutions focused on data and hardware integration for automated pharmaceutical laboratories.

For the past 12 years Heather has been focused on delivering problem specific solutions to Simplicis's clients with a dedication to data management.  Prior to Simplicis Heather worked in healthcare revenue cycle management implementing and integrating claims inventory management solutions.

Heather is an advocate for women in computer science and gladly volunteers her time to facilitate a Girls Who Code club at her son's school.

Shawnnah Monterrey, MBA, CEO of BeanStock Ventures, is a domain expert with over 20 years of experience in the medical industry with specific emphasis on guiding innovative products to market.  Shawnnah has a passion for innovation in medical devices, life sciences and biotechnology. As the CEO, she continues to provide thought leadership in guiding the innovation of products and services that benefit the market and healthcare.

Maya is a rising Junior with a never ceasing curiosity for the world around her. She was the team captain and programming lead on her FTC robotics team, and is currently their youth mentor. She also helped lead the team’s outreach efforts in hopes of inspiring the next generation of coders and engineers. Maya has experience with android app development, computer vision, and machine learning. As Maya graduates High School and goes to college, she is always exploring every possible opportunity to learn and grow as both an engineer and a person.

Debbie Bowers, VP of Commercial Development and Board Member at BioSoft Integrators; WomXn of SLAS Co-Chair. 26 years supporting global Life Science customers through automation consultation, applications development and first in class customer care. An industrial engineer; an MBA with an emphasis in Global Marketing; and certification in Contract Law. Holistic diversity with all scientific application areas with knowledge of global best practices used in laboratories around the world. Joined BioDot in November 2020. From 2017 to 2020, as President and CCO, Debbie led the commercial strategy for BioSoft Integrators.  BioSoft offers Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) to life science, clinical and manufacturing operation laboratories & is the preferred provider of High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions for PacBio customers.  Through Debbie's leadership from 2014 to 2017 as VP of Robotic Operations at Hamilton Robotics, her team of 250+ outperformed Industry Growth Targets YoY in selling automated liquid handling systems, while vaulting industry partnerships with the top 20 Life Science innovators, and launched 20+ new products to clinical and RUO customers. 2013/2014, Bowers was VP of Business Development at Invetech, a Danaher company, who specialized in product development for clinical diagnostics, life science and consumer product companies like Haemonetics, Coca Cola and Bio-Rad.  2000 thru 2012, Debbie acquired in-depth knowledge in all areas of liquid handling automation, detection, automated sample storage and retrieval systems and the consumables and modules required to automate complete workflows for life science applications in her many roles at Tecan US.  While at Tecan, she was responsible for sales, marketing, applications, custom solutions, product development and worked with every facet of customer type and scientific application. Early engineering, project management and technical sales roles provided Debbie with expertise in micro and macro filtration when working for Pall Gelman Sciences and Baker Hughes Process Equipment Company.

Dr. Samuel Oliveira is a Post-doc at the CIDAR lab (cidarlab.org) and the Research Lead of the DAMP Lab (damplab.org), led by Prof. Doug Densmore at Boston University. Samuel has a background in Bioengineering, Microfluidics, Microscopy, and Lab Automation. At the CIDAR lab, his research is focused on automating the design and fabrication of micro-environments to study the dynamics of intercellular communication and multicellular circuits in synthetic bacterial communities. At the DAMP Lab, he is responsible for supervising novel hardware, software, and wetware projects and managing off-the-shelf services and customer projects involving the design and assembly of synthetic genetic constructs using automated platforms.

Dr. Deepak Balaji Thimiri Govindaraj is a Centre Manager of CSIR Synthetic Biology and Precision Medicine Centre. Deepak Balaji is a chemical engineer by training and has worked on nanobiotechnology, industrial synthetic biology and drug screening for precision medicine. 

