Senior Principal Scientist & Regulatory Liaison, In vitro Diagnostics & Companion Diagnostics
Brian has been guiding regulatory strategies in precision medicine for over 15 years, specializing in the coordination between drug development and IVD development teams - firstly at AstraZeneca and presently as the leader of a small group of CDx regulatory scientists within Merck.

Director, Molecular Diagnostics, & Clinical Chemistry/Immunology, Division of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
Dr. Gyorgy Abel is the Director of Molecular Diagnostics, Clinical Chemistry/Immunology, and Point of Care Testing at the Lahey Hospital & Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts. He also serves as Instructor in Pathology, Part-time, at Harvard Medical School. Gyorgy received his MD and a PhD in immunology in Hungary, completed post-doctoral fellowship at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, U.S., and received board certifications in Clinical Pathology and Molecular Diagnostics. He made significant contributions to hepatitis C virus research by demonstrating the use of LDL receptor by the virus as a port of entry into hepatocytes. His professional interests include precision medicine and point of care testing. Gyorgy has held office in professional organizations such as the College of American Pathologists, the American Association of Immunologists, and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, and currently he is President-Elect of the Academy of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. He is an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, U.K. He authored or co-authored 65 publications and gave over 100 scientific presentations nationally and internationally.

President
Edward Abrahams, PhD, is President of the Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC). Representing a broad spectrum of academic, industrial, patient, provider and payer communities, PMC seeks to advance the understanding and adoption of personalized medicine concepts and products for the benefit of patients. It has grown from its original 18 founding members in November 2004 to over 160 today. Previously he was Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Association, where he spearheaded the successful effort that led to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s investment of $200 million to commercialize biotechnology in the state. Earlier he had been Assistant Vice President for Federal Relations at the University of Pennsylvania and held a senior administrative position at Brown University. Dr. Abrahams worked for seven years for the U.S. Congress, including as a legislative assistant to Senator Lloyd Bentsen, an economist for the Joint Economic Committee under the chairmanship of Representative Lee Hamilton, and as an AAAS Congressional Fellow for the House Committee on the Interior.

CSO
Dr. Adams is Chief Scientific Officer of Sesen Bio, a clinical stage company developing antibody-toxin fusion proteins for the treatment of cancer. In this role he is responsible for guiding the development of the company’s pipeline assets. Before moving to biotech, Dr. Adams was the Director of Biological Research and Therapeutics and previously co-led the Developmental Therapeutics Program at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, an NCI designated comprehensive cancer center in Philadelphia. Dr. Adams is an immunologist with over 30 years of experience in developing antibody-based agents for the treatment and detection of cancer. He received a PhD in Immunology from the University of California at Davis in 1991. He joined Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia where he led a laboratory focused on developing antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates for the treatment of breast, ovarian and renal cancer. Dr. Adams serves on the Editorial Boards of Cancer Immunology Research, MAbs and Cancer Biotherapy & Radiopharmaceuticals. He has served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of a number of biotechnology companies, including Endo Pharmaceuticals, Symphogen, Avipep, Viventia Bio, AvidBiologics, Xerion, Fabrus, Integral Molecular and YM Biosciences.

Senior Fellow & Senior Director, Computational Biology, RD Target Sciences
Pankaj Agarwal is a GSK Senior Fellow and Senior Scientific Director at GSK. Since1996, he has been on a quest to discover drugs, targets and indications using data driven methods, and embed quantitative thinking across pharmaceutical R&D. He has published methods and use cases for gene set enrichment, literature analysis, network analysis, machine learning, and connectivity map. He has done strategic work on evaluating innovation in industry pipelines and identifying disease areas for investment. He has led efforts on systematic drug repurposing and published methodology. Pankaj obtained a B. Tech. in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT, Delhi, PhD in Computer Science from the Courant Institute, New York University. He was one of the founding members and directors of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).

Director, Renaissance Computing Institute; Professor, Department of Computer Science
Dr. Stan Ahalt serves as the Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As Director, he leads a team of research scientists, software and network engineers, data science specialists, and visualization experts who work closely with faculty research teams at UNC, Duke, NC State and other partners across the country. RENCI’s role is to provide enabling cyberinfrastructure to these research collaborations, which often means working on the challenges of data management, sharing, integration, and security. Dr. Ahalt is also a professor in the UNC Computer Science Department and an Associate Director at the Biomedical Informatics Service of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS), UNC’s CTSA award; in this role, Dr. Ahalt leverages the expertise and resources of RENCI to foster clinical and translational research across the UNC campus.

CEO
Dr. Tino Alavie is the President and CEO of Qvella. Tino has the primary responsibility of leading the company’s full range of Research and Development initiatives. Prior to founding Qvella, he was founder, CEO and executive chairman of NOVX Systems, Inc., a medical device company that focuses on physician productivity tools, including diagnostic solutions for point of care testing and Electronic Medical Records. He was also co-founder and President of ElectroPhotonics Corporation, leading it through rapid expansion and acquisition by E-TEK Dynamics. Tino has served as a technical advisor and board member for a number of technology companies. He is a seminar leader and guest lecturer with the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto. He is on the Dean’s Advisory Board for the School of Science and Engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology. Tino has authored more than 50 journal articles and conference papers.

Director, Laboratory of Rare Human Circulating Cells (LCCRH), Pathology and Onco-Biology Department
Dr. Catherine Alix-Panabières received her PhD degree in 1998 at the Institute of Virology, University Louis Pasteur, in Strasbourg in France. In 1999, she moved to Montpellier where she did a postdoctoral research in the Department of Immuno-Virology of the University Medical Centre of Montpellier, France. During this last decade, Dr Alix-Panabières has focused on optimizing new techniques of enrichment and detection of viable disseminating tumor cells in patients with solid tumors. She is the expert for the EPISPOT technology that is used to detect viable tumor cells in the peripheral blood and the bone marrow of patients with breast, prostate, colon, head & neck cancer and melanoma. In 2010, she achieved getting a permanent position at the Hospital and at the Faculty of Medicine of Montpellier (MCU-PH), a wonderful mixture of giving teaching lessons to medical students on Cancer Biology in combination of developing this field of tumor cell dissemination at the hospital for the cancer patients, leading strongly translational clinical research. As an associate professor, she recently became the new director of the Laboratory of Rare Human Circulating Cells (LCCRH) in the Department of Cell & Tissue Biopathology of tumors. In this unique platform LCCRH, they isolate, detect and characterize circulating tumor cells using combinations of the EPISPOT assay, the CellSearch® system (Janssen), the flow cytometry, the CellCollector (GILUPI), the molecular biology (AmpliSpeed device), the Parsortix system and the DEPArray (Silicon Biosystem) for single cell sorting. She has authored or co-authored >50 scientific publications in this field during the last years, including 10 book chapters and she is part of two big European projects: CTC-SCAN (Transcan project) and CANCER-ID (IMI project). After she got the Scientific Prize given by the Region Languedoc-Roussillon in 2008, it was a great honor for her to receive the Gallet et Breton Cancer Prize, the highest honor conferred by the French Academy of Medicine in November 2012.

Associate Professor of Medicine, Divisions of Oncology & Hematology
I am a hematologist and oncologist and physician-scientist who leads a group at Stanford that is focused on developing and applying tools for cancer systems biology. We have a special interest in cancer genomics and tumor immunology as relates to unraveling clinically relevant heterogeneity in patients with diverse malignancies, by using tools to study their tumors and blood specimens. I have a history of research and accomplishments in cancer genomics, beginning with the original development of microarray gene expression profiling for cancer classification starting with lymphomas [1], and advancing to multiple tumor types. My group helped develop techniques for ultra- sensitive and non-invasive detection of tumor-derived cell-free DNA (CAPP-Seq) [2,3], and for computational deconvolution of gene expression data for deciphering cellular heterogeneity in tumors, including immune infiltration (CIBERSORT) [4]. My group's translational research effort is focused on attaining a more sophisticated understanding of the initiation, maintenance, and progression of tumors and their response to therapy toward improving current treatment strategies. In this effort, we employ tools from functional genomics, computational biology, molecular genetics, and mouse models. Clinically, I am a practicing medical oncologist specializing in the care of patients with lymphomas. My clinical research is focused on diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive markers and on translating discoveries from the laboratory to the clinic.

Professor and Chair, Pathology
Timothy Craig Allen, MD, JD, obtained his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in 1984 and completed his residency in anatomic and clinical pathology, subsequently serving on the faculty of Baylor College of Medicine until 1995. He then attended the University of Chicago Law School and graduated with the degree of Doctor of Law with Honors in 1998, subsequently practicing health care law and litigation. Dr. Allen completed a 2-year fellowship in pulmonary pathology in the Texas Medical Center in 2004. He was a Professor of Pathology and Director of Anatomic Pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. In January 2018, Dr. Allen became the Chair of the Pathology department at University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. Dr. Allen is certified by the American Board of Pathology in anatomic and clinical pathology, with added qualification in cytopathology. He is an associate editor of the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Dr. Allen is the Immediate Past- President of the Pulmonary Pathology Society and President of the Texas Society of Pathology. He is Governor of the College of American Pathologists Board of Governors, and is chair, vice-chair, or member of several CAP Councils and Committees. He has authored and coauthored numerous articles and book chapters on pulmonary pathology and medicolegal issues and has coauthored and co-edited several books on pulmonary pathology. Dr. Allen is series coeditor of the Advances in Surgical Pathology series.

Regional Genetic Services Administrator
Ms. Alvarado is a board certified and licensed genetic counselor with over 20 years of experience in clinical genetics. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Anthropology and Biology from Revelle College at UC San Diego, and her Master’s Degree in Genetic Counseling from UC Irvine. In her previous role she was Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine, and served as the genetic counselor for the USC Consortium of the Collaborative Family Registries for Colorectal Cancer Studies, a large multi-center colorectal cancer family registry. In 2004 she became the regional administrator for clinical genetic services at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California. In her current role she leads a dedicated team of clinical genetics providers serving a population of over 4.6 million members at 14 medical centers throughout Southern California. She has led the planning and implementation of numerous innovations in clinical genetics and care delivery services, including first-trimester prenatal screening, microarray testing for children with developmental delay and dysmorphic features, cell-free fetal DNA testing for prenatal screening, universal Lynch syndrome screening, multi-gene panel testing and whole exome testing, and implementation of alternative care delivery models. Her passion for and expertise in the field of cancer genetics led her to develop and manage a large clinical cancer genetic testing database which currently houses hereditary cancer testing data going back to 1997. She has been a co-investigator along with researchers at Kaiser Permanente Southern California on the design, implementation and analysis of clinical cancer genetics research projects. Ms. Alvarado has been interviewed by print, radio and television media in English and Spanish on various topics in genetics, and has been a presenter at national and international genetics conferences.

R&D Director
Dr. Ryan Amelon specializes in automated biomedical image analysis by aligning artificial intelligence solutions with existing medical knowledge. He graduated with a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Iowa in 2012 studying the mechanics of lung motion in CT scans. He started his career at IDx in 2013 and was promoted to Director of Research and Development in 2014. During his time at the company, Ryan has played an instrumental role in developing its flagship product IDx-DR, a system that automatically detects diabetic retinopathy in retinal images. Over a half-dozen deep learning algorithms that Ryan created have been incorporated into the product. IDx-DR is currently being used to screen thousands of patients each year in Europe. In April of 2018, IDx-DR received FDA clearance as the first fully-autonomous diagnostic system approved for use without specialist oversight.

Program Mgr, R&D
Orly Ardon, PhD MBA is heading the development of novel computer assisted diagnostic tools and the expansion of digital pathology collaborative initiatives at ARUP Laboratories, a national reference lab in Salt Lake City, Utah. Orly has over thirty years of academic and life science industry experience that, Includes laboratory research in microbiology, genetics, biochemistry, immunology and genomics. Orly’s business experience, Includes US and global healthcare market research, budget and contract negotiations, team building and the development of innovative solutions to complex problems. Orly has BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Microbiology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and postdoctoral training in cell biology and virology at the University of Utah. Orly joined the R&D Institute at ARUP Laboratories in 2007, where she managed a medical genetics lab and developed new commercial diagnostic tests for the biochemical genetics and molecular genetics labs at ARUP. After graduating from the Executive MBA program at the University of Utah, Orly joined the Business Development group at ARUP where she worked as an R&D market research manager for two years. In her current R&D management role, Orly combines her extensive scientific and business experience to identify and oversee the development of new machine learning based digital imaging and automation tools for state-of-the-art clinical operations and for improved patient care. Orly has authored 24 peer-reviewed manuscripts and a book chapter (cited more than 1,600 times in scientific literature).

President & CEO
Dr. Arlen is the company’s President, CEO and Chief Medical Officer. Prior to joining Precision Biologics, Inc., he served as President, CEO, and Chief Medical Officer at Neogenix Oncology, Inc. Dr. Arlen spent 11 years at the National Cancer Institute, USA, most recently as the Director of the Clinical Research Group for the Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Oncology. At the NCI, Dr. Arlen focused on the development of a programmatic approach to vaccine clinical trials conducted at the NCI as well as at numerous other Cancer Centers throughout the U.S. During his tenure at the NCI, Dr. Arlen was the Principal Investigator and/or Associate Investigator on numerous clinical trials involving the use of cancer vaccines and other immunostimulatory molecules. Dr. Arlen remains on the clinical staff at both the NCI Clinical Center as well as the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. He has authored or co-authored over 100 peer reviewed manuscripts in internationally known scientific and medical journals. Dr. Arlen received an NIH Award of Merit for major contributions to the field of cancer immunotherapy in 2003. He is a board-certified medical oncologist and received his BA from Emory University and his MD from Medical College of Georgia, School of Medicine.

Senior Business Development Specialist
Larry Atupem is the Sr. Business development specialist at Zeon Specialty materials with responsibility for development and marketing of Cyclic Olefin Polymer business in North America. He has over decade of experience in multiple industries spanning from pharmaceutical science, thermal packaging, and thermoplastics. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical & Biological Engineering from Tufts University along with management business coursework from Boston University.

Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine and Core Faculty, Former BCBS and Medicare Medical Director
Dr. Wade Aubry is Senior Medical Advisor for Navigant Consulting, Scientific Advisor for Precision Health Economics, and Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine (core faculty) at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF. He is also a practicing endocrinologist and former hospital Chief of Staff. Previously, he was National Medical Consultant and Chairman of the BCBSA TEC Medical Advisory Panel and Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for Blue Shield of California. As a former BCBS and Medicare medical director, he has extensive experience making coverage decisions and has also worked with numerous diagnostics companies as a consultant. Dr. Aubry received his B.S. degree Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University, his MD degree from the UCLA School of Medicine, and his postgraduate training from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He has served on numerous national health care advisory committees, including NIH committees on clinical trials and managed care, various IOM committees and roundtables on evidence-based medicine, the AHRQ Effective Health Care Program Stakeholder Group on comparative effectiveness research, and two terms on the CMS Medicare Evidence Development & Coverage Advisory Committee. Currently, he serves on the NCQA Geriatrics Measurement Advisory Panel, the CTAF Advisory Board (now an ICER program), and the Editorial Board of eGEMS, an online open source journal for electronic data methods in comparative effectiveness research. Dr. Aubry has taught on medical technology and health policy at UCSF, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, has lectured internationally, and has published numerous articles on medical technology and medical management. He is also co-author of a comprehensive case study of a failed treatment for breast cancer which led to reforms in the health insurance and managed care industry, such as coverage of clinical trials, coverage with evidence development (CED), and independent medical review (IMR) of coverage denials. Entitled False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer (Oxford University Press 2007), the book is considered the definitive resource on the subject.

Director, Companion Diagnostics
Deepti Aurora-Garg is the Director of Companion Diagnostics at Merck and Co. since2014. She has been instrumental in development of biomarkers and companion diagnostics in oncology and other therapeutic areas. She has been leading the companion diagnostic efforts in support of Merck’s anti-PD1 therapy Keytruda across various tumor types on immunohistochemisty and next generation sequencing platforms. Prior to joining Merck, Deepti served as Director of Product Development at Immucor, a market leader in Transfusion and Transplantation diagnostics. In her role, she was responsible for developing and commercializing molecular diagnostic assays for minor blood group antigens. She also has experience developing multiplex immunoassays for and molecular assays for infectious diseases and oncology at Genprobe and Trovagene. Through her career, she has helped develop, seek regulatory approvals and commercialize several IVD products. Deepti received her PhD in Molecular Biology and Immunology from Indiana State University and her post-doctoral training from Children’s Hospital Boston an affiliate of Harvard Medical School working with Dr. Anna Aldovini in the Department of Infectious diseases on development of vaccination strategies for HIV/AIDS.

Director, Clinical Microbiology Operations
Esther Babady, PhD, is the Director of Clinical Operations for the Microbiology Laboratory Service, Director of the CPEP Clinical Microbiology Fellowship program and an associate professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer (MSKCC) in New York City. She received her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and completed a post-doctoral CPEP fellowship in Clinical Microbiology both at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN before joining MSKCC. She is board certified by the American Board of Medical Microbiology and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology and Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. Her research interests include rapid diagnosis of infections in immunocompromised hosts, the development and evaluation of the clinical utility of molecular microbiology assays.

vitro Diagnostics Segment, Marketing Manager
Savita is the IVD Segment Marketing Manager at MilliporeSigma. She did her postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School in Boston and studied therapeutic targeting of mast cells in inflammatory diseases. She has a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology,University of Maryland and an MBA from Delhi, India.

Senior Lecturer, Division of Pathology
Peter Bankhead completed his PhD on the analysis of retinal images and calcium signals at Queen’s University Belfast, before taking up a postdoc position in the Nikon Imaging Center at Heidelberg University. During this time, he worked on a diverse range of microscopy image analysis projects using open source software, and wrote a popular, freely-available bioimage analysis handbook for biologists. After returning to Belfast at the end of 2012, Peter encountered digital pathology for the first time. Confronted with a lack of open software tools suitable for analyzing whole slide images, he created the open source QuPath digital pathology software platform with the aim of making whole slide analysis more accessible, intuitive and reproducible. Peter is now a Senior Lecturer in Digital Pathology at the University of Edinburgh.

Senior Research Investigator
Tim received his Doctorate in Molecular Pathobiology from Drexel University College of Medicine, where he investigated mechanisms of amyloid deposition in Cerebrovascular Amyloid Angiopathy. He subsequently worked at the University of Pennsylvania where he managed combined histology and imaging core laboratories in the departments of Ophthalmology, Orthopedic Surgery, Gene Therapy, and Pathology as well as the first Digital Pathology Lab, utilizing whole-slide scans, highly multiplexed IHC and multi-spectral image analysis in support of the Pathology Test Development Center & Tumor Biospecimen Bank. Tim subsequently joined PathXL (now part of Philips Digital Pathology) as an Application Scientist, supporting image analysis & Digital Pathology workflow applications. He is currently a Senior Research Investigator at Bristol-Myers Squibb in the Translational Bioinformatics Group, providing Digital Pathology support for Discovery, Clinical Biomarkers and Patient Stratification. In addition to his position at BMS, Tim serves as Adjunct Professor in the Masters of Histotechnology Program at Drexel University and holds ASCP Clinical certifications in Histology and Immunohistochemistry. He frequently lectures and presents workshops on immunohistochemistry and digital pathology. He recently was a contributor to the Digital Pathology Webinar jointly produced by the Digital Pathology Association and National Society for Histology.

Executive
Stephen Barrie, ND, PhD Dr. Barrie is an internationally recognized physician, clinical medical researcher, lecturer, inventor, author and entrepreneur. Dr. Barrie is currently an executive with Viome – the microbiome company that will make chronic illness a choice. Dr. Barrie was in clinical practice during the mid 1980’s as co-founder of the Great Smokies Medical Center, specializing in integrative medicine and clinical ecology. GSMC was the first large integrated anti-aging medical center in the United States. He is the founder and former CEO/Chairman of Genova Diagnostics, the world’s largest Functional Medicine clinical reference laboratory for physicians, which he started in 1986 to advance natural medicine and the scientific research of integrative and anti-aging medicine around the world. Dr. Barrie developed and patented many of the present day laboratory tests used for understanding the root causes of many chronic diseases. Dr. Barrie is also a New York Times and LA Times bestselling author of several health books including “7 Day Detox Miracle”, “Energize Your Life” and numerous scientific articles, which have appeared in major medical journals including The Lancet, Agents and Actions and Medical Hypothesis. He has been a pioneer in promoting the concepts of preventive medicine, healthy aging and early intervention as the most rational and cost-effective health care model. Dr. Barrie has been a keynote speaker in numerous worldwide forums and as one of the founders of Functional Medicine presenting the scientific basis for Functional Medicine and sharing new ways to uncover the causes of common diseases. Dr. Barrie also pioneered the concept of “home” and “direct to consumer” laboratory testing and developed the first commercially viable SNP Genomic testing profiles for common diseases; was co-founder of iNutritionals, the country’s leading developer and provider of supplements and tools for brain health. He has been a consultant for the formation of several on the world’s leading medical health resorts. Dr. Barrie was recently the Chief Medical Officer for Peking Union Lawke Functional Medicine Centers and Clinical Laboratory, Beijing, China. He is considered a Foreign Expert by the Chinese Government and holds a special residence Green card. Dr. Barrie also taught Chinese doctors about Functional Medicine and Anti-Aging and was a personal physician to President Xi.

Senior Director, Applications and Customer Support – US/EU
Dr. Friebe has over 10 years of research experience with extensive knowledge in the field of molecular diagnostic. Prior to joining PlexBio Co., Ltd., he was the Vice President of R&D for Zytogenex USA, Inc. Dr. Friebe received his Ph.D. in Biology from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany.

Practice Leader, TechVision-Innovation Services
Dr. Sudeep Basu is a member of the global consulting practice at Frost & Sullivan. His interests include intellectual property, technology management, and business strategy. He is an inventor on patents while having published several peer reviewed journal and conference articles. Dr. Basu volunteers for BayBio and is an active member of the Silicon Valley chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). He was an AHA Pre-doctoral fellow at the Brown Cancer Research Center and is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay.

Professor, Mechanical Engineering & Applied Mechanics
Haim H. Bau is a professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from Cornell University (1980) and his undergraduate degree from the Technion Israeli Institute of Technology. His research focuses on micro- and nano-fluidics with applications to point of care diagnostics, C. elegans phenotyping, and single cell studies. He has published over 180 archival papers and numerous conference proceedings. He is a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) Award, Penn Biomedical Device of the Year Award 2017/2018, and Penn One Health Award 2015.

Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Sciences
Tim Bauler is a full-time medical educator who teaches immunology and infectious disease in an integrated curriculum combining basic science with clinical applications. Tim received a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Michigan after studying the role of protein tyrosine phosphatases in regulating proximal T cell signal transduction. His postdoctoral fellowship at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, NIH, focused on the innate immune response to intracellular bacterial pathogens, including Salmonella Typhimurium and highly virulent Francisella tularensis which must be studied under Biosafety Level 3 containment.

Head, Business Development & Partnering
20yr career in diagnostics industry in global diagnostics companies in a variety of marketing, development and operational roles; experience in companion diagnostics, test development and global diagnostic test commercialization. Currently responsible for business development and pharma partnering for Siemens Healthcare Laboratory, Berkeley, California.

CEO
Andy earned his MD from Brown Medical School and completed residency and fellowship training in Anatomic Pathology and Molecular Genetic Pathology from Stanford University. He completed a PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University, where he developed one of the first machine-learning based systems for cancer pathology. He's been certified by the American Board of Pathology in Anatomic Pathology and Molecular Genetic Pathology. Prior to co-founding PathAI, he was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School in the Department of Pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He has published over 110 papers in the fields of cancer biology, cancer pathology, and biomedical informatics.

Founder & CSO
Dr. Holger Becker is co-founder and CSO of microfluidic ChipShop GmbH. He obtained physics degrees from the University of Western Australia/Perth and the University of Heidelberg. He started to work on miniaturized systems for chemical analysis during his PhD thesis at Heidelberg University, where he obtained his PhD in 1995. Between 1995 and 1997 he was a Research Associate at Imperial College with Prof. Andreas Manz. In 1998, he joined Jenoptik Mikrotechnik GmbH. Sincethen, he founded and led several companies in the field of microsystem technologies in medicine and the life sciences. He was nominated for the German Founders Prize in 2004. He led the Industry Group of the German Physical Society between 2004 and 2009, was co-chair of MicroTAS 2013, and is the current chair of the SPIE ‘‘Microfluidics, BioMEMS and Medical Microsystems’’ conference. He serves on the Editorial Board of “Lab-on-a-Chip” as well as acting as a regular reviewer of project proposals on a national and international level.

Senior Director, Real World Data, Analytics & Data Strategy
Lauren Becnel, PhD, has 15+ years’ experience in biomedical informatics using Real World Data, analytics, integration and visualization. Prior to joining the Real World Data and Analytics (RWDnA) team at Pfizer, she served as VP of Strategy & Innovation at the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC), a non-profit standards development organization whose products are utilized for regulated clinical trials’ electronic data submissions to global regulatory agencies and for a growing number of non-regulated clinical and translational studies worldwide. At CDISC, she led all technology initiatives, including myriad RWD, oncology radiomics, pharmacogenomics, and common data model (e.g., OMOP/OHDSI, etc.) projects in support of a learning health system. Lauren holds a joint faculty appointment at Baylor College of Medicine’s (BCM) Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Departments of Medicine, Hematology/Oncology, and Molecular and Cellular Biology. As Director of Biomedical Informatics at BCM, her team supported 1,000s of local and global industry-sponsored and investigator-initiated clinical trials, including INDs and IDEs, and other studies. Her group also provided solutions for biobanking, animal models, genomic analysis and data sharing projects, including those from NCI Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPOREs), Susan G. Komen Healthy Tissue Bank, and the AIDS and Cancer Specimen Resource. Electronic systems were “ ed” by electronic health records from multiple hospital systems, cancer and other registries, patient reported outcomes and other RWD sources, alongside traditional data collection methods.

Vice President, Commercial Market
Suzanne Belinson, PhD, MPH, is Vice President of Commercial Markets at Tempus Labs, Inc. Tempus is a technology company that has build the world’s largest library of clinical and molecular data and an operating system to make that data accessible and useful, starting with cancer. Her role focuses on commercial growth for Tempus through the development and execution of partnerships with organizations aiming to improve healthcare value and outcomes by leveraging molecular and clinical data. Before joining Tempus, Dr. Belinson served as an Executive Director, Clinical Markets, at the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. In addition to leading the sales and market development for products and services developed within the Office of Clinical Affairs, Dr. Belinson led the day to day operations of Evidence Street. As part of the leadership team in the Office of Clinical Affairs she also spent time focused on the development of emerging programs and services that enhance value and brand leadership for the independent BCBS Plans. Dr. Belinson received her bachelor’s degree from Cleveland State University, and a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also holds a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Pittsburgh.

Senior Member, Technical Staff-System Integration
Florian is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Qorvo Biotechnologies. He received his PhD in Optical Physics and was a Fellow of the Max-Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Germany. Florian has worked in the fields of semiconductor optics, electron spectroscopy, amorphous and liquid semiconductors, fiber optic instrumentation, solar energy, physiological monitoring, microarrays for cancer research and infectious disease diagnostics, medical instrumentation, and biosensors for diagnostics.

Vice President Oncology Research
Marcia Belvin is currently Vice President of Oncology Research at CytomX Therapeutics. Prior to joining CytomX, she led research departments in Oncology and Cancer Immunology at Genentech, where she oversaw multiple large and small molecule programs from early stage research through entry into the clinic. In addition, she worked at Exelixis, Inc., identifying and validating novel oncology targets, and has authored numerous publications and patents in the field of oncology. Marcia obtained her PhD in molecular biology at U.C. Berkeley.

Senior Director, Global Regulatory Affairs, Precision and Digital Medicine, R&D Chief Regulatory Office
Mike received his B.A. in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and his PhD in Biophysical Chemistry from Princeton University. Mike continued his academic research career as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Northwestern University and as an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical School-Milwaukee Clinical Campus. Mike then entered the in vitro diagnostic industry where he held product development positions of, increasing professional responsibility. Mike gained expertise in the preparation of FDA IDE and PMA medical device submissions for lasers used for vision correction surgery at Bio-Reg Associates. At QIAGEN (formerly Digene), Mike led the Regulatory/Clinical Affairs Group that prepared numerous FDA PMA submissions for the first FDA approved HPV DNA test for cervical cancer screening. Mike Benecky joined GSK in October 2011 as Senior Director, Global Regulatory Affairs in Precision and Digital Medicine located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. In the area of Digital Medicine, Mike currently assists GSK Teams in regulatory strategy during use of digital health technology in both clinical trial and commercial settings. Recent projects include the commercial launch of the MyAsthma mobile medical app in the EU and inclusion of digital sensors and mobile apps within GSK clinical development programs.

Senior Vice President, Public Policy
Cynthia A. Bens Senior Vice President, Public Policy at the Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC) leads the Coalition’s policy development and government relations efforts and serves as the primary liaison with the U.S. Congress and federal regulators. In collaboration with the PMC’s Senior Vice President, Science Policy, Ms. Bens is responsible for implementing research, regulatory and reimbursement policy strategies that promote the understanding and adoption of personalized medicine concepts, services and products to benefit patients and the health system. Before joining the PMC, she was the Vice President of Public Policy at the Alliance for Aging Research. Ms. Bens guided the Alliance’s federal policy work, represented the organization in multiple national coalitions, and directed all aspects of coalitions led by the Alliance. She spent more than a decade at the Alliance advancing policies to expedite the development of interventions for neurological diseases and physical frailty; to remove access barriers for cardiovascular disease treatments; and to enhance the quality of care for older adults living with multiple chronic conditions. Prior to joining the Alliance, Ms. Bens was a senior manager of government affairs with the Loeffler Group. As part of its federal government affairs practice, she represented client interests before the U.S. Congress and the administration. Her core areas of focus included appropriations, budget, health care, education, telecommunications and international trade. Through various other positions on Capitol Hill and in the private sector, she has acquired extensive experience researching and analyzing federal legislation and regulations. Ms. Bens holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University with concentrations in political science and women’s studies.

Assistant Professor, Neurosurgery and Oncology
D Dr. Bettegowda is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery, Oncology and Radiation Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where he cares for patients with brain and spine tumors, while studying what molecular events cause them to arise in the laboratory. In particular, his current research is focused on translating our genetic understanding of tumors for diagnostic benefit. His group studies the applications of cell free tumor derived DNA for the early detection and monitoring of a myriad of cancers. His work is funded by the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists, Doris Duke Clinician Scientist Award, Department of Defense and National Cancer Institute.

Professor of Medical Oncology
François-Clément Bidard is a full professor of medicine at the Paris Saclay university and a research physician in medical oncology at Institut Curie. His clinical work primarily focuses on breast and digestive cancers, while his research focuses on circulating tumor biomarkers. He acted as a coauthor of 100+ papers, including publications as first or last author in Lancet Oncol, JNCI, JCO, Sci Transl Med and Nat Rev Clin Oncol.

Medical Director, MolDX
Dr. Bien-Willner is the Medical Director of the MolDX program at Palmetto GBA, a Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC). MolDX seeks to understand the molecular testing landscape to implement payer controls, coverage, and to set policy for affiliated MACs, which currently cover 28 states. He is a leader in the Precision Medicine space and practices as a Board-certified Anatomic Pathologist and Molecular Genetic Pathologist. Throughout his career, he has been active in research, development, and advancement of molecular diagnostic services, specifically next generation sequencing. He has worked closely with clinicians to develop clear clinical diagnostic and treatment pathways directing Precision Medicine programs for community cancer centers. Dr. Bien-Willner received his MD and PhD degrees from Baylor College of Medicine, with a PhD in Human Molecular Genetics. He completed his residency, fellowship, and attained a faculty appointment at Washington University in St. Louis prior to leadership roles in laboratory and biotech companies before joining Palmetto GBA.

Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer
=Dr. Tim Blauwkamp, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Karius, is a biomedical scientist with 15 years experience managing research in molecular biology, regenerative medicine, and next-generation sequencing. He has a PhD in biological chemistry from U. Michigan and completed postdoctoral work at Stanford University.

Director, Melanoma Surgery Program, Massachusetts General Hospital; Director, Surgical Oncology Research Laboratories, Massachusetts General Hospital; Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School; Associate Member, Broad Institute
Genevieve M. Boland, MD, PhD, FACS is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Melanoma Surgery Program at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Her primary clinical focus is on melanoma and cutaneous oncology. She undertook combined MD/PhD training, completing a PhD in Cell and Tissue Engineering at the National Institutes of Health focusing on signaling pathways in adult, human mesenchymal stem cells. She graduated cum laude from Thomas Jefferson University as a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society and completed her general surgical training at Massachusetts General Hospital. Following this, she completed a clinical fellowship in Complex General Surgical Oncology and a combined research fellowship at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She joined the MGH Division of Surgical Oncology and is focused on the clinical management of melanoma patients. She is board certified in General Surgery and Complex General Surgical Oncology, and she is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. Dr. Boland has received many awards, including the American Surgical Association Foundation Fellowship, the Association of Women Surgeons Research Fellowship, the Harvard Catalyst Medical Research Investigator Training Award, the Karin Grunebaum Cancer Foundation Fellowship, and the Society of Surgical Oncology Clinical Investigator Award. She is Director of the Surgical Oncology Research Laboratories and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her laboratory is currently focused on molecular profiling of melanoma, characterization of molecular and immunological changes that occur during immunotherapy, and the identification of circulating biomarkers of cancer.

Vice President, Translational Medicine
Adrian Bot, MD, PhD is the Vice President of Translational Medicine at Kite, a Gilead Company. Kite is a biotechnology company developing genetically engineered T cell therapies, based in Los Angeles, CA. He has more than 20 years of experience in biomedical research and development. Dr. Bot obtained his MD at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Timisoara, Romania and his PhD in Biomedical Sciences at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Subsequently, he was a Guest Scientist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla and Scientist, Principal Scientist and Director of Immunology Research at Alliance Pharmaceutical Corp. in San Diego. In Nov 2002, Dr. Bot joined Allecure Pharmaceuticals which became MannKind Corp, where he was a Director of Research and Development. He had several other appointments at MannKind: Sr. Director of Translational Medicine, Vice President of Scientific Management and Vice President of Research, prior to the appointment first as Chief Scientific Officer and then Vice President of Translational Medicine at Kite.

Director, Strategy and Business Development
Bryan Bothwell is Qorvo Biotechnologies Director of Strategy and Business Development - with responsibility for new market, technology and customer development worldwide. He received undergraduate degrees in Biology/ Biochemistry, and Masters’ degrees in Electrical Engineering and Business Administration.

Director of Pharma Services
Douglas Bowman is the Vice President, Pharma Services at Indica Labs, Inc. Mr. Bowman plays an important role as the company develops its image analysis and biomarker assay services business to support preclinical and clinical biomarker assays for Indica Lab’s academic, biotech, and pharma customers. Doug was previously at Takeda Pharmaceuticals for 11 years where he was responsible for developing quantitative biomarker assays to support the Oncology Discovery and Translational Research groups. He was a key contributor to the development of a high throughput, automated, IHC biomarker laboratory that integrated a sample management system, digital slide scanners, and quantitative image analysis into the research workflow.

Sr. Computational Biologist, Pathology
A. Rose Brannon, PhD, is a Senior Computational Biologist in the Clinical Bioinformatics group at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York. She earned her BS in Genetics at Iowa State University and pursued a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. Rose then earned her PhD in Genetics and Molecular Biology at The University of North Carolina. Under the mentorship of Dr. Kimryn Rathmell, she studied the molecular subtypes of clear cell Renal Cell Carcinoma. Her postdoctoral training was with Dr. Michael Berger on the development and application of the MSK- IMPACT assay for FFPE tissue. For four years, she was an Investigator at Novartis Institutes of BioMedical Research, serving as Lead Bioinformatics Analyst for several early phase clinical teams. There, she was also involved in early pipeline development and analyses of a cell free DNA (cfDNA) assay. She has since returned to MSKCC to assist with the validation of MSK-ACCESS for analysis of cfDNA in the clinical setting.

Executive Director, Swedish Cancer Institute; Co-Chair, PSJH Personalized Medicine Program, PSJH Cancer Leadership Council
Dr. Brown is executive director of the Swedish Cancer Institute and co-chairman of the Providence Health & Services Personalized Medicine Program.

Vice President, Product and Business Development
Trisha Brown is a board certified, licensed genetic counselor with over two decades of experience in clinical genetics. She is currently the Vice President of Product and Business Development at BeaconLBS. Ms. Brown is experienced in commercialization of genomic tests, operations, and utilization management. Prior to joining BeaconLBS, she has held executive leadership roles at distinguished corporations such as LabCorp and Medco, and the entrepreneurial successes DNA Direct and Fabric Genomics.

CEO and Founder
Kris Buchanan is the owner and CEO of Phase Three Product Development which was founded in 2009. He has driven the development of many products while holding numerous engineering and product development positions in companies which produce products from consumer electronics to medical devices. After graduating with a Mechanical Engineering degree from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Mr. Buchanan worked as a young engineer in the computer hard disc drive industry in the 1980’s. He learned extensively about designing and manufacturing high volume/low profit margin products. Mr. Buchanan has been awarded over 75 USPTO and international patents as inventor or co-inventor. These patents range from air filtration and spin motor design in the disc drive industry to bio containment, nozzle and flow cell designs for flow cytometry to patents in the microfluidics field. More recently, Mr. Buchanan has helped researchers develop designs and systems which allow “organ-on-chip” technologies to be developed and to prepare them for commercialization while also developing lab-on-a-chip technologies for continuous cell sorting. Phase Three has been instrumental in preparing microfluidics products for integration in water quality and food safety applications which cover cellular therapy, RNA detection, cellular analysis, and protein detection fields.

VP, Content Marketing
Diane Burley is a former journalist, multi-media executive, and content officer for technology companies. Having put the first daily newspapers on the web in 1995, she is fully aware of the complexities of integrating vast amounts of data and changing up processes to support the technologies – all while facing that “existential threat.” As a story teller, Diane helps executives in all industries understand technology’s role in solving many of the challenges they face today.

Vice President of Clinical Informatics
Dr. Matthew Burton is Vice President of Clinical Informatics at Apervita, Inc. as well as Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the Mayo Clinic. Previously he was the Principal Clinical Information Scientist at the Applied Clinical Informatics Program in the Office of Information and Knowledge Management at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Burton is a pioneering clinical informatician and health systems engineer who designs, develops, and implements innovative information and knowledge management systems. He works at the intersection and pushes the boundaries of knowledge management, clinical workflow, and practice redesign. These systems enable the full lifecycle of clinical best practices and pathways through cognitive support of expert clinician mental models within optimal workflows.

Gastrointestinal Malignancies, Clinical Director, Inova Schar Cancer Institute Molecular Tumor Board; Assistant Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University
Dr. Cannon specialized in gastrointestinal malignancies and is the clinical director and moderator of the weekly molecular tumor board at the Inova Schar Cancer Institute which matches patients with targeted therapies based on molecular diagnostics. He is very interested in national cooperative group clinical trials and is the PI for multiple industry sponsored and investigator-initiated trials. Dr. Cannon was the chief fellow of hematology/oncology at New York University (NYU). He was voted fellow of the year at NYU during each of his last 2 years there. He has been first author in publications in several journals, including The Oncologist and Journal of Clinical Oncology. A native of New Jersey, Dr. Cannon is married with 2 sons. His wife, Amy, works for Save the Children. In his spare time, he likes to play sports (particularly soccer, flag football, tennis) and read books. He was a member of two Division I basketball teams (University of Utah as a freshman and then later at Brigham Young University) in the 1990s and continues to be a huge basketball fan. He is fluent in Mandarin.

Senior Vice President, Immuno-oncology
Dr. Carroll joined Genocea Biosciences in 2016 to lead immuno-oncology efforts. Her previous positions include vice president of oncology discovery at Roche Pharma Research and Early Development, vice president of Janssen oncology at Johnson and Johnson Innovation, and founding Head of Research at the Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science at Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Her broad skillset also comes from drug discovery experience working in applied genomics at Bristol-Myers Squibb and oncology research done at Merck Research Laboratories. She earned a B.A. in biology at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, a doctorate in cellular biology at Stony Brook University, and a post-doctorate fellowship at Stanford University.