During his PhD in KU Leuven Belgium, Deepak worked on Nanobiotechnology methods for cell surface proteomics. The work resulted in a Patent and sold as a product in a spin-out company. Deepak then went to EMBL for a Marie Curie EIPOD Fellow where he designed synthetic baculovirus genome for recombinant protein expression. As a Senior Scientist at Oslo University hospital Norway,  Deepak established the drug sensitivity screening platform for blood cancer precision medicine.  Deepak has published 32 research papers, 3 granted patents, 25 conference proceedings and book chapters. Deepak has published in high impact journal such as Molecular Systems Biology, Blood, Nanoconvergence and Leukemia.

Neil is co-founder and Managing Director of Ziath.  Since 1994, Neil has experience with a range of companies; GlaxoSmithKline; Cambridge Antibody Technology, Cenix Bioscience GmbH and the Max Planck Institute of Cell Biology and Genomics. Within these companies Neil has been responsible for the development, maintenance and implementation of laboratory automation and associated software with a focus on process control and information management.

Neil has served on the board of the European Laboratory Robotics Interest Group (ELRIG) in both Germany and the UK. He was the informatics chair for Lab Automation 2009, has edited for the Journal for the Association for Laboratory Automation and also served on the board of The Journal for Laboratory Automation. Neil has a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and a Master’s degree in Computer Science.

Maciej Grajewski studied Biotechnology at Poznań University of Life Sciences. After graduation, he moved to Groningen for his PhD studies on microfluidic cell cultures and optical real-time cell monitoring. This work was performed with professor Verpoorte, in the Pharmaceutical Analysis group. It was also part of a larger EU collaborative network (LiPhos), which aimed to design, develop and test an optical tool for endothelial cell behaviour. Currently, Maciej’s interests revolve around real-time monitoring systems for diagnostic and environmental purposes.

Dr Adam Stoten is SVP Academic Partnerships at Evotec SE, a global multi-modality drug discovery and development company, where he is responsible for creating new international BRIDGE partnerships to accelerate the translation of academic science into new therapeutics. Prior to Evotec, Dr Stoten was Chief Operating Officer and board director at Oxford University Innovation Ltd (OUI). While at OUI he was a member of the team that negotiated the Oxford COVID vaccine partnership with AstraZeneca, was a founding director of Vaccitech Ltd and EvOx Therapeutics Ltd and was a co-architect of Evotec's first BRIDGE; LAB282. Between 2010 and 2013 Dr Stoten worked as Deputy General Manager for a joint venture between the University of Oxford and Emergent BioSolutions Inc, developing a next generation TB vaccine. Prior to this Dr Stoten worked in healthcare consulting and then in increasingly senior commercialisation roles at Isis Innovation. Dr Stoten also serves as a board member of both PraxisAuril, the UK professional association for knowledge exchange practitioners, and of ATTP, the body that maintains internationally recognised standards for the knowledge and technology transfer profession.

Life Sciences investor from the Netherlands.

I work at a regional investment fund based out of the Netherlands that invests across several domains, amongst others life sciences & health, in the pre-seed and series A stages. My personal expertise lies within the early stage, life sciences and high- and deeptech domain. 

Maurizo Aiello, CEO of React4life with international experience in company growth, execution, innovation. Specialties are: strategic vision and ability to create innovation, starting from basic and applied research and reaching the market. At present, he launched 3 startups born from basic research.

He holds a physics degree in nuclear physics in 1994. He has been Technologist at National Research Council of Italy since 2001 and Professor at the University of Genoa.
From 2014 to 2020 Aiello was Italian delegate for European Commission Horizon 2020 ""Secure Societies"" program; board member in different companies and institution, and scientific councils: among them former president of the SIIT Technology District, CEO of Cleis Security, board member at Italian Institute of Communications and others.
Author of more than 60 articles in international journals, international conferences, white papers; research activity in bioengineering, cybersecurity and infrastructure management. Hacker, with competences in development of cyberattacks and cyberweapons to IoT devices and networking infrastructure. Author of “slowdroid” denial of service attack.
Since 2017 Maurizio Aiello is founder and CEO of React4life s.r.l., an Italian biotech company that develops organ on chip technologies for accelerating the human disease understanding and novel personalized therapies development; React4life has won several international awards and projects, and recently the Innovation Radar award from European Commission as best Health technology 2021. 