Senior Medical Director
Ken Carson is a board-certified practicing hematologist and medical oncologist who currently serves as senior medical director at Flatiron Health, where he focuses on real-world evidence generation. Over the course of his career, Ken’s research has focused on the use of large electronic databases to evaluate health care disparities and oncology drug safety. Ken also currently practices at Washington University where he specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of patients with hematologic malignancies like lymphomas and leukemia. He joined Washington University School of Medicine’s faculty in 2008 and later served as chief of hematology and oncology at the St. Louis Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Ken received his medical degree from the University of Southern California, Keck School of Medicine followed by residency training at Duke University, and research and clinical fellowships at Northwestern University. Ken also received a PhD (with an emphasis in health policy and administration) from the University of Illinois School of Public Health.

CEO, Founder
Tanya Cashorali is the founder and CEO of TCB Analytics, a Boston-based data and analytics consultancy. With an interest in statistics and programming, Tanya started her career in the data-rich field of bioinformatics in the early 2000s. During this period, Tanya was one of the early adopters of data science technologies and platforms. The next decade of Tanya’s career, Inc.luded more commercial use cases for data science and analytics. Here she applied the scientific rigor acquired on the research side of healthcare and pharma to commercial applications. In 2015, Tanya launched TCB Analytics, where she applies those pr, Inc.iples to help businesses across various industries tackle data challenges. As an extension of her career path, Tanya leads a community network of over 300 data scientists and data enthusiasts, with members spanning the globe. She’s helped universities in Massachusetts launch data science programs, helped grow a handful of Boston- based startups, and is a frequent speaker at tech and industry conferences.

Director, Software Engineering, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Dana directs software development efforts within the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology department at Genentech. Her team of scientists, engineers, business analysts, and project managers develop, implement and support informatics solutions that enable drug discovery and development processes within Genentech Research and across its interfaces. The team supports complex laboratory workflows within and across Protein Sciences, Translational Research, Lab Animal Resources, & Pathology and develops self-service analytics platforms to enable the researcher community. Dana received her PhD in Chemistry at UC Berkeley and completed a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She joined Genentech in 2008, and every day works with talented and passionate people to solve hard problems that make a difference in people’s lives.

Associate Professor, Genetics & Genomics Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine; Director, Digital Health & Personalized Medicine, Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mt. Sinai
Dr. Yvonne Chan is a board-certified Emergency Medicine physician with a PhD in clinical research as well as experience in mobile health applications, pharmacogenomics, clinical trials and patient education. During Dr. Chan’s 7 years at New Jersey Medical School, she served as the Associate then Research Director for the EM residency and medical student EM electives as well as the fieldwork site supervisor for the MD/MPH students. Dr. Chan was the Principal investigator for the Stroke Education Center in the Emergency Department Waiting Room studies and was also a co-investigator for a CDC HIV Counseling, Testing, and Referral Services project. In 2008, Dr. Chan took an EM faculty position at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to pursue formal research training. After a two-year NIH/National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) T32 Post-doctoral Cerebrovascular Research Fellowship at Sinai, she was awarded the NIH Institutional KL2 Clinical and Translational Research Career Development Award and received her PhD in Clinical Research from the Mount Sinai Graduate School of Biological Sciences. Dr. Chan’s dissertation was on the Pharmacogenetics of clopidogrel in the Mount Sinai Biobank Cohort. During her training, she was the co-investigator of three NINDS clinical trials: the ‘Platelet-Oriented Inhibition in New TIA and minor ischemic stroke (POINT), Tenecteplase (TNK) in acute ischemic stroke, and the Discharge Education Strategies for Reduction of Vascular Events (DESERVE) trials. In addition, she collaborated with the Institute of Personalized Medicine faculty on the CLIPMERGE (CLinical Implementation of Personalized Medicine through Electronic Health Records and Genomics) project. Currently, she is a co-investigator on the Patients with Mild Stroke: Rapidly Improving Symptoms and Neurologic Deficits (PRISMS) Trial. In 2014, Dr. Chan joined the Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology as the Director of Personalized Medicine (PM) and Digital Health (DH). Her role is to lead the Institute in clinical trial study design, execution, and management of all DH and PM related clinical trials and initiatives conducted at the institute. She also serves as the collaborator and client liaison for these projects.

Bayer Corporation Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Professor Hsueh-Chia (“Chia”) Chang was born in Taiwan but grew up in Singapore, Malaysia and California. He received his BS from Caltech and PhD from Princeton, both in Chemical Engineering. He holds the Bayer Corporation Chair of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and was the department chair from 1989 to 1995. Professor Chang is the founding editor of Biomicrofluidics, an American Institute of Physics journal. He won the Frenkiel award from the American Physical Society and was elected a fellow of that society. He was honored as the Distinguished Senior Fellow of the United Kingdom Royal Society of Engineering. Professor Chang is known for his electrokineitc technologies for biochips, which use dc and ac electric fields for molecular transport, separation and sensing. He wrote the seminal book on the subject: “Electrokinetically Driven Microfluidics and Nanofluidics” (Cambridge Univ Press, 2009). He has presented more than 10 plenary and named lectures and wrote two authoritative reviews on electrokinetics. He has mentored more than 60 PhD/Postdocs in this field and half of them are on the faculty of top research universities in 6 continents. He holds 10 patents on electrokinetic technologies and has successfully commercialized several of them with two Notre Dame start-ups.

Medical Director, Heart Failure Program and Chief Intelligence & Innovation Officer, Founding Director of The Sharon Disney Lund Medical Intelligence and Innovation Institute (Mi3); Author of Medical Intelligence: Principles and Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Medicine (releasing in Spring 2019)
Dr. Chang attended Johns Hopkins University for his BA in molecular biology prior to entering Georgetown University School of Medicine for his MD He then completed his pediatric residency at Children's Hospital National Medical Center and his pediatric cardiology fellowship at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He accepted a position as attending cardiologist in the cardiovascular intensive care unit of Boston Children's Hospital and as assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. He has been the medical director of several pediatric cardiac intensive care programs (including Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, Miami Children's Hospital, and Texas Children's Hospital) and is currently the Chief Intelligence and Innovation Officer and Medical Director of the Heart Failure Program at Children's Hospital of Orange County. He has also been repeatedly named Physician of Excellence by the Orange County Medical Association. He is known for several innovations in pediatric cardiac care, including introducing the cardiac drug milrinone and co-designing (with Dr. Michael DeBakey) an axial-type ventricular assist device in children. He has helped to build a successful cardiology practice as a company and was able to complete a deal on Wall Street. He is a committee member of the National Institute of Health pediatric grant review committee. He is also the editor of several textbooks in pediatric cardiology, including Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care, Heart Failure in Children and Young Adults, and Pediatric Cardiology Board Review. He is the founder of the Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Society (PCICS) that launched the multi-disciplinary focus on cardiac intensive care for children. He is also the founder of the Asia-Pacific Pediatric Cardiac Society (APPCS), which united pediatric cardiologists and cardiac surgeons from 24 Asian countries and launched a biennial meeting in Asia that now draws over 1,000 attendees. He has completed a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) in Health Care Administration at the University of Miami School of Business and graduated with the McCaw Award of Academic Excellence. He also completed a Master’s in Public Health (MPH) in Health Care Policy at the Jonathan Fielding School of Public Health of the University of California, Los Angeles and graduated with the Dean's Award for Academic Excellence. Finally, he completed his Master’s of Science (MS) in Data Science with a sub-specialization in artificial intelligence from Stanford School of Medicine. He is also a computer scientist-in-residence at Chapman University. He is the founder and medical director of the nascent Medical Intelligence and Innovation Institute (MI3) that is supported by the Sharon Disney Lund Foundation. The institute is dedicated to implement data science and artificial intelligence in medicine and is the first institute of its kind in a hospital. The new institute is concomitantly dedicated to facilitate innovation in children and health care all over the world. He is the organizing chair for the biennial Pediatrics2040: Emerging Trends and Future Innovations meeting as well as the founder of the Medical Intelligence and Innovation Summer Internship Program, which mentors close to 100 young physicians-to-be every summer. He has organized a pediatric innovation leadership group and has started the international Society for Pediatric Innovation (iSPI) with 30 charter members. He intends to build a clinician-computer scientist interface to enhance all aspects of data science and artificial intelligence in health and medicine. He currently lectures widely on big data and artificial intelligence in medicine (he has been called "Dr. A.I." and has given a TEDx talk and on the faculty of Singularity University). He has also published review papers on big data and predictive analytics as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence in medicine. He is currently organizing a book project, Medical Intelligence: Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Cognitive Computing, Machine and Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. He is also the organizing chair for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIMed) annual meeting, the largest meeting that focuses on applications of artificial intelligence in medicine. He is the co-founder and CEO of a startup company (CardioGenomic Intelligence, LLC) that focuses on artificial intelligence applications such as deep learning in clinical cardiology and genomic medicine.

Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Dr. Yvonne Chen earned her BS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University and her PhD in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology. She received postdoctoral training at the Center for Childhood Cancer Research within the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and at the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Yvonne was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows prior to joining the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013. The Chen Laboratory focuses on applying synthetic biology and biomolecular engineering techniques to the development of novel mammalian-cell systems, particularly cell-based immunotherapy for cancer. Dr. Chen has been a recipient of the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, the Hellman Fellowship, the ACGT Young Investigator Award in Cell and Gene Therapy for Cancer, and the NSF CAREER Award. Yvonne is also a Member Researcher in the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

Former Worldwide Vice President, Global Head of Research and Development
Adrian Chernoff, B.S.M.E., M.B.A., M.E.M.E. is a visionary technologist and digital transformation executive who helps companies create and deliver what comes next. Honored with 20 awards and 90 patents, he routinely solves critical business problems to deliver game-changing products and first-to- market solutions. Distinguished career encompasses 20+ years of leading innovation, fostering collaboration, building new capabilities, leveraging insights from other industries, influencing change and introducing new products and services within companies, across industries and around the world. An experienced builder and strategist of new digital platforms, patient-centric mobile apps and smarter medical devices that empower millions of patients and improve patient outcomes. As Worldwide Vice President, Global Head of R&D, Digital and Innovation for the Johnson and Johnson $2B Diabetes Care Companies he launched IoT connected medical devices, deployed a digital health platform ecosystem and introduced a best-in-class patient-centric mobile app in 20 countries with over 1M downloads to help patients better manage their diabetes. As Vice President of Digital Strategy and Product Transformation at Broadridge Financial Solutions, he spearheaded digital transformation efforts to improve investor communications for over 100M investors by building an omni-channel digital delivery system and creating a software-as-a-service (SAAS) platform for personalizing customer experiences to increase assets under management, improve operating efficiencies and reduce operating costs. As a Strategic Consultant at Ideation Genesis, he advises CEO’s and executives in digital technology and innovation to accelerate product development and differentiate product offerings. As a Director of Worldwide Marketing at Kodak, overseeing P&L for a $200M portfolio, he launched a family of consumer digital products with new technology and design advancements to achieve double-digit growth. As the Chief Product Architect at General Motors for Reinventing the Automobile, he pioneered a revolutionary vehicle platform to improve the customer experience and simplify design, engineering and vehicle manufacturing to enable and introduce electric and autonomous vehicles with software advancements currently utilized in Tesla and Chevrolet vehicles.

Professor, Microbiology; Scientific Director, High-throughput Screening Core; Director, Program for Chemogenomic Discovery
Sara Cherry is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Scientific Director of the High- throughput Screening Core at the University of Pennsylvania. She has applied cell-based screening approaches to discover new facets of biology and through the Precision Medicine Program in Chemogenomic Discovery she Directs, she has developed a new pipeline to directly screen patient tumor cells for responsiveness to available and experimental treatments, which will be used to direct new therapeutic approaches. Her initial work in Acute Myelogenous Leukemia is moving into clinical trials, and this discovery platform is expanding to additional leukemias and cancers.

Associate Professor, Laboratory Medicine and Medicine/Infectious Diseases, Director, UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center, Associate Director, UCSF Clinical Microbiology Laboratory
Dr. Charles Chiu, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Laboratory Medicine and Medicine, Infectious Diseases at the University of California, San Francisco. He is also the Director of UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center (VDDC) at China Basin and Associate Director of the UCSF Clinical Microbiology Laboratory. Charles is an expert in the emerging field of clinical metagenomics, and his research is focused on the development and validation of microarray and next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies for viral discovery and pathogen diagnostics, with over 20 patents and peer-reviewed publications on these topics. In addition, he is the Principal investigator of a 5-year R01 grant from the NIH on multiplexed blood bank pathogen screening, California Discovery, UC-MEXUS, and National Research Fund for Tickborne Diseases (NRFTD) grants on the microbial epidemiology of encephalitis, diarrhea, and Lyme disease, a QB3 Rogers Family Foundation Award in translational diagnostics, and a UCSF-Abbott Viral Discovery Award. Charles is also an active practicing infectious diseases physician at UCSF. Charles has active collaborations with research groups and public health agencies worldwide, including Abbott Diagnostics, Inc., Blood Systems Research Institute, the California Department of Public Health, the United States CDC, the American Red Cross, and the Texas Biomedical Research Institute.

A. Bruce Montgomery Professor of Chemistry and Bioengineering
Daniel T. Chiu is the A. Bruce Montgomery Professor of Chemistry, Endowed Professor of Analytical Chemistry, Washington Research Foundation Professor, and Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. He obtained a B.A. in Neurobiology and a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993 and a PhD in Chemistry from Stanford University in 1998. He is currently a member of the Center for Nanotechnology and the Neurobiology and Behavior Program at the University of Washington, as well as a member of the Cancer Consortium at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Scientist, Computational Biology
Peter Cimermancic received his BSc degree in Biochemistry from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2009. He was awarded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellowship at University of California, San Francisco where he received his PhD in Biomedical Informatics in 2014, under the supervision of Prof. Andrej Sali. He developed and applied computational methods to several problems in proteomics, genomics, drug discovery, and structural biology. Currently, he is a Scientist at Verily Life Sciences, utilizing machine learning for life science and health-related challenges.

CEO & Founder
Dr. B. Melina Cimler is a senior quality, regulatory, and in vitro diagnostic device expert with over 29 years of experience in the life science and FDA-regulated global diagnostic industry, leading regulatory, quality systems, clinical affairs, research, and product development organizations with a focus on precision medicine. She joined NDA Partners as an Expert Consultant in 2018. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Nanostics, Inc. and is a Scientific Board member of M3 Biotechnology. Prior to joining NDA Partners, Dr. Cimler served as SVP of Regulatory & Quality at Adaptive Biotechnologies where she worked with FDA and pharma partners to define the regulatory strategy for use of NGS-based immunosequencing in minimal residual disease. She was formerly Head of Global Quality and Vice President of Quality, Regulatory, Clinical, and Government Affairs at Illumina Inc., where she defined and executed on the regulatory strategy for the first next generation sequencing platform (MiSeqDx) to receive FDA marketing authorization. Dr. Cimler has also previously held executive leadership positions in quality, regulatory, clinical, and government affairs roles at Abbott Molecular, Beckman Coulter Inc., Gen-Probe Inc., and CR Bard, Inc., and was formerly head of Product Development at Epitope, Inc. Dr. Cimler holds a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Washington.

Group Lead, Digital Endpoints, Translational Medicine
Bringing together broad experience in applied data science, clinical practice and large-scale data handling to drive the use of modern technologies in clinical trial settings. Focusing on collecting and integrating new information on how patient lives are impacted by disease: only by quantitating better and more relevant endpoints can we target and improve those phenotypes with novel therapies.

Global Partner Program Lead, Diagnostics Information Solutions
Dr. Cobb is the Global Partner Program Lead at Roche focused on the GE Healthcare partnership for Acute Care. The partnership was established to deliver digital solutions by leveraging GE Healthcare’s in vivo patient monitoring and Roche’s in vitro diagnostics. In this role, Bryan is responsible for leveraging Roche’s assets and integrating diagnostics solutions and strategies into the joint product development goals. The Acute Care team is working on developing digital solutions to identify patients at-risk for deterioration in order to identify, predict, and prevent sepsis. By combing artificial intelligence and machine learning with real-time patient monitoring and biomarkers, it will be possible improve patient outcomes, save lives, reduce hospital infections, and associated costs. Bryan obtained his PhD in Medical Genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University Institute for Molecular Genetics. He then completed an American Board of Medical Genetics fellowship program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the National Human Genome Research Institute and is a board-certified diplomat of the American College of Medical Genetics & Genomics. He has held several roles at Roche, including the Head of MCOE, Head of Medical Affairs for the global organization where he was responsible for the molecular portfolio’s medical plans. He has over 15 years of experience in diagnostics, published in key scientific journals, is a reviewer for Journal of Clinical Microbiology, and has served on several international scientific committees and working groups.

Staff Scientist
Bruce Cohen is a Staff Scientist at The Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He graduated from Pr, Inc.eton University, with an AB in Chemistry and earned his PhD in Chemistry from Berkeley, working with Daniel E Koshland, Jr. He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellow at UCSF in the neurobiology laboratory of Lily Y. Jan, developing novel fluorescent probes of protein function. His current research focuses on engineering nanocrystals as biosensors and single molecule probes, developing bioconjugation and cell targeting methodologies, and live cell imaging. His work aims to integrate the development of novel luminescent nanomaterials into multidisciplinary efforts to address significant biological questions of cell function.

Associate Director, Moores Cancer Center, Professor of Medicine
Ezra Cohen, MD, is a board-certified oncologist and an internally renowned cancer researcher. He cares for patients with all types of head and neck cancers, including esophageal, thyroid and salivary gland cancers. As a physician-scientist, Dr. Cohen also leads a laboratory that studies novel cancer treatments, including immunotherapy, and has made major contributions in understanding how targeted cancer therapies work. Much of his work has focused on squamous cell carcinomas and cancers of the thyroid, salivary gland, and HPV-related oropharyngeal cancers. He is especially interested in understanding mechanisms of sensitivity or resistance; cancer screening; and using medication and other agents to delay or prevent cancer (chemoprevention). His recent National Institutes of Health-funded work in the study of epidermal growth factor receptor inhibitors in head and neck cancer has contributed to the understanding of the biology of this critical signaling network, integration of these agents into standard of care, and definition of mechanisms to overcome resistance. He recently served as chair of the NCI Head and Neck Cancer Steering Committee, which oversees NCI-funded clinical research in this disease. Dr. Cohen also serves as co-director of the San Diego Center for Precision Immunotherapy. At UC San Diego Health’s Moores Cancer Center, he is associate director for translational science and the leader of the Solid Tumor Therapeutics research program. Dr. Cohen recently served as editor-in-chief of Oral Oncology, the most respected specialty journal in head and neck cancer, and recently chaired two Multidisciplinary Head and Neck Cancer Symposia—the largest international meeting of its kind— sponsored by the American Society for Radiation Oncology, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Head and Neck Society. A frequent speaker at national and international meetings, he has authored more than 170 peer-reviewed papers and has been the Principal investigator of multiple clinical trials of new drugs for head and neck cancer and other solid tumors in all phases of development. In addition, he has served as a grant reviewer for the NIH, American Association for Cancer Research, American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. Prior to joining UC San Diego Health in 2014, Dr. Cohen was co-director of the Head and Neck Cancer Program at the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center. A dedicated educator, Dr. Cohen also mentored and developed young faculty in his program. Dr. Cohen completed a hematology/oncology fellowship at the University of Chicago, where he was named chief fellow. He completed residencies in family medicine at the University of Toronto and in internal medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Cohen earned his medical degree at University of Toronto. He is board certified in medical oncology, and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (FRCPSC) and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (FASCO).