Leveraging my experience, qualifications, and passion for bioengineering & mechanical design I can accelerate innovative ideas to products for real world applications. I have a talent for linking early stage technologies to address specific market needs and have experience in growing tech platforms from initial concept to commercialization, with unique expertise in micro/nanotechnologies. In 2015, I founded Ferrologix based on my doctoral work at UCLA and currently serve as Chief Operating Officer where I oversee technical development and management of technical staff. Our company mission and vision is to use cutting edge magnetic nanotechnology to accelerate & scale emerging diagnostics & therapeutics.

Amel Bendali, PhD, is the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of Inorevia, a Paris-based startup providing new tools for life science research and diagnostics.

After graduating as an engineer in Physics and Biotechnologies, she joined the Vision Institute in Paris to participate in an ambitious research project to develop retinal prosthetic implantable devices, helping to restore functional vision to blind patients. Once graduated with a PhD in Neurosciences, she decided to move to microfluidics and microsystems, and joined Dr JL Viovy's lab at Curie Institute in Paris. After developing technologies based on microfluidics and magnetic particles, she co-founded Inorevia with Julien Autebert, CEO and CTO, and 3 researchers from CNRS who invented the technologies.
Since the creation of Inorevia in 2016, Amel has gained extensive experience in entrepreneurship, market approach for innovation, and taking patents and invention to meet market needs and solving actual users challenges.

Inorevia's vision is to unlock next-generation life science solutions, by combining highly efficient miniaturization and full automation to support reasearchers and clinicians dealing with complex workflows and challenging samples.

Elizabeth Sharlow is a Professor of Research in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Virginia. She is currently developing high content imaging assays using iPSC-derived neurons and iNeurons  from healthy and Alzheimer's disease patients. She has worked in the drug discovery field for over 20 years in academia and in industry.

Ishita Mili is a Bengali American Choreographer, Director of IMGE Dance LLC, and US Sales Associate for acCELLerate. After extensively training in Indian classical, folk, and hip hop dance in NJ, Ishita founded to use her cultural roots to share global stories with artists of diverse backgrounds. IMGE has since been highlighted at Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, New Victory Theater, Seattle International Dance Festival. Ishita was also featured in Dance Informa and Pulse Magazine UK as a rising South Asian artist, and was most recently Co-Choreographer of "HAIR" The American Rock Musical at Asolo Repertory Theater. Ishita also holds a BS in Chemistry and a Masters of Business and Science in Drug Discovery and Development, and has been working with acCELLerate since 2018 to expand and support the use of Assay Ready Cells transatlantically.

Lab automation engineer and molecular biologist specialized in scaling, development, and teams. Extensive experience with liquid handlers and integrated workcells in R&D and factory settings.

I teach 3D printing, am a certified rescue SCUBA diver, and am passionate about D&I programs.

R&D molecular diagnostics professional, 10+ years of experience, with drive for results, known for high productivity and delivering products, from concept through commercialization, to market in time. Extensive
knowledge of molecular biology high throughput laboratory systems and CLIA lab operations, analytical assay validation and clinical studies to supporting clinical utility for LDTs. Enthusiastic about learning and enabling tools and solutions contributing to the improvement of human health.

Ashley J. Wallace, Ph.D. is the Assistant Director of Education and Outreach for the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM), an NSF-funded center for materials science research, at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the immediate past Diversity and Education Coordinator for the Center for Engineering MechanoBiology (CEMB), an NSF-funded science and technology center.

Dr. Wallace obtained a BS in Chemistry from Southern University and A&M College (SUBR) and her doctoral degree from the Department of Chemistry at THE Ohio State University (OSU), where she designed self-assembling amphiphilic materials for early detection of cancer tumors via MRI under the supervision of Dr. Joshua Goldberger. Upon completing her doctoral program, she realized her desire to combine her love for science with general education. In her current position, Dr. Wallace’s scientific repertoire and commitment to developing a new generation of scientific leaders for an ever-evolving workforce is shown through managing a well-versed portfolio of programs. She is also heavily involved in the development and implementation of policies that support diversity initiatives and fosters a culturally inclusive scientific community.