Associate Director of Scientific Technologies, Inova Schar Cancer Institute, Inova Center for Personalized Health; Chief Scientific Officer, Gynecologic Cancer Center of Excellence, John P. Murtha Cancer Center, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
I am currently the Associate Director of Scientific Technologies in the Inova Dwight and Martha Schar Cancer Institute and Chief Scientific Officer of the Department of Defense Gynecologic Cancer Center of Excellence and its affiliated flagship laboratory, the Women’s Health Integrated Research Center at Inova Health System. I am also a full Professor the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine at the Inova Fairfax Campus and in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Molecular & Cellular Biology at the Uniformed Services University. My scientific training, includes mechanistic enzymology, spectroscopy and high-resolution mass spectrometry (MS) with particular focus on biological applications, including protein and peptide identification, quantitation and elucidation of post-translational modifications from clinical samples such as tissue and biofluids. My scientific career has been spent developing new technologies in chemistry and biology and applying cutting-edge applications and workflows in genomics and proteomics for systems biology and cancer biomarker discovery and validation in tissues, proximal fluids and serum/plasma. The overarching goals of my research are toward identification of genomic, proteomic and small molecule biomarkers and surrogates for enhanced cancer patient management through improved early detection, patient stratification, and monitoring for therapeutic efficacy, outcome and recurrence. The focus of my efforts for the past 10 years has been toward creating, increasingly integrated multi-disciplinary research programs that span multi-omic approaches for conducting novel molecular discoveries and identifying translational opportunities for clinical potential.

Global Head of R&D&C IT, Science and Enabling Units IT
John brings to AstraZeneca deep expertise in computational drug discovery, cheminformatics, bioinformatics, over a 25 year career within the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, John served as Global Director of R&D Thought Leadership and Innovation and Head of Data Science and Informatics Strategy at LabAnswer, specializing in R&D Data and Cloud Strategies in the life sciences and related industries. Prior to this role, John held leadership roles at Schrödinger and Accelrys (now BIOVIA), Director of Discovery Informatics and IT Structural Biology Domain at GlaxoSmithKline, and a senior scientific programmer and informatics roles at Merck and Co. Inc. He attended Penn State University (Biochemistry) and then Lehigh University (MS, Molecular and Cellular Biology), and then spent his career becoming an expert in scientific informatics, computational approaches and analytics.

Professor and Chair, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Senior Vice President of Laboratory Services
James M Crawford, MD, PhD, is professor and chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Zucker School of Medicine Hofstra/Northwell, and Senior Vice President of Laboratory Services at Northwell Health. Crawford received his MD and PhD from Duke University School of Medicine, and his post-graduate training in anatomic pathology and gastrointestinal pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, followed by a fellowship in hepatic pathology at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He has served on the faculty and as a staff pathologist at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Yale University School of Medicine. He was also formerly professor and chair of the Department of Pathology, Immunology, and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville, FL. Dr. Crawford is a leading proponent of the role of pathology and the clinical laboratory in patient- centered care and in accountable care. He is founding member and chair of the board of directors for the Project Santa Fe Foundation, which is advancing the concept of Clinical Laboratory 2.0 for developing the evidence base for the value statements of laboratory services in the next era of American health care. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of Laboratory Investigation, an official journal of the U.S. and Canadian Academy of Pathology, Chair of the Council of Academic Societies of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and on the AAMC Board of Directors. He currently is Editor-in-Chief of Academic Pathology, the official journal of the Association of Pathology Chairs.

President & CEO
Evan is the founder, President and CEO of Protein Fluidics, Inc. Protein Fluidics provides protein analysis and immunoassay systems using microfluidics to accelerate data driven decisions in the laboratory. He has over 30 years of senior executive and technical expertise in numerous hi-tech industries including hard disk drive, semiconductor, telecom, and biotechnology. He has been involved in all phases of the design, development, and manufacture of systems for biological assays, materials analysis, optical inspection, and process control. Prior to Protein Fluidic, Evan served as the President and CEO of Blueshift Biotechnologies, a high-content screening and analysis venture that was acquired by Molecular Devices, a Danaher company, in 2008. At Molecular Devices, Evan led global technology development initiatives for novel Life Sciences products, directed an assay development group, and chaired the company’s scientific advisory board. Evan’s passion is integrating new technologies into products that provide unexpected value to customers in life sciences and other communities. Evan holds a B.S. in Chemistry from Caltech and earned his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He has authored 40+ publications in the fields of biology, physical chemistry, and optical instrumentation and holds 16 patents

Director, Research Collaborations, Department of Genetics
Seth Crosby is the Director of Research Collaborations in the Department of Genetics at Washington University. Crosby works with groups within and outside the University to leverage technology to achieve research and clinical goals. He has been at Washington University for nearly 12 years. During that time, he directed the Department of Genetics Microarray Core, which is now part of GTAC and then GTAC, itself, during its first two years. Prior to that he was the Director of Translational Research at the Genome Center (now the Genome Institute). Prior to his tenure at Washington University, Dr. Crosby worked in the field of genomics and drug discovery at Abbott Laboratories, Pfizer and Pharmacia.

Vice President, Immunology, Head, Companion Diagnostics
Dr. Curran is currently Vice President of Immunology at Janssen Research & Development, LLC. He leads the Companion Diagnostics and Digital Healthcare strategy for Immunology and is a Development Team leader for multiple clinical assets. Mark’s experience in drug and diagnostic development spans over 25 years in biotech, venture and pharma. Mark earned his doctorate in Human Genetics at the University of Utah, has co-authored over 50 scientific publications and holds multiple patents. He has contributed seminal discoveries in the field of heritable cardiac arrhythmias and developed the Familion™ diagnostic test for long QT syndrome. His primary interests are discovery of novel therapeutics, implementation of molecular diagnostics for personalized medicine and evolution of Digital Health Care and Integrated Patient Care Solutions to improve the lives of all patients living with auto-immune disease.

CEO
Mr. Manoj Dadlani serves as Chief Executive Officer at CosmosID, Inc., a genomic big data company focused on rapid identification of microorganisms for infectious disease diagnostics, public health surveillance, food safety monitoring, pharmaceutical discovery, and microbiome analysis for health and wellness. CosmosID has built the largest curated databases for best-in-class microbial identification and characterization. So far, the technology has already been utilized in over a dozen high impact peer reviewed publications. Previously, Mr. Dadlani served as a partner at Applied Value Group, a management consulting and investment firm, and was co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Rasa Industries, Ltd., a leading beverage manufacturing company in northern Nigeria. Mr. Dadlani has substantial experience in strategy, M&A, supply chain management, product development, marketing and business development. Mr. Dadlani received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Biological Engineering from Cornell University.

Director, UC Health Data Warehouse, Center for Data-Driven Insights and Innovation (CDI2), University of California Health
Lisa Dahm, PhD is Director of Enterprise Data & Analytics at UCI Health, and Associate Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the Institute for Clinical & Translational Science at UC Irvine. She oversees the enterprise clinical and research data warehouse projects, the clinical & quality analytics implementations across the enterprise, and the clinical research informatics support strategy at UC Irvine. She is a founding member of the UC Research Exchange (UCReX) where she led the technical implementation of UCReX Data Explorer to support federated data sharing of clinical information across the 5 medical centers. As Director of the UC Health Data Warehouse (UCHDW), she also leads a matrixed team of individuals from all five UC Health medical centers in the implementation of a centralized, OMOP-based clinical data warehouse that is modeled on the UC Irvine clinical data warehouse.

Medical Oncology Fellow, Genitourinary Oncology Service, Department of Medicine
Dr. Daniel Danila graduated valedictorian from C. Davila University of Medicine in Bucharest, Romania in 1996. Attracted by the promise of targeted therapy to increase treatment efficacy and limit toxicity, he pursued a career in translational research, initially working on pituitary tumorigenesis at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA in a research fellowship. He continued with residency training at MGH and graduated the fellowship training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, NY. After he joined the staff in Medical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, he focused on the critical unmet needs in prostate cancer clinical research and management, specifically in understanding prognosis, determining whether therapies are effective, and profiling disease to guide treatment selection using blood-based diagnostics. He received awards from ASCO, AACR, and the Department of Defense to study the role of molecularly profiling circulating tumor cells as biomarkers in patients with prostate cancer and his work has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Health, Department of Defense, and investigator-initiated studies partnering with industry. He is an author of numerous studies in these areas, including in PNAS, JCO, Lancet, NEJM, Clinical Cancer Research, and he is a member on the Editorial Boards of several journals.

Marketing Manager
Ankita Das, PhD is currently the Marketing Manager at MedGenome Inc where her work involves market development efforts for MedGenome's Immuno-oncology, and NGS services portfolio. She holds a PhD in Genetics, Molecular& Cellular Biology from the University of Southern California and has experience in studying epigenomic mechanisms of Neural crest development. Prior to working at MedGenome, she worked at Takara Bio USA where she was responsible for launching and marketing of products for low-input and Immune profiling applications.

 

Executive Editor
Kevin Davies is a scientific editor, author and publisher. 25 years after establishing Nature Genetics as the founding editor, he launched The CRISPR Journal, a new peer-review journal on gene editing (published by Mary Ann Liebert Inc.) He has also served as editor-in-chief of Cell Press, Bio-IT World and publisher of Chemical & Engineering News. Kevin is the author of several popular science books including Cracking the Genome and The $1,000 Genome. Last year he joined Jim Watson and Andrew Berry as a co-author of DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution. He is also the recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and is working on a new book on genome editing. Kevin graduated with a degree in biochemistry from Oxford University and obtained his PhD in human genetics from St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London. After a pair of postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and Harvard Medical School, he retired from the bench, landing a position as genetics editor for Nature magazine.

Senior Director, Immuno-Oncology, Early Development & Translational Oncology
Dr Davis (BA, University of California, Santa Barbara; PhD, Stanford University) has studied multiple interactions between the immune system and disease, including HIV, inflammation, and cancer. His current focus is on monitoring immune responses in cancer patients to determine which therapy might be most beneficial.

Sr Dir Innovation Programs & External Networks, Innovation Programs & External Networks
Dany currently leads the implementation of various industry-first AI projects at Sanofi in departments like R&D and Regulatory Intelligence which builds on his earlier work in automation and the development of culture change platforms. He also explores blockchain applications in the healthcare space. Dany is an engineer trained in biology and has over 20 years of industry experience at GSK and Sanofi Pasteur. In various global positions he contributed to the research, product and clinical development, manufacturing and regulatory submission of both companies’ line of products.

Vice President, Computational Biology
A molecular biologist by training, Renee has spent the last decade guiding drug discovery and biomarker development by designing and building high resolution molecular models of disease, and creating systems that find meaning in big biological data. Her team of biologists and computational biologists are spearheading our most innovative projects, which are focused on using modeling strategies such as deep learning and neural network applications to understand the molecular underpinnings of health and disease. Renee was previously Senior Vice President of Research and Chief Scientific Officer at Selventa. In that role, she set the scientific direction for the company’s personalized medicine strategy and built a multidisciplinary team of biologists and computational biologists to characterize disease biology and identify target pathways. Before that Renee was Selventa’s Senior Director of Scientific Research Operations, responsible for designing and building the company’s biomarker discovery platform. Renee holds a doctoral degree in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor of science degree in bioengineering with a minor in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Senior Director, R&D Strategy and Alliances, SPMD, Strategy, Program Management and Data Sciences
Tom received his PhD from the University of California San Francisco. He started his career in bioinformatics and data science, eventually leading teams in genomics, and molecular sciences. He then transitioned to project management, project leadership and portfolio management, ultimately taking on the role of chief of staff for the neuroscience research area. Two years ago, Tom joined Alexion to lead a number of alliances with the goal of, increasing the ability to diagnose children with rare diseases. Recently, the alliance with the Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine and CliniThink led to a record-setting patient diagnostic effort.

Program Manager
Dr. Nadine Defranoux joined the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in July 2016. She oversees the Tumor Neoantigen Selection Alliance, a joint initiative with the Cancer Research Institute (CRI) as well as leads and manages other collaborative research projects in the field of antigen discovery. She has a significant experience in the areas of inflammation, infectious diseases and cancer. Prior to joining PICI, Dr. Defranoux was Associate Director for Scientific Affairs at Crescendo Bioscience, a Myriad Genetics Company, where she established and managed international collaborations with key opinion leaders to study the first multi-biomarker disease activity blood test in rheumatoid arthritis to be commercialized. She also assisted in the development of the company’s prospective outcome study protocol. Previous to that, Dr. Defranoux has been managing global clinical trials for an imaging CRO and directing in silico-disease modeling projects for a biotech. Dr. Defranoux received a PhD in Microbiology from the Pasteur Institute /Paris VII and completed her post-doctoral training at UCSF in immunology.

Vice President and Head of Global Medical Affairs
Dr. Eslie Dennis is a physician with 10 years’ experience in clinical practice (internal medicine and hematology/oncology), 20+ years international experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, 2+ years leadership of public-private partnerships, and laboratory research experience (immunology). She is Vice President and Global Head of Medical Affairs at Roche Tissue Diagnostics, which focuses on the development, manufacturing and commercialization of tissue-based cancer diagnostics. In this role, she has established and leads all global Medical Affairs activities supporting Companion Diagnostics, Advanced Staining, Primary Staining and Digital Pathology. Prior to joining Roche Tissue Diagnostics, she was Executive Director of the Predictive Safety Testing Consortium and Executive Director for the Polycystic Kidney Disease Outcomes Consortium at the Critical Path Institute (C-Path) where she led collaborations with global health authorities, the pharmaceutical industry, academia, the NIH, patient organizations, and other private sector and non-profit organizations. She was responsible for the development and execution of strategic research plans to support the regulatory qualification of biomarkers and led interactions with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency and the Japanese Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices Agency. Prior to joining C-Path, she was Vice President and Medical Head Northeast for Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, where she led a field-based medical affairs team and developed patient- and customer-focused medical strategies. She has spent over 20 years in the biopharmaceutical industry overseeing registration studies, pre-launch activities and post-marketing medical activities for both pharma and diagnostics organizations. She has led commercial communications strategies on a global brand team and her Medical leadership experience includes responsibility for non-registration studies, epidemiology and health economics and outcomes research, publications, medical information services, physician and pathologist training, medical education programs, drug safety activities and regulatory interactions including FDA Advisory Committee presentation. Dr. Dennis received her MBChB from the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Harare, Zimbabwe, and was the recipient of the Winston Churchill, Margaret Low, and Prankard-Jones Scholarships, as well as the Guy Elliot Bursary. She is a Fellow of the College of Physicians of South Africa and received her internal medicine and hematology/oncology training at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa.

Director, Diagnostics Lead, Precision Medicine and Genomics, Innovative Medicines and Early Development (IMED) biotech unit
Benoit Destenaves has 18 years of experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry specializing in the analysis of molecular biomarkers. Benoit started his career in 1999 working for Genset, a French Biotech company that specialized in pharmacogenomics. He then worked for Serono/Merck Serono where he held positions of, increasing responsibility linked to precision medicine in oncology, endocrinology and fertility. He joined AstraZeneca in 2013 to lead the dolecular diagnostics labs and Pharmacogenomics group within the Precision Medicine and Genomics Function where he developed the group’s focus on novel approaches (ctDNA, NGS) for companion diagnostics. In his current role, he leads strategic diagnostic projects and precision medicine approaches at AstraZeneca.

Instructor, Laboratory of Dr. Matthew Porteus, Department of Pediatrics, Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Regenerative Medicine
Daniel Dever is a Research Instructor in the laboratory of Dr. Matthew Porteus at Stanford University, in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Regenerative Medicine. During his postdoctoral work in the Porteus group, he (with others) developed a CRISPR/Cas9-based beta-globin (HBB) gene editing by homologous recombination methodology (gene targeting) in CD34+ hematopoietic stem cells as a potential therapeutic strategy to treat severe sickle cell disease. Dr. Dever (along with collaborators) has now successfully used this methodology to efficiently target >20 genes in primary blood cells that are associated with hematopoiesis, hematopoietic genetic diseases, hematopoietic malignancies, or safe harbor sites. Dr. Dever's primary research interests are to continue to leverage CRISPR/Cas9-based genome editing technologies to study the molecular mechanisms of gene targeting in human hematopoietic stem cells with the ultimate goal of optimizing and further developing novel cell and gene therapies for disease of the blood and the immune system. Currently, he is leading IND-enabling preclinical efficacy, feasibility, safety and tumorigenicity studies for FDA approval of a first-in-human clinical trial at Stanford in 2018 for the treatment of severe sickle cell disease using CRISPR/Cas9-based HBB gene targeting in autologous hematopoietic stem cells.

Division of Cancer Biology and Therapeutics, Departments of Surgery, Biomedical Sciences and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute
Dr. Dolores Di Vizio is a pathologist and a molecular and cell biologist trained at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Di Vizio holds an academic appointment as associate professor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is Executive Chair of the International Society of Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV). Her group studies the molecular mechanisms of progression to advanced disease in human tumors, with a particular emphasis on large oncosomes, extracellular vesicles (EVs) shed into the extracellular space from fast migrating and metastatic amoeboid cancer cells. Her lab is currently profiling the large oncosomes and other EV populations by NGS and proteomics for functional and molecular characterization. She employs molecular, cellular, animal, and human tissue models to perform molecular and functional analysis of circulating Large Oncosome (LC) in prostate cancer and other tumors. Molecular profiling is based on large scale quantitative LC/LC- MS/MS, and NGS.

Assistant Professor, Radiation Oncology, Stanford Cancer Institute, Institute for Stem Cell Biology & Regenerative Medicine
Max Diehn MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at Stanford University. He has co-appointments in the Stanford Cancer Institute and Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. Dr. Diehn trained at Harvard University and Stanford University and has a background in genomics and stem cell biology. He is also a board-certified Radiation Oncologist and specializes in treatment of lung cancer. Dr. Diehn’s research programs spans basic, translational, and clinical studies. He has made significant contributions in number of areas, including in cancer stem cell biology and cancer genomics. His group recently developed a next generation sequencing-based method for detection of circulating tumor DNA called CAPP-Seq. Further development and clinical application of this approach are major ongoing research efforts in his laboratory.

Director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory, Assistant Professor of Clinical Pathology
Jennifer Dien Bard, PhD, D(ABMM), is the director of the clinical microbiology and virology laboratories at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) and Associate Professor of Clinical Pathology at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. She is also the program director of the Medical and Public Health Microbiology CPEP training program at CHLA. Dr. Dien Bard is a Diplomate of the American Board of Medical Microbiology. Her current research interests, include the development and utilization of rapid laboratory diagnostics and their subsequent impact on patient management.

Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Pathology
Dennis J. Dietzen is currently Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Pathology at Washington University where he directs the Core Laboratory and Metabolic Genetics Laboratory at St. Louis Children's Hospital. Dr. Dietzen received a PhD in Biochemistry from Indiana University in 1992 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Washington University in 1995. Prior to his return to St. Louis in 2002, he was a chemist at DuPont Diagnostics (now a part of Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics) and served as Director of Clinical Laboratories at the Memphis Veterans Affairs Hospital. Dr. Dietzen has been a member of AACC since 1994 and has served the Association in numerous local, division, and national capacities. He was a member of the organizing committees for the 2001-2003 Oak Ridge Conferences, the 2007 and 2010 Annual Meetings, and will serve as Chair of the 2013 Annual Meeting in Houston. Dr. Dietzen was a member of the ABCC Board of Directors, serving as chair of the chemistry examination subcommittee and then as Vice President and Chair of Examinations. He was the newsletter editor for the Pediatric-Maternal Fetal Division from 2007-2010. Dr. Dietzen currently serves as Chair of the Government Relations Committee and a member of the Pediatric Reference Range Committee. Dr. Dietzen served the NACB on the Expanded Newborn Screening LMPG committee and is a member of the Academy of Clinical Laboratory Physicians and Scientists and the Society for Inherited Metabolic Disorders. He is an author/coauthor of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications, monographs, and book chapters on subjects ranging from basic membrane biochemistry to various clinical issues, including anemia, acute liver failure, drugs of abuse testing, and metabolic disease. Finally, Dr. Dietzen is co-editor of the fourth edition of the Biochemical and Molecular Basis of Pediatric Disease published by AACC Press.

Co-Founder, Chief Business Officer
Perry has more than 20 years of commercialization and reimbursement experience with novel diagnostics. In co-founding CoverMyTest, Perry continues his dedication to simplifying the healthcare reimbursement process to improve patient outcomes while also improving the payor and provider processes to deliver those outcomes. Perry is also founder of The Diagnostics Conference, which is aimed at bringing together the Principal thought leaders and executives in personalized medicine, from leading diagnostic companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers, to discuss the current challenges and subsequent opportunities for launching a successful diagnostic test in the U.S. marketplace.

CSO
As the Chief Science Officer of Sapiens Data Science, Inc., Kuan leads all aspects of the company’s science-related research, development, and solutions, including product strategy, bioinformatic and data analysis work flows, and technical support for commercial and operational functions. Additionally, he works closely with other company leaders to ensure effective use of diverse data sources, cost-effectiveness, and continuous improvement to achieve overall company success. Prior to joining Sapiens, Kuan was a Senior Data Scientist at Intrexon, where he pioneered data science and computational biology efforts in the health therapeutics division. He successfully created a scientific team dedicated to the application of bioinformatics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence algorithms in health. Kuan received a PhD in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology from the University of California, San Diego, a MSc in Biostatistics from the University of Virginia, and a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin.

CSO & Senior Vice President, Research
Steve Doberstein leads the discovery, clinical development, and regulatory affairs teams at Nektar and joined the company in January 2010. Prior to joining Nektar, Dr. Doberstein served as Vice President of Research at XOMA, a monoclonal antibody discovery and development company, where he led the discovery and development of multiple antibody drug candidates, from discovery through non-clinical safety, translational medicine and PK/PD. Prior to that, he served as VIce President of Research at Five Prime Therapeutics, a protein and antibody discovery and development company, and Xencor, a leader in protein engineering. He also held senior leadership positions at Exelixis. He received a PhD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and was a MDA Postodctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. Steve also serves as the Chairman of the Board of Nektar India, and represents Nektar to the NIH Public/Private Partnership to Address the Opioid Crisis.

Professor, Clinical Pharmacy and Family and Community Medicine
Betty J. Dong, PharmD, CSHP, FASHP, FCCP, FAPHA, AAHIVP, is Professor of Clinical Pharmacy at University of California Schools of Pharmacy and Family and Community Medicine. She received her PharmD from UCSF in 1972 and then completed a clinical pharmacy residency at UCSF in 1972. Betty holds a joint appointment in the Department of Family and Community Medicine. She is a clinician for the Clinicians' Consultation Center (CCC), a national telephone consulting service funded by the CDC and HRSA for the management, including pre-exposure and post-exposure prophylaxis, for HIV, HBV, and HCV infection in adults, children, and during pregnancy. Betty’s clinical practice functions under a collaborative prescribing protocol. These clinics, include the Family HIV/HCV clinic and a Family Medicine clinic for the referral of difficult-to-manage patients with chronic diseases, including hepatitis C, HIV, hypertension, anticoagulation, diabetes, non-adherence, and medication reconciliation. At UCSF, she provides HCV education and follow-up assessment for chronic HCV+ and HIV/HCV co-infected patients, including pre and post liver transplants. Betty has extensively published and lectured in the aforementioned areas.

Asst Prof Biochemistry in Medicine, Medicine & Hematology & Medical Oncology, Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center
Luke Dow did his postdoctoral work with Prof. Scott Lowe developing new approaches to interrogate gene function in the mouse, specifically, the in vivo application of inducible (and reversible) shRNAs, and inducible CRISPR/Cas9-based genome editing tools. His lab at Weill Cornell Medicine is focused on understanding the biology of gastrointestinal malignancies, particular colorectal and pancreas cancer. They build transgenic systems and organoid-based models to investigate how genetic context and local environmental cues influence the onset, progression and therapeutic response of cancer.

Senior Biology Director and Chief Scientist, Advanced Solutions Group
John Dresios has 15 years of experience in researching the mechanisms governing the regulation of gene expression ranging from DNA and chromatin structure to RNA expression and protein synthesis. As a Chief Scientist at Leidos (formerly SAIC), he has conceptualized, captured and directed internally- and US government-funded programs for the development of advanced diagnostic and therapeutic technologies at the intersection of biology, bioinformatics, chemistry and engineering. His accomplishments have been recognized with various awards and his elevation to the rank of Technical Fellow. His team applies advanced laboratory and computational tools to interrogate the effects of environmental stimuli on the genome and epigenome and delineate how such factors affect the host’s molecular phenotype. In addition, they apply NGS-based approaches to quantify the effects of genome editing on the various levels of DNA structure and chromatin organization toward the development of novel genome manipulation detection methods and advanced genome editing characterization tools. Before Leidos, Dr. Dresios worked in Europe as well as at The Scripps Research Institute and the University of Chicago in the areas of nucleic acid-protein recognition, large ribonucleoprotein structure and function, and control of gene expression.

CEO
Ashish Dua is a serial entrepreneur with a successful exit and is currently the CEO of Glidian. He has previously worked in the health IT and medical device industry at companies such as Boston Scientific, Thoratec (now Abbott), and Vigilant Medical. He holds degrees in Biomedical and Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Professor, Department of Statistics, Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health
Sandrine Dudoit is Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Dudoit's methodological research interests regard high-dimensional inference and, include exploratory data analysis (EDA), visualization, loss-based estimation with cross-validation (e.g., density estimation, regression, model selection), and multiple hypothesis testing. Much of her methodological work is motivated by statistical inference questions arising in biological research and, in particular, the design and analysis of high-throughput microarray and sequencing gene expression experiments, e.g.,single-cell transcriptome sequencing (RNA-Seq) for discovering novel cell types and for the study of stem cell differentiation. Her contributions include: exploratory data analysis, normalization and expression quantitation, differential expression analysis, class discovery, prediction, inference of cell lineages, integration of biological annotation metadata (e.g., Gene Ontology (GO) annotation). She is also interested in statistical computing and, in particular, reproducible research. She is a founding core developer of the Bioconductor Project (http://www.bioconductor.org), an open-source and open- development software project for the analysis of biomedical and genomic data. Professor Dudoit is a co- author of the book Multiple Testing Procedures with Applications to Genomics and a co-editor of the book Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Solutions Using R and Bioconductor. She is Associate Editor of three journals, including The Annals of Applied Statistics and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Professor Dudoit was named Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2010 and Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute in 2014. Professor Dudoit obtained a Bachelor's degree (1992) and a Master's degree (1994) in Mathematics from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She first came to UC Berkeley as a graduate student and earned a PhD degree in 1999 from the Department of Statistics. Her doctoral research, under the supervision of Professor Terence P. Speed, concerned the linkage analysis of complex human traits. From 1999 to 2000, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley. Before joining the Faculty at UC Berkeley in July 2001, she underwent two years of postdoctoral training in genomics in the laboratory of Professor Patrick O. Brown, Department of Biochemistry, Stanford University. Her work in the Brown Lab involved the development and application of statistical methods and software for the analysis of microarray gene expression data.

CTO
William B. Dunbar is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Two Pore Guys (2PG), Inc. Dr. Dunbar received his doctorate in engineering from Caltech in 2004, and was an associate professor at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) until 2015.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Stanford Genome Technology Center, Department of Biochemistry
Gozde Durmus is a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University; working with Prof. Ronald W. Davis and Prof. Lars Steinmetz at the Stanford Genome Technology Center. She received her Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University in May 2013, with a minor in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship. She is also an alumna of the Ignite Program at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Boston University and received her M.Eng. degree in Biomedical Engineering as a College of Engineering Fellow in 2009. She received her B.S. degree in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Middle East Technical University (METU) in 2007. She has been recently recognized among the "Top Innovators Under 35" (TR35) by the MIT Technology Review.

Senior Technologist and Independent Life Sciences Consultant
Chris Dwan is an independent technologist, focusing on data strategies and technology architectures for genomics and the life sciences. Dwan led research computing at the Broad Institute through a critical period of cloud transformation. He led design and implementation of the IT systems for the NY Genome Center. Dwan was the first full-time employee at the consulting firm “BioTeam,” leading their consulting efforts for nearly a decade. Dwan’s academic background is in machine learning and artificial intelligence. He is based in Somerville, MA, just north of Boston.

Senior Software Engineer
John Earls is a Computer Science PhD candidate at the University of Washington-Seattle and a Sr. Software Engineer at the Institute for Systems Biology where he works in the Hood-Price Lab for Systems Biomedicine. John's work focuses on integrating diverse omics "Personal Dense Dynamic Data clouds" (e.g. WGS, clinical measures, proteomics, metabolomics, exposures, etc.) into models of human wellness and disease.

Director, Scientific Affairs, Flow Cytometry
Mark Edinger is the Scientific Advisor for Flow Cytometry at Q² Solutions. Mark began his career at the Cleveland Clinic where he pioneered flow cytometry there in the late 1970’s. During his 21 years there he developed many of the techniques and assays employed today for clinical practice and academic research. In 1998 Mark formally joined BD Biosciences where he founded the Technical Applications Group, and later the R&D Systems Validation Laboratory. While at BD Mark, working with scientists at Amgen, developed the whole blood phosphoprotein lysing buffer that is now used daily in labs throughout the world. Mark joined Quintiles in 2012 and since here has, working with his former colleagues at BD, put quantitative standardization of flow cytometers in place, along with other state of the art practices, making Q² flow labs the first to offer this level of instrument standardization anywhere in the world. BD and Q² presented this work at Cyto/ISAC 2014. Mark is currently implementing next generation flow cytometry globally at Q², which will be operational in 2019.

Co-Founder and CEO
Dr. Eggington is a world expert in the initial classification of novel genetic variants in germ line (hereditary) disease, high throughput literature curation, as well as the accurate re-classification of Variants of Uncertain Significance (VUS) through optimized research methods. Dr. Eggington has directed variant classification and reclassification programs at Myriad Genetics, Courtagen, and 23andMe. Dr. Eggington co-founded the Center for Genomic Interpretation (CGI) in 2016, which became a nonprofit organization in 2017, with the mission to drive quality in clinical genetics. To accomplish its mission, CGI provides services to laboratories, health insurers, clinicians and patients.

Senior Director, Pathology & Companion Diagnostics, Pharma Services Medical Director
Ehab A. ElGabry, MD is a board-certified pathologist who currently heads the Roche companion diagnostics (CDx) pathology group. He also serves as the Roche CDx pharma services medical director. Dr. ElGabry completed his preliminary general surgery and pathology residencies at the Cleveland Clinic Ohio. Subsequently, he finished his fellowship training in breast and cytopathology at the University of Florida, Jacksonville. Dr. ElGabry then joined University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) as an independent pathologist and research associate, where he focused on digital pathology. In addition, he has also obtained a certificate of completion of the Essential Management Skills for emerging leaders’ course at Harvard extension school, Boston. Dr. ElGabry is renowned for his expertise in developing scoring algorithms and immunohistochemical assays for personalized medicine and companion diagnostics. His team developed Roche PDL1 CDx assays. He has extensive research background, including over 100 publications, and serving as a book editor. In addition, he has delivered many national and international presentations and workshops where he trained hundreds of pathologists on PDL1.

Assistant Professor, Chemical and Systems Biology
Dr. Joshua Elias is a Cape Cod native who received his undergraduate degree from Cornell in Biology in Biology (1998), and his Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School in Cell Biology with Stephen Gygi (2006). Perhaps best-known for the ubiquitous "target-decoy" search strategy for controlling error in proteomics experiments, he has long been interested in bringing proteomics workflows in sync with the kinds of robust methods used in genomics and allied fields. Since 2009, Dr. Elias has directed his laboratory at Stanford University towards solving three extraordinary challenges in proteomics: identifying disease relevant antigens presented on MHC complexes; characterizing the biologically relevant proteins that mediate host and microbiome inter-and intra-organism interactions, and computational tools that surmount the obstacles both experiment types pose. As a step towards meeting the first experimental goal, his team has been building a MHC analysis platform that has earned support from the NIH, W.M.Keck and Gates foundations to study antigen presentation in lymphoma, head and neck cancer, allergy, and infection. In parallel, the Elias lab developed a method they termed “host-centric” proteomic analysis of stool, which we have shown enriches the precise kinds of proteins one would desirably measure when studying host-microbiome relationships. To solve the problem of low protein identification rates associated with both types of experiments, his lab developed a new spectrum interpretation tool called TagGraph (under review), which is capable of unbiased, rapid, and accurate PTM discovery. It can also identify proteins without a priori knowledge of their source organism. This strategy stems from our efforts to develop and apply de novo search methods for characterizing proteomes when the source genome is ill-defined or completely absent, as is the case with both gut microbiota and MHC-presented antigens. The lab’s long-term goal is to unify these efforts, to better understand and control how our diets and commensal microbes influence our immune health.

Executive Medical Director, Translational Medicine, Companion Diagnostics
Kenneth Emancipator received his AB degree from Harvard University and his MD from St. Louis University. He completed his medical internship at Westchester County Medical Center and his pathology residency at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was a Senior Staff Fellow at the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Emancipator began his career in academics, having served as Director of Clinical Chemistry at Cornell University and Beth Israel Medical Center. He subsequently migrated to the medical device industry, holding positions as Director of Medical Affairs for Bayer Diagnostics, Senior Director of Medical Affairs for Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, and Senior Director of Medical Regulatory and Clinical Affairs at Abbott Molecular. He has also worked as an independent consultant to the medical device and pharmaceutical industries before joining Merck to lead its companion diagnostics program. He is a former officer and former member of the Board of Directors of the American Society for Clinical Pathology. He is considered an expert on medical device safety and precision medicine. In his current capacity, Dr. Emancipator led the Merck team which worked with Dako to develop the PD- L1 test, which identifies those non-small cell lung cancer patients most likely to benefit from Keytruda® (pembrolizumab), and which is the first companion diagnostic in immuno-oncology to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Emancipator was one of six members of the Keytruda® Team to receive the 2015 PhRMA Research and Hope Award for Biopharmaceutical Industry Research on behalf of Merck.

Senior Vice President, Global Head of Cell Therapy Research
Peter Emtage serves as the Global Head of Cell Therapy Research at Kite, a Gilead company. He most recently served as the Chief Scientific Officer at Cell Design Labs. He previously held senior positions at Intrexon, MedImmune and Femta Pharmaceuticals. Peter is an immunologist by training and over the past 20 years has focused on developing drugs to modulate the immune response in humans. His work in oncology, autoimmunity and infectious disease has included the utilization of viral and non-viral delivery systems, chimeric antigen receptors and TCR adoptive T cell modalities, and monoclonal antibodies in checkpoint blockade and immuno-oncology. His career started with a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health followed by his role as Research Scientist at Aventis Pasteur and then Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

COO, Freenome
With the knowledge and skills he gained as a biotechnology entrepreneur, Riley is helping to make Freenome’s vision of a cancer-free world a reality. As the company’s co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Riley heads the clinical and commercial development of Freenome’s noninvasive tests for early cancer detection and treatment selection. A Thiel Fellow, Riley developed a cancer vaccine and founded his first biotech company, Immudicon, while still in high school. While earning his degree in molecular biology at Dartmouth, Riley co-authored several publications and worked as a visiting scientist with Novartis. In addition to his work as a scientist, Riley worked as an analyst at Morgan Stanley and an associate at Bridgewater, where he observed the positive impact of a strong organizational culture firsthand. Riley’s previous biotech experience includes work at Foundation Medicine, Syros Pharmaceuticals, Adimab, and Emergent Biosolutions.

Chief Medical Officer, Senior Vice President, Clinical Genomics
Dr. Phil Febbo was appointed as Chief Medical Officer at Illumina in March 2018. In this role, he is responsible for developing and executing the Company’s medical strategy to drive genomic testing into healthcare practice. Dr. Febbo has a successful track record of translational research, clinical excellence and for embedding molecular insights into clinical care. Immediately before joining Illumina, Dr. Febbo served as CMO of Genomic Health. Prior to his five years at Genomic Health, Dr. Febbo was a Professor of Medicine and Urology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where his laboratory focused on using genomics to understand the biology and clinical behavior of prostate cancer, and his clinical practice focused on genitourinary oncology. Dr. Febbo holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from Dartmouth College and an MD from UCSF. He completed his internal medicine residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and his fellowship in oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. While an Attending Physician in the Genitourinary Oncology Center at Dana-Farber and Instructor at Harvard Medical School, he spent 5 years as a post- doctoral fellow in Dr. Todd Golub's laboratory at Dana-Farber and the Whitehead Institute Center for Genomic Research of MIT (now the Broad Institute). In 2004, Dr. Febbo joined the faculty at Duke University Medical Center’s Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy for 6 years until his return to UCSF. Dr. Febbo served as a primary investigator for the Translational Research Program of The Alliance, an NCI-supported cooperative group focused on, incorporating biomarkers into large clinical trials.

Digital Health Analyst and Chief Growth Officer
DrBonnie360’s mission is to create a digitally connected world of personalized care for autoimmune patients. Driven by personal and professional passion, she uses 21st Century technology to raise awareness about the invisible autoimmune epidemic and to build bridges across the abyss of slow diagnosis and disappointing treatment. Bonnie is an invited speaker for SXSW, Stanford Medicine X, Bio-IT, Data to Drugs to Diagnostics, StrataRx, Games for Health, the Center for Connected Health, the NY eCollaborative Digital Health Summit, the mHealth Summit, and Ideas LA. Her work is featured in Medium, The Doctor Weighs In, O’Reilly Strata, Greatist, and Forbes. DrBonnie360’s recent multimedia work spotlights, “The Invisible Epidemic of Autoimmune Disease,” “ The Lonely Voices of Autoimmune Disease,” and “Bridging the Autoimmune Abyss Through New Discoveries.” If you are a forward-thinking entrepreneur in a big company or small, primed to take on the huge and growing unmet needs of the autoimmune market, let’s talk. I bring a broad and deep network of digital health and autoimmune connections, as well as experience as a healthcare provider, Wall Street financial analyst, and consultant to companies supporting digital medicine.

Staff Scientist, dbGaP Team Lead, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
Michael Feolo is a staff scientist at the NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology Information and since2007 has been the team lead for the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP). The database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP) was developed to archive and distribute the data and results from studies that have investigated the interaction of genotype and phenotype in Humans. From 2000-2007, Michael worked on developing dbSNP, NCBI’s database of genetic variation. During this time, Michael participated as a member of the International HapMap planning and analysis committees and coordinated the upload of genotype data from the project to the dbSNP. Michael received a BS in Molecular Biology, 1996, and MS in Medical Informatics, 1999, from the University of Utah, Department of Biomedical Informatics.

CEO and President
Joe Ferrara has over 20 years of experience in life sciences consulting, working with biopharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostics, and informatics clients in market and business development strategy.

CEO, Teselagen
Kimary Kulig joined Verily Life Sciences in June 2016 to lead oncology research within the science organization. Prior to Verily, Kimary was the Lead for Molecular Oncology Research at Bristol-Myers Squibb, where she designed and directed a large lung cancer immuno-profiling cohort study and a multi-center study for pathologists to compare lab-developed and FDA-cleared PD-L1 IHC assays. Before BMS, Kimary was Vice President, Clinical & Translational Outcomes Research for the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) where she directed the Oncology Outcomes Database team and created a blueprint for a next generation, cloud-hosted database. Prior to NCCN, Kimary spent 8 years at Pfizer leading Outcomes Research programs in colorectal, breast, and lung cancers and melanoma. Kimary designed and conducted biomarker-linked outcomes research projects supporting the successful launch of crizotinib (Xalkori) in lung cancer, including IHC-FISH concordance evaluation for ALK translocation. Kimary earned her doctorate in Immunology and Molecular Oncology from New York University and a master’s degree in Public Health from Columbia University.

Partner
Wainwright Fishburn, Jr. is a founding partner of Cooley’s San Diego office, a prominent venture capital attorney and global chair of the firm’s digital health group. Wain's practice emphasizes general representation of life science, technology and other operating companies that range from startup through IPO. His practice focuses on corporate governance matters as well as mergers, acquisitions, strategic alliances, and intellectual property licensing and management. He also assists his client companies in financing matters, often involving the placement of debt and equity securities.