Aiming to promote and increase public awareness of STEM relevance in society to communities that are disproportionally underserved, Dr. Wallace has held a number of leadership roles as an active member of the National Society of Black Engineers Greater Philadelphia Professionals (NSBE GPP) Chapter and the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE). In 2020, she successfully organized NOBCChE’s first all-virtual national conference, and was awarded the 2020 NOBCChE Presidential Award, recognizing her for her leadership as an advocate for underrepresented communities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In 2021, Dr. Wallace was elected to be serve NOBCChE as an Executive Board Member.

Peter E. Wais, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Residence, Department of Neurology, UCSF

After a career in industry, which culminated as chief executive for companies producing basic sheet steel and pure chocolate, I redirected my energy and curiosity toward basic research in the cognitive neuroscience of long-term memory. I made the transition from leadership of an industrial organization to graduate school at UCSD, where I developed my thesis in cognitive neuroscience about the roles of the hippocampus in recognition memory.

My current research focus involves a translational neuroscience approach in a cognitive training intervention that targets sustained improvement in capabilities for long-term memory (LTM) and cognitive control. My goal in this research is to develop an effective, practically useful cognitive intervention that remediates high-fidelity LTM capabilities in older adults diminished by mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

Tim Ruckh is an Associate Director in AstraZeneca's R&D Digital Health group. In his role he supports clinical stage drug programs with aspects of their digital strategy that focus on remote clinical data collection using devices and wearable sensors. Tim's academic training was in Mechanical (B.S, M.S) and Biomedical (Ph.D) Engineering, and he was a postdoc at Massachusetts General Hospital and Northeastern University before joining the private sector at Google [X], later becoming Verily Life Sciences, and AstraZeneca. His current focus is on developing and implementing digital health technologies to collect key clinical trial endpoint data in order to increase efficiency in clinical development.

She received in 2005 the Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the University of Genoa, Italy.

Since 2010 Silvia Scaglione is permanent Researcher at National council of Research (CNR).

She is founder and chief scientist of React4life s.r.l., an innovative biotech company that develops organ on chip technologies for accelerating the human disease understanding and novel personalized therapies development; React4life has won several international awards and projects, such as H2020 SME Instrument Phase 1, seal of Excellence SME phase 2, Innovation Radar (2021) as best Health technology.
Scaglione is author of more than 80 international peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, author of 7 patents.

Rachel Chasse is a Group Lead, Digital Operations & Qualifications at AbbVie. Previously, she was the founding Director of Innovation at the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe). At DiMe, she curated scientific content, led patient engagement and equity initiatives, and developed content for the Playbook, the essential industry guide for developing successful digital clinical measures. Prior, she supported the digital clinical team at MindMedicine, developing successful digital, remote data capture paradigms supporting psychadelic drug development. Before that, she was in the Digital Medicine group at Pfizer exploring innovative technological approaches to drug development, including developing the industry-first on-site lab using digital medicine tools (wearables, ambient sensors, etc). Rachel is based in Chicago, USA.

Daniel has more than 20 years of experience in the biopharma industry, working across multiple functional disciplines, including phenotypic assay development, high-throughput screening, and software engineering. Before Strateos, he was a Research Investigator at Novartis (GNF) and led multiple drug discovery campaigns. His research focused on developing novel phenotypic assays across various indications. Daniel received a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of California at Davis and a Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Charles Fracchia is the founder of BioBright, a Boston-based company that automates the secure data collection and analysis from laboratory and biomanufacturing environments. BioBright was initially funded by DARPA to create DarwinSync: the first -and continues to be the only- scalable and end-to-end encrypted data collection and analytics system for the life sciences market.