Co-Lead, Discovery Work Stream, Global Alliance for Gemonics and Health; Co- Founder, CEO, DNAstack; Co-Founder, Canadian Genomics Cloud
Dr. Marc Fiume is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of DNAstack – a Toronto-based genomics company that has created an advanced platform for genomics data storage, bioinformatics, and sharing on the cloud. Dr. Fiume is an associate at OICR, working closely with a variety of teams in OICR’s Genome Informatics and Computational Biology groups to create software tools that enable genomics research. Dr. Fiume also co-leads the Discovery Work Stream of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), an international group of organizations working to create a unified data discovery platform that makes it easier to find and use data for genomics and clinical analyses. He is the Co-Chair of the Beacon project, which is working to create a ‘Google for genomics’.

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

Principal
Becky Foster, Principal, has nearly 20 years of industry and consulting experience in managed care, health policy, and reimbursement for biotechnology manufacturers, molecular diagnostic labs, and digital health companies. She has worked across multiple therapeutic areas, drug classes, and treatment modalities for both launch and legacy products. Her experience includes marketing, account management, strategic planning, training, market analytics, and operations. Becky received her undergraduate degree from Harvard and a master’s in public health with a focus on health policy and administration from the University of California at Berkeley.

Vice President, Associate Chief Medical Officer
John Fox, MD, is Vice President, Associate Chief Medical Officer, medical affairs at Priority Health. He is responsible for medical technology assessment (medical and pharmaceutical), utilization and case management, physician profiling and pay-for-performance programs. He is also responsible for development of new programs, including shared decision making, advanced care planning, integrated specialty pharmacy program and value-based benefit designs. He is currently engaged in payment reform strategies, including oncology medical home initiatives and bundled payments with Prometheus. The author of many articles, Dr. Fox has written on the use of firearms in suicides, firearm-related deaths and hospitalizations, breast cancer mortality rates, asthma hospitalizations, hip fractures among the elderly and the impact of spine management programs on surgery rates. He has also written and lectured on value-based benefit design, the impact of genomics and proteomics on the future of medical practice, and role of shared decision making in reducing unwarranted variations in healthcare utilization, including end-of-life. His current interests include the use of cost-effectiveness and number-needed-to-treat analyses in coverage determinations, specialty pharmacy management, the effect of pay for performance programs on health outcomes, and the role of advanced care planning in improving patient experience and health outcomes.

President and Chief Scientific Officer
Agnete B. Fredriksen is Co-Founder, President and CSO of Vaccibody AS. She holds a MSc, PhD from Institute of Immunology, Rikshospitalet Medical Center in Oslo where she designed and developed the first Vaccibody vaccines. Agnete is one of the inventors of the Vaccibody technology and received the King’s Gold Medal for her PhD thesis describing the first Vaccibodies. Her focus is on improvement of cancer immunotherapy and moving innovative cancer vaccines from idea to clinical development. Previous employment, includes Affitech AS and Medinnova AS. Agnete is author on numerous scientific papers in the field of immunology, immunotherapy and vaccines. She is inventor on several patents in the field of immunotherapy. She is board member for UIA of NRC as part of her efforts stimulating innovation in the Norwegian industry. In Vaccibody, Agnete has been involved in all disciplines from, inception to clinical trials with main responsibility being all R&D, including the neoantigen-based cancer vaccine program at Vaccibody.

Vice President of Research
Multiplex Image Analysis in The Tumor Microenvironment Using Artificial Intelligence Visiopharm Ben Freiberg has a PhD from CU Denver and serves as Vice President of Research Product at Visiopharm. Dr. Freiberg’s time is predominantly spent on expanding Visiopharm’s software offerings with a focus on the research market.

Chief, Laboratory of Neurogeriatrics
Dr Friedland is a clinical and research neurologist devoted to the study of brain disorders associated with aging. He is a graduate of the City College of New York and was a student at the University of Kentucky School of Medicine before graduating from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York in 1973. He completed his neurology residency at the Mount Sinai Hospital and was a Fellow in dementia and aging at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY. He then worked at the University of California, Davis, and in the Research Medicine Group of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University California, Berkeley where he served as Chief Neurologist. From 1985 to 1990 he was Deputy Clinical Director and Chief of the Section on Brain Aging and Dementia of the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health of Bethesda, MD. At the CWRU School of Medicine he was Professor of Neurology, Radiology and Psychiatry and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurogeriatrics from 1990 to 2008. In December of 2008 he joined the faculty of the University of Louisville, as a Professor of Neurology. Dr. Friedland’s work has focused on clinical and biological issues in Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders. Dr. Friedland has authored or coauthored over 200 scientific publications and has current research funding from the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Aging), as well as several Foundations, Institutes, Corporations and Families. He has had over $1,000,000 of research funding to support his work from 1985-2013.

Pharmacy Regulatory Affairs Advisor, Retail Chain Pharmacy; Adjunct Professor of Pharmacy Law, Pacific University School of Pharmacy
Dr. Tim Frost graduated from the University of Toledo College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences with his PharmD. Working with the Ohio Pharmacists Association and the Idaho State Board of Pharmacy during school, he discovered his passion for point-of-care testing, public policy, and regulatory affairs. Dr. Frost went on to become the first Pacific University School of Pharmacy and Oregon Board of Pharmacy Regulatory and Academia Fellow. He wielded this new unique opportunity to teach pharmacy law and led the startup of the Oregon Public Health and Pharmacist Formulary Advisory Committee to expand independent prescriptive authority for certain drug categories and devices. Dr. Frost currently specializes in pharmacy regulatory affairs for a retail chain pharmacy corporation and continues to teach pharmacy law as an adjunct professor at Pacific University School of Pharmacy.

Associate Member, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; Associate Professor, Weill Cornell Graduate School for Medical Sciences; Director, The Warren Alpert Center for Digital and Computational Pathology; Head, Computational Pathology and Medical Machine Learning Laboratory, Department of Pathology, Memorial Sloan Kettering
Thomas Fuchs heads the Computational Pathology and Medical Machine Learning Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and teaches biomedical machine learning as associate professor at Weill-Cornell in New York City. He is director of The Warren Alpert Center for Digital and Computational Pathology. His passion for the tremendous potential of artificial intelligence in medicine resulted in more than 90 publications spanning a range of topics from novel deep learning and Bayesian approaches for quantification to real-world applications in the clinic. Previously, Thomas was a rocket scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he developed autonomous computer vision systems for space exploration. He completed his Postdoc at the California Institute of Technology after receiving his Dr.Sc. in machine learning from ETH Zurich.

Vice President, Clinical Affairs, Veritas Genetics; Associate Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School (AMP Genetics Subdivision Chair and Representative to the AMP 2018 Board of Directors; Member)
Birgit Funke, PhD, FACMG, Associate Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School; Vice President, Clinical Affairs, Veritas Genetics Dr. Funke received her Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the University of Würzburg, Germany and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York where she identified the gene for 22q11 deletion syndrome. She subsequently completed a fellowship in Clinical Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School and has dedicated her career to personalized genetic medicine since then. She served as the director of Clinical Research and Development at the Laboratory for Molecular Medicine (LMM) and was among the first worldwide to implement clinical next generation sequencing (NGS). She also has a extensive experience in clinical diagnostic testing for inherited cardiovascular disorders and is co-chairing the cardiovascular domain working group of the Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen) whose mission is to harmonize and centralize knowledge resources for genomic medicine. Today, Dr. Funke is Vice President of Clinical Affairs at Veritas Genetics and part time Associate Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. Her long term goal is to use genomic testing for disease prevention.

SVP, R&D
Dr. Furebring joined Alligator Bioscience in 2001, as a SVP R&D she is responsible for the pipeline program consisting of mono and bispecific antibodies for tumor directed immunotherapy of cancer. Dr. Furebring has more than 20 years of experience with protein and antibody optimization as well as generation of antibodies using phage display. Dr. Furebring completed her PhD in Immunotechnology from Lund University, Sweden.

Medical Director, Molecular Oncology, ARUP Laboratories, Associate Professor of Pathology
Larissa Furtado, MD is a molecular oncology medical director at ARUP Laboratories and an associate professor of pathology at the University of Utah School of Medicine. She completed her residency in anatomic and clinical pathology at the University of Utah and ARUP Laboratories, where she was chief resident, and a molecular genetic pathology fellowship at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining ARUP as a medical director, she co-founded the Division of Genomic and Molecular Pathology at the University of Chicago, where she was an assistant professor of pathology and co-director of the University of Chicago Clinical Genomics and Molecular Diagnostics Laboratories. In addition to developing numerous molecular diagnostics and genomic tests and being invested in national pathology education, Dr. Furtado’s practice also, includes immuno-oncology with focus on PD-L1 biomarker testing in solid tumors.

Instructor, Genetic and Genomic Sciences
Kiran plans, develops and implements marketing programs for Sunquest Mitogen™, a molecular diagnostics enablement solution comprised of a molecular LIMS and genetic analysis software. Kiran joined Sunquest with dedicated experience in health technology, having served as Director of Marketing for iSpecimen, where she grew brand and product awareness for a cloud-based human specimen procurement tool supporting precision medicine research. She earned a BS from Tufts University summa cum laude and MBA from Boston College.

Professor of Genetics, Perelman School of Medicine
Dr. Ganguly is a Professor of Genetics and is a molecular biologist with particular expertise in mutation analysis and adaptation of novel assays for mutation scanning and direct mutation detection. She is Board Certified in Clinical Molecular Genetics by the American Board of Medical Genetics. Prior to her appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Ganguly was on the faculty of the Thomas Jefferson University School of Medicine. Dr. Ganguly directs the laboratory which is a reference laboratory in the US for genetic testing of Hemophilia A, Retinoblastoma, Li Fraumeni disease, Herediatry Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT or Osler Weber Rendu Syndrome), Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, Russell Silver syndrome, and Uveal melanoma. She supervises all diagnostic testing for these disease-related genes.

Founder & President, BigHead Analytics Group; Principal Algorithm Development Engineer, Sensor R&D, Diabetes R&D, Medtronic
Dr. Elaine Gee is the founder and Principal consultant of BigHead Analytics Group (BHA) with industry expertise in clinical bioinformatics and scalable compute platforms for clinical genomic testing. BHA is a consulting group that provides analytics expertise in advanced computational technologies –, including bioinformatics, machine learning, and data science - to healthcare clients to achieve their clinical and research goals. Previously Dr. Gee was the Director of Bioinformatics at ARUP Laboratories, a national clinical and anatomic pathology reference laboratory. At ARUP, she supported the bioinformatics and compute infrastructure for next-generation sequencing-based assays. At ARUP she led her team to scale bioinformatics by creating and deploying a clinical-grade, cloud-based compute infrastructure in Amazon Web Services to execute standardized bioinformatics pipelines for clinical NGSbased genetic tests (a.k.a. “Pipey”, see www.genomeweb.com). This work included tuning somatic and germline pipelines by variant class, developing a central genomic variant datastore to house discrete data, modularizing the infrastructure, and executing comprehensive validations. Additionally, her work included implementing bioinformatic and benchside processes and techniques to improve performance for low frequency variant detection and NGS panel design. Dr. Gee leverages benchside techniques, design architecture, and automated software testing to achieve analytic quality at scale. Her background includes cross-disciplinary experience in algorithm design, signal processing, molecular dynamics modeling, and instrument integration and control. Dr. Gee earned her PhD in biophysics from Harvard University and a B.S. in physics.

CSO, Computational Neuropharmacology, In Silico Biosciences; Adjunct Associate Professor, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Hugo Geerts spent 17 years in the (CNS) Drug Discovery Area, with Dr. Paul Janssen, probably the greatest drug hunters in history at the Janssen Research Foundation in Beerse, Belgium doing research in Alzheimer’s disease with targets in tangle and amyloid pathology. He was involved in supporting the successful preclinical, clinical and postmarketing development of galantamine for Alzheimer’s Disease. In 2002, he co-founded In Silico Biosciences, a company providing mathematical modeling of pathological interactions in the brain for supporting the whole process of Drug Discovery – from Target validation to clinical trial design - in Psychiatry and Neurology, an approach now called Quantitative Systems Pharmacology. He is leading the Brain Health Modeling Initiative, is a driving force behind the NINDS/NIA workgroup on QSP in CNS and is co-chairman of the QSO workgroup in the International Society for Pharmacometrics. He has over 90 peer-reviewed publications and patents.

Senior Director of Platform, Applications
Tad has over 15 years of startup experience dedicated to creating scientific markets for novel instrumentation platforms that span basic research, drug discovery and clinical applications. Prior to joining RareCyte, Tad has held similar positions at Biodesy, Inc. and DVS Sciences, and was Director of Biology at Amnis Corporation. Tad completed his B.A. in Biochemistry from the Univ. of Texas at Austin, Ph.D. in Immunology from UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and post-doctoral training at Immunex Corp. in Seattle.

Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics
Dr. Gehlenborg directs a research lab (http://gehlenborglab.org) at Harvard Medical School that focuses on data visualization techniques for biomedical data. His group designs and implements techniques for visualization of genomic and epigenomic data for both basic and clinical research. Dr. Gehlenborg leads the data visualization team for the NIH Common Fund 4D Nucleome Data Coordination and Integration Center and he is also involved in several projects aimed at creating novel visualization techniques for large-scale cancer genomics data. Furthermore, Dr. Gehlenborg is actively pursuing the development of key software infrastructure to accelerate the creation and distribution of biomedical visualization tools (http://phovea.caleydo.org) and the integration of such tools with data management and analysis pipelines (http://www.refinery-platform.org). Dr. Gehlenborg is a co-founder and former co-chair of BioVis (http://biovis.net) and VIZBI (http://vizbi.org), which are long-running data visualization meetings focused on biological data. He is currently serving as the chair of the BioVis Steering Committee. Dr. Gehlenborg is also an Associate Editor of BMC Bioinformatics and a contributor to the Nature Methods "Points of View" data visualization column. His work was honored with Best Paper and Best Poster awards at the IEEE Information Visualization conference. Dr. Gehlenborg is a co-founder of datavisyn (http://datavisyn.io), a company that develops data visualization solutions for applications in pharmaceutical and biomedical R&D. Dr. Gehlenborg received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and was a predoctoral fellow at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). He completed postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute.

Global Director, Regulatory Affairs and Quality Assurance
Jason Gerhold, Global Director of RA & QA, led Invivoscribe’s CDx regulatory development strategies resulting in international companion diagnostic approvals supporting multiple drugs. Fifteen of his twenty years of experience in biotechnology were in regulatory affairs, quality, and clinical affairs.

Head, Pathology, Translational Science
Dr Ghoddusi is a translational pathologist with extensive experience in the field of oncology and immune-oncology biomarkers. Previously he has lead the experimental pathology group at Novartis, and has co-founded Ensigna Biosystems, a molecular pathology service provider. Currently, he is the head of Translational Pathology group at Juno Therapeutics where he leads efforts in analyzing tumor biopsy samples collected at clinical trials. A major focus of his group is to identify biomarkers that predict response in patients, and try to elucidate underlying mechanisms that would explain relapse in particular groups of patients.

MSc, Scientific Affairs Liaison
Arielle is highly experienced field based scientist, specializing in single cell isolation and analysis platforms, with experience in the medical device and diagnostics industry, medical affairs, and clinical trials. She has over decade of research experience in the fields of vaccine development and immune checkpoint blockade inhibitors, and holds a Master of Science (MSc) in Bioinformatics, Computational Immunology from Brandeis University.

Assistant Professor of Medicine, Channing Division of Network Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Dr. Kimberly Glass is an Assistant Professor in the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Associate Scientist at Harvard Medical School. Her primary research interests include developing methods for integrating and interpreting multiple sources of -omics data in the context of gene regulatory networks and investigating the potential translational application of networks for understanding susceptibility to, severity, and treatment of complex diseases.

Medical Director
Dr. Glassy is a community pathologist in Southern California and director of pathology at Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center, San Pedro. He is a member of Affiliated Pathologists Medical Group, a 40-person independent pathology group covering 15 hospitals and laboratories in California, Portland and Phoenix. Dr. Glassy has won a number of pathology awards, including the Distinguished Service Award and Excellence in Education Award from the College of American Pathologists (CAP). He has chaired hospital and CAP national committees. He served as chairman of the Hematology and Clinical Microscopy Resource, Publications, Digital Pathology and Curriculum Committees. He is a past Board Member of the CAP Foundation and a graduate of the Engaged Leadership Academy. He is president of the Digital Pathology Association. He edited, wrote and illustrated several pathology color atlases and developed software programs for pathology reporting, outreach, and practice management. He holds a green belt in Six Sigma. He is a trustee of the American Board of Pathology as well as a board of governor of the College of American Pathologists.

Healthcare Consultant; Author, Commercializing Novel IVD’s Content
Mr. Glorikian has more than 20 years of experience in the health care and life science industries. He has deep commercial background in diagnostics, molecular biology, proteomics, cellular biology and biodefense. His unique understanding of technologies, operations and strategy from both customer and industry player perspectives has shaped a sophisticated framework and proprietary analytic tools. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration from Boston University, a Masters of Business Administration from the Boston University, and a BA in General Biology from San Francisco State University.

Research Investigator
William J. Godinez obtained his PhD degree in computer science from the University of Heidelberg in Germany in 2013. From 2006 to 2015 he worked as a research assistant with the Biomedical Computer Vision Group at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), in Heidelberg, Germany. In 2015 he joined the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) in Basel, Switzerland as a Postdoc. Since2017 he has been working as a Research Investigator at NIBR in Emeryville, California, USA. He is the author of two book chapters and more than 35 peer-reviewed scientific articles. His current research focuses on developing deep learning methods to gain novel insights from biomedical data to guide decision-making processes in drug discovery. For his research work Dr. Godinez has been awarded a number of prizes, including the Thomas Gessmann Foundation prize for "outstanding dissertations in technical fields" in 2014.

Chancellors Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Sciences endowed Professor and Director, Molecular Oncology, Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Kansas Medical Center, Deputy Director
Andrew K. Godwin, PhD, is the Chancellors Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Sciences endowed Professor and the Director of Molecular Oncology at KUMC. He serves as the founding director the Clinical Molecular Oncology Laboratory (CMOL), a CLIA- certified, CAP-accredited molecular diagnostics laboratory and supports the precision medicine initiative for the KU Health System. He was recruited to KUMC as the Associate Director for Translational Research for the Cancer Center in November 2010 and his engaged participation as a member of the Cancer Center's leadership team helped led to NCI-designation for the first time in 2012, and resulted in him being promoted to Deputy Director in 2013. Dr. Godwin also serves as the Director of the KUCC's Biospecimen Repository Core Facility as well as the Scientific Director for the Biomarker Discovery Laboratory (BDL). He was named a Kansas Bioscience Authority Eminent Scholar in 2010 and the Biorepository Coordinator for the HICTR Translational Technologies Resource Center in 2011. His contributions towards education and training was recognized when he was presented the KUMC School of Medicine Achievement Award for Mentoring Post-Docs in 2014 and the KU Medical Center's Faculty Investigator Research Award in 2015.

Author A Life Everlasting The Extraordinary Story, of One Boys Gift to Medical Science
Sarah Gray is the author of the award-winning, Washington Post bestseller, A Life Everlasting: The Extraordinary Story of One Boys Gift to Medical Science. Her work and her family's story has been featured on CNN, WNYC's RadioLab, The Moth RadioHour, TED Talk of the Day, The Associated Press, Science Magazine, Reader's Digest, The Atlantic, and other major media outlets. Sarah Gray advocates for organ, eye, tissue, and blood donation around the world. See www.sarahgray.com for more information. Twitter: @SGrayDC

Head, Pharmacodiagnostics
George A. Green, IV PhD is Head, Pharmacodiagnostics in the Bristol-Myers Squibb Translational Medicine organization. He joined BMS in March 2010 and played a key role in establishing Pharmacodiagnostics as a core capability within BMS. In his role, George has been responsible for leading pharmacodiagnostic development programs in oncology, neuroscience, cardiovascular, and virology, as well as early diagnostic development programs in a number of therapeutic areas and across multiple technology platforms. In his current role, George heads the Pharmacodiagnostics team, providing strategic direction and support for all diagnostic platforms across the portfolio BMS Oncology and Innovative Medicine assets. Prior to joining BMS, George was the Director of Assay Development at Veridex, LLC (a Johnson & Johnson Company), where he focused on oncology molecular diagnostic products. Prior to Veridex, George worked at Ortho Clinical Diagnostics,Inc., in the development of immunoassay products for transfusion medicine and clinical diagnostics. Dr. Green received his PhD degree in Microbiology from The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. He also holds a B.A. degree from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA and is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt.

Assistant Professor, Laboratory Medicine, Assistant Director, Clinical Virology Laboratory
Alex Greninger, MD, PhD, M.S., M.Phil., is assistant director of the UW Medicine Clinical Virology Laboratory and a UW assistant professor of Laboratory Medicine. Dr. Greninger focuses on genomic and proteomic characterization of human viruses. He has co-discovered multiple new human and animal viruses, including human salivirus, which is associated with pediatric diarrhea. Dr. Greninger earned his MD and PhD, from UC San Francisco, his M.S. from Stanford and his M.Phil. from Cambridge in England. Dr. Greninger has specific clinical interests in respiratory viruses and human herpesviruses. He serves as a Associate PI of the Hepatitis B Research Network and as a virologist on the Transformational Science Group for Antiretroviral Therapy Strategies for the AIDS Clinical Trial Group.

Head of CellSearch Assay Development R&D
Currently the Head of CELLSEARCH Assay Development for Menarini Silicon Biosystems. Steven has been involved in research and development in the field of rare cell detection and analysis for most of his career. As a Scientist/Senior Scientist, he has been a part of the CELLSEARCH story from its beginning at Immunicon Corporation followed by Veridex, LLC and Janssen R&D, developing the platform and the various IVD and RUO assay kits and services. Received Master’s degree in biology from Temple University.

Frederick H. Rawson Professor, Professor of Medicine and Computer Science, Jim and Karen Frank Director, Center for Data Intensive Science (CDIS), Co-Chief, Section of Computational Biomedicine and Biomedical Data Science, Dept. of Medicine
Robert L. Grossman is the Frederick H. Rawson Professor of Medicine and Computer Science and the Jim and Karen Frank Director of the Center for Data Intensive Science at the University of Chicago. He is the Principal investigator for the National Cancer Institute Genomic Data Commons (GDC), a next-generation platform for the cancer research community that manages, analyzes, integrates, and shares large-scale genomic datasets in support of precision medicine. He is also the Director of the not-for- profit Open Commons Consortium that develops and operates data commons and data clouds to support research in science, medicine, health care, and the environment.

CMO
Bill Grossman has an extensive background in the development of cancer immunotherapies and joined Bellicum in 2018 from Genentech/Roche. In his most recent role at Genentech, Dr. Grossman served as the Group Medical Director, Cancer Immunotherapy, where he led the global clinical development of TECENTRIQ® in gastrointestinal cancers and of cancer immunotherapy combinations across all solid tumor types. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President, Research & Clinical Development at Biothera, and also held leadership positions in oncology and hematology research, clinical development, and medical affairs at AbbVie, Baxter Healthcare, and Merck & Co. Prior to joining the industry, he held various positions with the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, and was Founder and Medical Director of the Clinical Immunodiagnostic and Research Laboratory, Professor for Microbiology and Genetics, and Director of the Hematology/Oncology/Bone Marrow Transplant Division for the Immunodeficiency Transplant Program. Dr. Grossman earned his MD and PhD degrees from Washington University School of Medicine.

Associate Professor, Developmental Neuroscience
Guru (CB Gurumurthy) received his BVSC (DVM) from Bangalore Veterinary College, India and MVSC & PhD in Veterinary Virology from Indian Veterinary Research Institute, with a Gold Medal distinction in MVSC, and an Executive MBA from University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is currently an Associate Professor of Developmental Neuroscience, Munroe Meyer Institute for Genetics and Rehabilitation at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He is also the Director of the UNMC’s Mouse Genome Engineering Core Facility. His research interests are improving and development of novel genome engineering technologies. He is a co-developer of popular technologies such as Easi (Efficient additions with ssDNA-inserts)-CRISPR, CRISPR-first: PITT-next and GONAD (Genome Editing via Oviductal Nucleic Acids Delivery). Some of these technologies have already been adapted in many labs worldwide.

Partner, NDA Partners LLC; Former Director, Office of In vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health, FDA
Alberto Gutierrez, PhD is a Partner with NDA Partners and has worked with the company as an Expert Consultant since2017. He is an expert in preclinical and clinical testing of in vitro diagnostic devices and radiological imaging devices, premarket notifications of devices, applications for approval, and post- marketing surveillance and compliance. Dr. Gutierrez oversaw the Personalized Medicine Staff at the FDA and developed and managed the policies surrounding companion diagnostic devices. Dr. Gutierrez was also a member of the Center for Devices and Radiological Health committee that oversaw policies on Digital Health. During his 25-year career at FDA, Dr. Gutierrez served in several executive roles at the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), including, Director, Office of In vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health; Director, Office of In vitro Diagnostic Device Evaluation and Safety; Deputy Director, New Product Evaluation, Office of In vitro Diagnostic Device Evaluation and Safety; and Director, Division of Chemistry and Toxicology Devices. He served as Toxicology Team Leader in the Division of Chemistry and Toxicology Devices and as Scientific Reviewer in the Chemistry and Toxicology branch (CDRH). In addition to his experience at the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, Dr. Gutierrez served as Staff Scientist in the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), Office of Vaccines Research and Review researching the biochemical properties of vaccine adjuvants and polysaccharides.

Senior Director, Pharmacology & Toxicology
Dr. Haines currently serves as Sr. Director at Oncorus, where he leads a group that tests the preclinical activity, mechanisms of action, and safety of Oncorus’ OV candidates, toward advancement to the clinic. Before Oncorus, Dr. Haines supported or led the pharmacology efforts at Merck (MSD) for many IO programs, including immune checkpoints PD1 and LAG3, as well as several small molecule and OV programs.

Applied Computer Scientist, Quantum Computing
Dr. Hamed's research is concerned with investigating the biological phenomena exhibited on Real World Data. He has contributed new network models and algorithms to generate early warning alerts for drug- side effects by mining billions of tweets. He is analyzing biomedical literature to investigate therapeutic molecules and their association with genes, proteins, cell types, and chemical entities. He has been designing a network centrality algorithm that is concerned with ranking drugs according to their specificity which is a biological a notion that is inspiring the main ranking heuristic of his algorithm. Dr. Hamed was among the FastCompany MostCreative People annual edition of 2016.

VP, Biologic Development
Bonnie J. Hammer, PhD is the Vice President of Biologics Development at Invenra, Inc. headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. Invenra is focused on discovery and development of multispecific antibodies for immuno-oncology. Invenra’s proprietary B-Body™ and SNIPER™ technologies are used to develop novel antibodies that can bind to two or more specific therapeutic targets and mimic the natural IgG antibodies made by the human body. Dr. Hammer holds a PhD from the University of Oregon in Biochemistry and has over 17 years’ experience in cell biology, disease modeling, and assay development for drug discovery. In her current role, she focuses on non-clinical and pre-clinical in vitro and in vivo functional assays for therapeutic antibodies. Prior to joining Invenra, Dr. Hammer held research and development leadership roles in the Discovery Assays and Services business unit of Life Technologies.

Executive Vice President, Clinical Genomics
Garret Hampton joined Illumina in 2017 and leads the company’s Clinical Genomics group, which includes Clinical Assay Development, Regulatory, Clinical Product Marketing, Market Development, Lab Services, and Clinical Research groups, as well as the Office of the Chief Medical Officer. Before joining Illumina, he held a variety of leadership positions at Genentech, Inc., and was most recently Vice President and Global Head of Oncology Biomarker Development and Companion Diagnostics. He previously held scientific and management roles at Celgene Corporation, Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, and Genos Biosciences. Hampton holds a BA in natural sciences and genetics and an MA in natural sciences from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and a PhD in cancer genetics from Imperial Cancer Research Fund and University College London.

MS Program Director for Clinical Informatics, Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research, Associate CMIO
David Hanauer earned his medical degree from the University of Michigan, followed by training in pediatrics at the New York University Medical Center. He then obtained a master's degree in medical informatics at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston through the combined Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Dr. Hanauer is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan Medical School with a joint appointment in the School of Information. He is a practicing pediatrician and serves as program director of Clinical Informatics for the CTSA-supported Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research (MICHR). He is also an Associate Chief Medical Information Officer for the Michigan Medicine. His academic interests, include clinical and health informatics initiatives primarily focused on the secondary use of clinical data and the interface between patients and the health care system. Dr. Hanauer's primary informatics efforts these days involve the ongoing development and dissemination of a search engine for clinical documents called EMERSE.

Clinical Instructor
Dr. Hanna is a Clinical Instructor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He had appointments as a Clinical Instructor of Pathology Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh. He completed his residency at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and a Pathology Informatics fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Dr. Hanna serves as a junior editor of the Journal of Pathology Informatics. He has strong interests in pathology and clinical informatics, as well as breast pathology. Matthew’s knowledge in digital pathology ranges from experience with all major hardware and software vendors as well as being on the medical advisory board for PathPresenter, an open access pathology platform.

Associate Professor of Pathology and Director, Division of Pathology Informatics
Dr. Douglas J. Hartman is the Director of the Division of Pathology Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and a gastrointestinal pathologist. He has been implementing digital pathology for primary signout as well as for telepathology at UPMC. Dr. Hartman has also been a leader within the UPMC health system in assessing the recent Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience guidelines released by the United States Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. He has participated in implementing two different digital pathology solutions for routine anatomic pathology. Dr. Hartman participated in the Interagency Working Group for Medical Imaging workshop titled “Building the Diagnostics Cockpit of the Future” in September 2017 and the workshop titled “Building the Diagnostic Cockpit of the Future & Advancing High Impact Imaging” in May 2018. Dr. Hartman’s research in informatics is varied but focuses on practical application of informatics. He has published on informatics topics and given national talks based on his informatics work.

Program Director, Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis, National Cancer Institute
Dr. Christopher M. Hartshorn serves as a program director at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health. In this role, he manages nano- and passive continuous monitoring-centric research projects, evaluates effectiveness of the programs, and maintains proper stewardship over federally funded research. Furthermore, he serves as a technical expert to extramural programs and participates in development and direction of new research initiatives within the NCI Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis. Prior to the NCI, Dr. Hartshorn worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Founder and CEO
Dr. Harwood is a former Principal Research Investigator at Pfizer. Currently, he is the Founder and Chief Consultant at Delphi BioMedical Consultants LLC, Adjunct Professor Department of Cell and Molecular Biology and Health Professions Advisory Committee Member at the University of Rhode Island, and Adjunct Professor Department of Pathology at Wake Forest University. Jim brings more than 30-year experience in drug R&D in pharmaceutical industry especially in physiology and pharmacology of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases.

Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer
Matthew Hawryluk, PhD has served as our Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer since October 2015. Prior to Gritstone, from April 2011 to October 2015, Dr. Hawryluk held positions of, increasing responsibility at Foundation Medicine, Inc., or Foundation Medicine, a public molecular diagnostics company, most recently serving as vice president, corporate and business development. Previously, he held roles in business development, marketing and product management across multiple divisions of Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. Dr. Hawryluk received a B.S. from the University of Notre Dame, a PhD in cell biology and protein biochemistry from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and an M.B.A. at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business as a Swartz Entrepreneurial Fellow.

President and CEO
Lin He received her B.S. in Biology from Tsinghua University and her Ph.D. in Stanford University under the mentorship of Dr. Gregory S. Barsh. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with Greg Hannon before joining the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 2008. Currently, Lin He is an associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC-Berkeley. She is interested in gaining mechanistic insights into the functional importance of the non-coding elements in the mammalian genomes. ​

Assistant Professor, Chemical & Petroleum Engineering, Chemistry
Dr. He is a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Kansas after moving from the Kansas State University. She received her PhD degree from the University of Alberta and postdoctoral training from the University of California, Berkeley. She also worked as the senior scientist at the University of Kansas Cancer Center between 2012-2014. She is the vice chair of ASABE Biosensor program and the Councilor of the American Electrophoresis Society. Her research interests include 3D microfabrication of nano-biomaterials, biomedical microfluidic devices and sensing approaches, for designing, programming and monitoring biomimetic immunity, associated with extracellular vesicles-based communications.

CMO
Dr. Christopher Heery is the Chief Medical Officer for Bavarian Nordic where he oversees the clinical development of BN’s pipeline, comprising therapeutic cancer vaccines and vaccines for prevention of infectious diseases. He is a medical oncologist by training. He trained at the National Cancer Institute in the Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology, where he went on to be the Head of the Clinical Trials group in that translational ImmunoOncology-focused branch. He has personally run a wide variety of immunotherapy trials using a variety of first-in-human agents, including therapeutic cancer vaccines, checkpoint inhibitors, antibody-cytokine conjugates, and cytokine targeting antibodies. His trial experience also, includes combination strategies in IO and IO with standard therapies based on mechanistic rationale.

Vice President, Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Hegde is the VP and Chief Scientific Officer, Global Laboratory Services and Adjunct Professor of Genetics and Pediatrics at Emory University and Georgia Tech. Previously, she was the Executive Director of Emory Genetics Laboratory and Professor of Genetics and Pediatrics at Emory University. The focus of her clinical work is the development and implementation of high-throughput strategies for discovery and clinical testing for rare disorders using next generation sequencing (NGS), robotics, clinical exome and genome sequencing, and oligonucleotide array platforms. Her recent work is focused developing strategies for offering clinical genome sequencing for newborns and adult (neurology) populations. Her research work is focused on neuromuscular disorders and understanding the impact rare variant burden in genetic diseases. Dr.Hegde has over 20 years’ experience in clinical diagnostics, which includes laboratory administration, management, developing tools for analysis and interpretation for genomic variation , and consultation with molecular diagnostic companies. She has extensive knowledge of CLIA and CAP regulations related to LDTs and NGS and a strong understanding of current reimbursement landscape and new CPT coding guidelines. She received a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. from the University of Bombay, India, and a PhD from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She completed post-doctoral studies at Baylor College of Medicine and is board certified in Clinical Molecular Genetics.

Director, R&D and Head, Platform Development
Christopher Helsen holds a Master’s degree in biochemistry from the Technical University Munich, Germany and a doctorate from the University of Toronto in biochemistry. He is the primary inventor of the T-cell Antigen Coupler (TAC) technology and founding scientist of Triumvira. Chris has in-depth experience in biochemistry, cell biology and protein science. He has worked so far on a variety of research topics such as spider silks, chaperones and yeast prions. As Director of Research and Development at Triumvira Chris is now managing the development of new TAC products and ancillary technologies.

Sr Data Scientist Machine Learning & Software Eng, Statistics & Visualization
Peter Henstock is the AI and Machine Learning Technical Lead at Pfizer. He served as the site statistician for nearly 10 years while also developing analytics software. Working with scientists and managers, he concluded that visualization was the ideal common ground where everyone could understand and discuss results, so he went on to develop most of Pfizer’s internal visualization and analysis software. Prior to joining Pfizer, Peter worked at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in image processing and computational linguistics projects. He holds a PhD in AI from Purdue University, and Masters degrees in Linguistics, Software Engineering, Biology, and Statistics. He currently teaches graduate level AI and Machine Learning, and Software Engineering at Harvard.

Head, Experimental Pathology Laboratory, Laboratory of Pathology, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute
Stephen M. Hewitt, MD, PhD, is a Clinical Investigator within the Laboratory of Pathology, National Cancer Institute and serves as head of the Experimental Pathology Laboratory. Stephen received his BA from the Johns Hopkins University, and his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston. He completed his residency in Anatomic Pathology at the NCI. Dr. Hewitt is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Histochemistry & Cytochemistry. Dr Hewitt has co-authored over 300 articles and servers on the editorial board of four peer-reviewed journals.

Vice President, Molecular Biology/Protein Engineering
Oliver Hill joined Apogenix in March 2006. He is an expert for protein engineering and protein expression technologies. Prior to his position at Apogenix, he headed the protein expression and purification group at Graffinity Pharmaceutical Design GmbH (Heidelberg, Germany) from 1999 to 2006. At Graffinity Oliver Hill was responsible for delivering a broad spectrum of target proteins for screening on a chemical microarray platform. His work in former, academic R&D positions at the Lower Saxony Institute for Peptide Research (Hannover, Germany; 1992-1996) and the Institute for Molecular Biotechnology (Jena, Germany; 1997-1998), Inc.luded gene hunting, protein engineering and the development of recombinant phage display technologies. Mr. Hill studied biology at the University of Hannover where he also received his PhD from the Department of Chemistry in 1997.

Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA, Medical Director, Quest Diagnostics, and Deputy Director for Global Health, RAND Corporation
Lee H. Hilborne (MD-UCSD 1982; MPH-UCLA 1988) is Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Senior National Medical Director, Quest Diagnostics and a Health Services Researcher at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Dr. Hilborne served as a member of the Board of Directors of the ASCP for nearly 20 years and was president from 2007-2008. Dr. Hilborne is currently a member of the Board of Governors of the ASCP Board of Certification, Chair of the Effective Test Utilization Committee, and past chair of the International Commission. Past RAND work, Includes guidance and direction for formation of the National Health Authority for the State of Qatar, assessment of the appropriateness of a number of clinical procedures, development of strategies to redesign the National Hospital Discharge Survey, evaluation of Pay for Performance for Breast Cancer in Taiwan and evaluation of bundled ambulatory payments for CMS. For ten years Dr. Hilborne was Director of Quality Management Services and Associate Director at UCLA Healthcare. In this role, he was responsible, among other areas, for quality of care and patient safety, medical staff functions, utilization review, and medical coding. He continues to work with UCLA Health to address quality and reimbursement issues. Dr. Hilborne serves on a number of editorial boards and is a member of the Board of Directors and Treasurer of the Institute for Medical Quality (IMQ). He served on several federal committees, including Medicare’s Ambulatory Payment Classification Advisory Committee and the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Advisory Committee (CLIAC). He was the American Hospital Association’s representative to the AMA’s CPT Editorial Panel and now serves as ASCP CPT Advisor to the AMA and co-chairs the PLA Technical Advisory Group.

Director, Community Affairs, Associate Professor, Clinical Pharmacy and Translational Science
Dr. Kenneth Hohmeier, PharmD is an Associate Professor and Director of Community Affairs at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) in Nashville, TN. Dr. Hohmeier engages in a variety of community pharmacy scholarship, mainly in the fields of effectiveness and implementation science research. His currently funded research projects include investigating a new model of medication therapy management (MTM) delivery and implementation for Tennessee’s Medicaid population, point-of- care testing (POCT) implementation and consumer perceptions, use of pharmacist-extenders to improve pharmacy care quality and delivery, and interventions and implementation strategies to reduce vaccine hesitancy. In addition to his research interests, he maintains an active practice site at a community pharmacy in Hendersonville, TN. He also serves as Residency Program Director (RPD) for the UTHSC PGY1 community-based residency program, is Director of Community Affairs for the College of Pharmacy, and serves as a course director and lecturer for several courses within the College of Pharmacy.

Chief of Scientific Intelligence; Director, Molecular Oncology; Director, JWCI Sequencing Center
Dr. Hoon is the Director of Translational Research of John Wayne Cancer Institute (JWCI) and Director of Dept of Translational Molecular Medicine and Sequencing Center. JWCI is a member of the Providence Health System Scientific Advisory Board. He is a pioneer of minimal disease detection in blood assessing cfNA (cell free nucleic acids) and CTC (circulating tumor cells) from the 90’s. Over the years he has demonstrated the clinical utility of molecular blood biopsy assays in multicenter clinical therapeutic trials and surgical oncology trials. In the early studies Dr. Hoon brought in the concept of multimarker molecular approaches for blood biopsy assays.