Mr. Fracchia is also the Co-Founder of BIO-ISAC, an international organization that addresses threats unique to the bioeconomy and enables coordination among stakeholders to facilitate a robust and secure industry.

Charles received his graduate education between the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Medical School and obtained his bachelor’s degree from Imperial College London. Charles gained critical experience from his work at IBM Research and Ginkgo Bioworks where he was respectively the first synthetic biologist and first full-time person outside of the founding team. He has received a number of awards including MIT Technology Review’s 35 under 35, IBM PhD fellowships and the Extraordinary Minds fellowship.
In 2021, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) named Charles Fracchia to its Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group.

A successful Computational Biology researcher will have a strong understanding of computational techniques and the biological processes and techniques underlying the development of the data they are analyzing. In the courses Joshua teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, students generate experimental data in wet-lab experiments and learn to apply computational techniques for the analysis of those data. Joshua constantly looks for ways to make our course offerings as modern as possible in both the wet-lab and computational techniques learned by students. At times, this has included modernizing classic labs or generating new modules based on novel research. He teaches courses for high school students, undergraduates, and graduate students (M.S. and Ph.D.).

He was also integral in the design and setup of the Automation Lab used by the M.S. Automated Science program at Carnegie Mellon University.

Brian joined HighRes in March 2014 as the head of sales and marketing. In his eight years with the company, he and his team built a dynamic global sales, marketing, applications and service/support organization spanning the globe. Brian has more than 20 years experience selling, marketing, demonstrating, breaking, servicing lab automation solution. The solutions range from basic liquid handling workstations to enterprise level modular, mobile robotic automation data factories.

Toby Blackburn serves as the Head of BD and Strategy at Emerald Cloud Lab (ECL), a physical laboratory which scientists can access remotely via the internet that allows them to run, analyze, and interpret experiments without setting foot in the lab. He holds an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from North Carolina State University.

David R. Walt is the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is a Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, Associate Member at the Broad Institute, and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. Dr. Walt is co-Director of the Mass General Brigham Center for COVID Innovation. Dr. Walt is the Scientific Founder of Illumina Inc., Quanterix Corp., and has co-founded multiple other life sciences startups including Ultivue, Inc., Arbor Biotechnologies, Sherlock Biosciences, Vizgen, Inc., and Torus Biosciences . He has received numerous national and international awards and honors for his fundamental and applied work in the field of optical microwell arrays and single molecules. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and is inducted in the US National Inventors Hall of Fame.

RAVEN SOLOMON is a global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion thought leader and nationally recognized keynote speaker who helps organizations get future-ready by understanding generations, racial equity, and their intersection.

Raven's mission is simple-- to solve for racial inequity by breaking down generational and racial barriers in the workplace, replacing them with empathy and synergy that fosters productive working relationships, drives business results, and prepares organizations to compete in the not-so-distant future.

She is the author of the 2019 release Leading Your Parents: 25 Rules to Effective Multigenerational Leadership for Millennials and Gen Z, where she shares leadership principles and practical advice for young professionals seeking to transition into leadership positions in today’s diverse workplace, and the founder of the Charlotte-based Center for Next Generation Leadership and Professional Development, a startup focused on providing softskill development to the leaders of tomorrow. In her spare time, Raven consults with Franklin Covey, the world leader in leadership development, in the area of unconscious bias and is the host of The Generational View Podcast.

Raven has helped tens of thousands, from podiums around the world, close the gaps inside of dozens of industry-leading companies, and create sustainable cultural change. She’s also consulted with household brands in the areas of generational diversity & inclusion and early talent development and retention. As the valedictorian of her college graduating class and one of the youngest-ever executives in the Fortune 50 company with which she spent nearly a decade, she has always shown that her approach to leading and influencing people yields results.

Carolyn Bertozzi is the Baker Family Director of Stanford ChEM-H and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University. She is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research focuses on profiling changes in cell surface glycosylation associated with cancer, inflammation and infection, and exploiting this information for development of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, most recently in the area of immuno-oncology. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also has been awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Chemistry for the Future Solvay Prize, among many others.