Founder and CEO
Eleanor Howe is the founder of Diamond Age Data Science and a computational biologist with extensive experience in drug discovery and development. Diamond Age partners with the country’s most innovative biotechnology firms, from early-stage, venture-funded start-ups to well-established small pharmas. Services include statistical modeling and machine learning applications for therapeutics development, as well as guidance on software engineering, informatics, data management, and knowledge architecture. For fledgling companies, Diamond Age can function as a one-stop bioinformatics department, helping to answer both scientific and strategic questions (e.g., build vs. buy, where and how to store large/complex datasets). For more mature companies, Diamond Age provides targeted bioinformatics services designed to fit into existing scientific strategies, with special expertise in transcriptional profiling and pathway analysis. All of the company’s code is meticulously documented to enable reproducibility, and its services are rooted in a deep understanding of fundamental molecular biology – allowing them to be applied across a wide range of therapeutic areas, from diabetes to neuroscience. Diamond Age builds on Howe’s expertise in transcriptional profiling, a field in which she has worked since from its early days of small-scale microarray analysis. Prior to founding Diamond Age, Howe led research in the Center for the Development of Therapeutics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she worked on drug discovery projects in cancer, cardiovascular disease, and kidney disease, among others. She has also worked at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she developed the Multiexperiment Viewer – a powerful software tool for mining large genomic datasets – and the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland. She earned a Ph.D. bioinformatics from Oxford University under Christopher Holmes and John Quackenbush, and holds a master’s degree in cellular and molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor’s degree in cellular and molecular biology from the University of Michigan.

Senior Manager AI Machine Learning Devp, Digital Health Intelligence Group
Dr. Kefeng (Kevin) Hua has over 20 years of experience working in research, design and development of AI/Machine Learning applications in various industries. He is currently a Senior Manager with the Digital Health Intelligence group of Bayer, responsible for application of AI to clinical trials and digital health innovation. Prior to Bayer, he was a machine learning specialist at Deloitte Analytics Institute/AAM Group and a research manager of AI at Center for Advanced Research of PwC. He holds a PhD in AI from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL).

Executive Director, Head of Computational Sciences
Enoch S. Huang received an AB in Molecular Biology from Pr, Inc.eton University and a PhD in Structural Biology from Stanford University, where he was a National Science Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Michael Levitt (2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). He was appointed a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow at Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis), where he developed methods for protein structure prediction with Prof. Jay Ponder. In 1999, Enoch joined Cereon Genomics as a Computational Biologist. The following year, he accepted a position at Pfizer R&D in Cambridge as a Senior Research Scientist. In 2001, he became department head of the newly formed Molecular Informatics group and joined the site management team. In 2007 he accepted a global role as Head of the Computational Sciences Center of Emphasis. External to Pfizer, Enoch has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics at Boston University since2001. He currently serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for Drug Discovery Today, the Bioinformatics Professional Advisory Committee at Brandeis University, and the Industry Advisory Board of the International Society for Computational Biology. He has also served on the external advisory board of the Bioinformatics Program at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the external advisory committee for the Research Informatics Solutions group at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, the program committee of the Systems Biology discussion group at the New York Academy of Sciences, the Steering Group for the Life Sciences Informatics Committee of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and on Special Emphasis Panels of study sections for the National Institutes of Health. He is the author of over 30 research articles, scientific reviews, and book chapters and released the Open Source software package PFAAT.

Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Medical Oncology, Department of Medicine
Dr. Husain received his undergraduate and medical degree from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. He completed his internal medicine residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and an oncology fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature Cell Biology, Science Translational Medicine, Annals of Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research, and Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, among others. His research focuses on novel cancer therapeutic strategies and oncogenic dependencies in solid tumors, specifically lung cancer, with an emphasis on the epithelial growth factor receptor and non-invasive cancer detection strategies.

Scientific Director, Laboratory of Diagnostic Molecular Oncology, Department of Pathology, UMass Memorial Healthcare
I hold degrees in microbiology (BSc), virology and immunology (Ph.D) and a postdoctoral fellowship in oncology at Harvard Medical School. As a scientific director of a CLIA laboratory at UMass Medical school my primary interest lies in development of molecular diagnostic assays and biomarker for early detection, to assist in diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment decisions and to monitor levels of minimal residual disease in cancer patients. When UMASS entered into a Joint Laboratory Venture with Quest Diagnostics my focus expanded to, include payer reimbursement (i.e. lack of) for molecular assays employing next generation sequencing or other advanced technology. In 2015 I joined the Economic Affairs Committee for the Association of Molecular Pathology (AMP) and contribute to AMP review of payer coverage decisions.

Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Professor Imoukhuede recently joined Washington University in St. Louis as an associate professor of biomedical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where she was recognized with a Distinguished Promotion Award to associate professor of bioengineering. Professor Imoukhuede performed biomedical engineering postdoctoral training at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She has earned numerous awards, including the 2017 NSF CAREER Award, the 2018 IMSA Distinguished Leadership Award and the 2018 Young Innovator in Nanobiotechnology.

Assistant Professor, Bioengineering & Electrical & Systems Engineering
David Issadore's research focus is on microelectronics, microfluidics, nanomaterials and molecular targeting, and their application to medicine. These multidisciplinary skills enable him to explore new technologies that can bring medical diagnostics from expensive, centralized facilities, directly to clinical and resource-limited settings. He has developed hybrid chip designs, a portable NMR system and the micro Hall detector.

Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Artificial Intelligence for Medical Systems (AIMS) Lab
Peter G. Jacobs, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). He received his PhD in electrical engineering from OHSU, his master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and his bachelor’s in engineering from Swarthmore College. His lab is called the Artificial Intelligence for Medical Systems (AIMS) lab where his group is applying engineering systems design principles, machine learning, signal processing, and control theory across a number of disease states and chronic conditions, including type 1 diabetes, mobility disorders, including MS and chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, and hearing disorders. Projects ongoing fit broadly within the following areas (1) medical device and algorithm development primarily in diabetes technologies, (2) clinical diabetes research, (3) mathematical modeling of the glucoregulatory system, and (4) ubiquitous computing for home-based health care solutions. Current projects are focused on integrating exercise and metabolic expenditure into automated insulin and glucagon delivery and decision support systems for improving glycemic control in people with diabetes. Several discoveries and technologies from the AIMS lab are being translated to patients and health care providers through licensing by OHSU to commercial partnerships and through new spin-off companies.

Associate Professor, Department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics
Dr. Filip Janku, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics (Phase I Program) at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Janku obtained his MD and PhD at the Charles University Prague. He joined the Department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics in the 2011 after completion of the drug development fellowship at the same institution. Dr. Janku is a Principal investigator for numerous phase I, most of which involve novel, targeted agents, many of those being novel first-in-human studies. Dr. Janku received multiple awards for his research efforts, including Khalifa award, Sidney Kimmel Scholar award, several ASCO Merit Awards as well as an American Association for Cancer Research Scholar-in-Training Award. Dr. Janku has published over 170 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Janku's academic research interests focus on poof-of- concept clinical trials that possess a pivotal correlative component especially those involving liquid biopsies, molecular profiling of cell-free DNA, the PI3K/AKT/mTOR, MAPK, IDH pathways and therapeutic use of oncolytic bacteria.

John & Marva Warnock Prof, Surgery
Stefanie Jeffrey, MD, is the John and Marva Warnock Professor and Chief of Surgical Oncology Research in the Department of Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine. She received her undergraduate degree in Chemistry and Physics and master’s degree in Chemistry from Harvard University. She graduated from medical school at University of California San Francisco (UCSF), where she also completed her surgical residency. Her lab focuses on technology development and applications related to liquid biopsy (CTCs, ctDNA, extracellular vesicles), droplet-based microfluidic platforms, and preclinical models for testing new cancer therapies.

Senior Research Analyst – Medical Policy & Technology Evaluation, Facilitated Health Networks
Eugean Jiwanmall's past professional experiences, include basic science and clinical research. In his current role as a Senior Research Analyst for Medical Policy & Technology Evaluation at Independence Blue Cross’ Claim Payment Policy Department within Facilitated Health Networks, he has served as the subject-matter-expert, writer, reviewer, communicator, presenter, consultant, adviser/facilitator, & decision-maker for hundreds of medical policy topics & technology assessments within dozens of clinical disciplines & multiple business areas. Eugean is finishing graduate work in bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences with honors from Drexel University (minor was in business administration), a master’s degree of public health in evaluative clinical sciences from Dartmouth Medical School, and an MBA in health care management and economics with honors from Drexel University.

CEO, Calviri; Director, Center for Innovations in Medicine, Professor, School of Life Sciences, Biodesign Institute, ASU
Johnston directs the Biodesign Institute Center for Innovations in Medicine and is Founder and CEO of Calviri, Inc. He was the co-inventor of multiple widely used technologies, including pathogen-derived, resistance, organelle transformation, gene gun, TEV protease, genetic (DNA) immunization, immunosignature diagnostics, synbodies and others. He founded Eliance (now Macrogenic, Inc.) and HealthTell (now iCarbonX). Calviri is dedicated to eradicating cancer for everyone. It has unique technologies for diagnostics and vaccines which may enable this goal.

Executive Vice President, R&D
Douglas Jolly, PhD, is a co-founder of Tocagen and has served as our executive vice president, research and pharmaceutical development since December 2007. He is an internationally recognized expert in the field of gene therapy and its pharmaceutical application. Over the last 25 years he has been a senior biotechnology executive involved in translating gene-based products from research through clinical development at the following companies: Viagene, Inc., where he was also a co-founder, Chiron Corporation, Oxford BioMedica plc, where he ran the U.S. subsidiary, BioMedica, Inc., and Advantagene, Inc., where he most recently served as president. He has published more than one hundred scientific articles and is an inventor on more than forty-five issued patents. Before entering the biopharmaceutical industry, Dr. Jolly pursued his academic career in biophysics and molecular biology at the Weizmann Institute; Harvard Medical School; Scripps Clinic; University of California, San Diego; and The French National Institute for Health and Medical Research, INSERM, in Paris. Dr. Jolly holds a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Glasgow. Dr. Jolly is a current board member and past chairman of the Industrial Liaison Committee of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy.

CSO
Dr. Karin Jooss serves as executive vice president of research and chief scientific officer. She joined Gritstone from Pfizer, where she was head of cancer immuno-therapeutics in the Vaccine Immuno-therapeutics Department. While at Pfizer, she built and led immuno-oncology teams, was a member of the vaccine immuno-therapeutics leadership team, and served as head of the immuno-pharmacology team. Her responsibilities, included overseeing the assessment of all cancer vaccine in-licensing opportunities and developing and launching Pfizer’s first clinical cancer vaccine program, which deployed a variety of vaccine platforms and immune modulators to create a multi-component vaccine-based immunotherapy regimen. Prior to joining Pfizer, Dr. Jooss served as vice president of research at Cell Genesys, where she oversaw all research activities related to the company’s cancer vaccine and oncolytic virotherapy programs. She is on the editorial board of Molecular Therapy and the Journal of Gene Medicine and is a member of the Immunology and Educational Committee of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) and the Industry Task Force of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC). Dr. Jooss received a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Marburg in Germany and performed postgraduate work in gene therapy and immunology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Industry CTO Healthcare
Sanjay Joshi is the chief technology officer for healthcare and life sciences in the emerging technologies division of Dell EMC. Based in Seattle, Sanjay's 28-plus year career has spanned the entire gamut of life sciences and healthcare from clinical and biotechnology research to healthcare informatics to medical devices. His current focus is a systems view of genomics, proteomics and healthcare for infrastructures and informatics.

Scientific Liaison, Senior Scientist
Anna Juncker-Jensen is a Scientific Liaison and Senior Scientist at NeoGenomics where she is responsible for scientific and operational aspects of MultiOmyx study execution. Anna received her PhD in cancer cell biology from University of Copenhagen, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute focusing on remodeling of the extracellular matrix and immune responses during tumor progression. Prior to joining NeoGenomics in 2017 she worked at NantBioscience leading several projects with responsibility for delivery of lead cancer drug candidates from discovery to the pre-clinical phase.

Research Fellow, Partners Connected Health Innovation
Dr. Sujay Kakarmath is a physician-scientist conducting research on the use of data science and artificial intelligence for improvement of health outcomes.

Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy
Tom leads enterprise strategy for LabCorp and has spearheaded the launch of many new initiatives, including LabCorp’s whole exome sequencing offering, LabCorp at Walgreens, and Pixel by LabCorp which offers consumer-initiated wellness testing. Tom previously led business strategy and innovation initiatives for the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) and led the launch of the Duke Institute for Health Innovation (DIHI). He also previously led marketing for LabCorp’s Oncology businesses and served as chief-of-staff for CEO Dave King. Tom began his professional career as a consultant with Accenture. He has a BSE in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan and an MBA and Health Sector Management certificate from Duke's Fuqua School of Business.

Head of Research Laboratory, Dep. of Gynecology and Obstetrics
Sabine Kasimir-Bauer received her PhD in 1993 from the Institute of Med. Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Bochum in Germany. During her postdoctoral education in the Leukemia Research Group of Prof. Dr. M.E. Scheulen at the Department of Internal Medicine (Cancer Res) at the University Hospital of Essen in Germany, she studied mechanisms of therapy resistance in patients suffering from acute myeloid leukemia. In 1998, she became Head of the Laboratory for the “Detection and Characterization of Disseminated and Circulating Tumor Cells” at the same Department. Based on her immunocytochemical studies on disseminated tumor cells (DTCs) in the bone marrow (BM) and circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in blood of patients with epithelial cancers, she became Associate Professor in 2003. She continued working in the field as Head of the Laboratory at the Department of Gynecology & Obstetrics in the same University Hospital. Her main focus is the molecular characterization of CTCs in gynaecological cancers, the predictive value of CTCs for monitoring breast/ovarian cancer related therapies, the prognostic value of CTCs, their comparison with DTCs as well as stem cell properties of these cells. Based on these studies, she became apl Professor in 2009. Ongoing studies, include expression profiling of CTCs, including single cell analysis, compared with the expression on the primary tumor as well as the metastases to evaluate patients for targeted therapies. Besides CTC analysis in blood, the group now also focusses on circulating extracellular vesicles and circulating, cell-free DNA applying the use of unique molecular identifiers as well as Next Generation Sequencing. She is an active member of the West German Cancer Center and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).

Director of Clinical Applications, Calviri, Inc.; Center for Innovations in Medicine, Arizona Biodesign Institute
Dr. Katz is a board-certified internal medicine physician and director of clinical applications for Calviri, Inc. In this role, Dr. Katz has been instrumental in setting up early-phase clinical trials for FAST Vaccines (Frameshift Antigens for Specific Therapy), for multiple indications, including pediatric brainstem tumors as well as adult head/neck and non-small cell lung cancers. Dr. Katz’s medical training was completed at Georgetown University Hospital; he continues to practice inpatient hospital medicine at the University of California – San Diego. He is also the founder of Clinical Strategy, LLC, and is a nationally-recognized clinical educator, having taught at over twenty US medical schools. Dr. Katz’s background in translational research, includes previous work in biochemistry and neuroimaging, ongoing drug discovery work for neurodegenerative disease at the University of Pennsylvania, and oncology diagnostics and therapeutics at Calviri and the Biodesign Institute in Arizona.

Layton Professor, Neurology & Biomedical Engineering
Jeffrey Kaye is the Layton Endowed Professor of Neurology and Biomedical Engineering at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU). He directs ORCATECH, the NIA - Oregon Center for Aging and Technology and the NIA - Layton Aging and Alzheimer's Disease Center at OHSU. He leads several longitudinal studies, including: the ORCATECH Life Laboratory, Ambient Independence Measures for Guiding Care Transitions, EVALUATE - AD (Ecologically Valid, Ambient, Longitudinal and Unbiased Assessment of Treatment Efficacy in Alzheimer’s Disease), and the Collaborative Aging (in Place) Research using Technology (CART) Initiative, all using pervasive computing technologies for novel assessments and health interventions. Dr. Kaye has received the Charles Dolan Hatfield Research Award for his work. He is listed in Best Doctors in America. He serves on many national and international panels and boards in geriatrics, neurology and technology, including as a commissioner for the Center for Aging Services and Technology (CAST), on the Advisory Council of AgeTech West, the International Scientific Advisory Committee of AGE-WELL Canada, and Past Chair of the International Society to Advance Alzheimer’s Research & Treatment (ISTAART). He is an author of over 400 scientific publications and holds several major grant awards from federal agencies, national foundations and industrial sponsors.

CTO
Michael Kellen, PhD is the CTO at Sage Bionetworks, a not-for-profit biomedical research institute dedicated to pioneering new ways to gather, store and use health data. Sage’s research programs are united by a philosophy of developing new roles for researchers, patients, clinicians, and others to collaborate around openly shared data, tools, and knowledge. At Sage, Michael has built out a cross- functional technology platform team of software engineers, designers, product managers, and IT professionals that develop the systems that power Sage’s research program. These efforts are currently focused on developing new ways to leverage mobile phone and sensor platforms to capture novel types of medical research data, and on enabling large-scale sharing of genomics, imaging, mobile health, and other data among researchers in the life sciences. As part of the Sage Bionetworks leadership team, Michael leads the development of Sage’s technology strategy, and develops multidisciplinary research collaborations with a range of leading academic, industry partners. Prior to joining Sage, Michael held a variety of positions in bioinformatics start-up companies, and completed a PhD in bioengineering at the University of Washington with a focus in computational biology.

Lab Chief, Laboratory of Genitourinary Cancer Pathogenesis, Center for Cancer Research
Dr. Kelly is chief of the Laboratory of Genitourinary Caner Pathogenesis (LGCP) and Deputy Director for Basic Research in the Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute. As chief of LGCP, Dr. Kelly advances integration with the clinical prostate cancer program to carry out mechanism-based translational studies using a variety of pathological, genomic, and patient-derived live culture approaches. A major area of her laboratory research investigates mechanisms of prostate cancer tumorigenesis and progression, addressing the roles of oncogenotype, tumor heterogeneity/cancer stem cells, and metabolism in the development of therapeutic responses, especially for castrate resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). In collaboration with Dr. Eva Corey at the University of Washington and with physicians at the NIH Clinical Center, Dr. Kelly has established, characterized, and utilized a platform of PDX-derived and biopsy-derived organoids that reflect the genomic landscape and phenotypes of CRPC patients.

Associate Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Dr. Kelly is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Brigham Young University and he holds a joint appointment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. His research focuses on the development of new technological solutions for improved biochemical analyses, including mass spectrometry-based proteomics. To this end, his team has developed ultrasensitive electrospray ionization sources based on chemical etching techniques that enable improved stability in the nano and picoflow regime, multiplexed electrospray sources to extend nanoelectrospray performance to higher flow separations, ion optics for, Inc.reased ion transmission to the mass analyzer, and ultrasensitive biochemical separations based on liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis. Most recently, Dr. Kelly’s efforts have focused on overcoming the losses and inefficiencies associated with isolation and preparation of trace biological samples for proteomic analyses, which has resulted in the development of nanoPOTS, a microfluidic platform that has enabled in-depth proteome profiling of single mammalian cells.

Full Member, Human Biology
Dr. Kemp received a BA in Biology from Case Western Reserve University, an MS in Fisheries Toxicology from Oregon State University and PhD in Experimental Oncology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His PhD thesis focused on the genetic and hormonal basis of hepatocellular carcinoma using mouse models. He did postdoctoral research with Allan Balmain at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow Scotland studying the role of Hras and p53 in multistage cancer using mouse models. He has been at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center for over 23 years where he studied the role of tumor suppressor genes, including p19/Arf, Atm, Cdkn1b/p27 and Ctcf in cancer progression. He is currently using functional genomic approaches to identify new cancer drug targets using a range of patient derived tumor models. Highlights of Dr. Kemp’s 30-year research career in studying the environmental and genetic basis of cancer using mouse models, include the following. 1.Discovery of a causal role for p53 in tumor progression and metastasis (Kemp et al., 1993). 2) Discovery that p53 is a major barrier to ionizing radiation induced carcinogenesis (Kemp et al., 1994). 3) Discovery of synthetic lethality between DNA repair genes DNA-PK and Atm, the first such example in mammals and predating the current interest in synthetic lethality in cancer research by many years (Gurley and Kemp, 2001). 4) Discovery that p27 is a tumor suppressor gene (Fero et al., 1998). 5) Discovery of the first example of a haploinsufficient tumor suppressor, thus modifying one of the central dogmas in cancer research (e.g. Knudson’s two hit hypothesis). The concept of tumor suppressor haploinsufficiency is now firmly integrated in the field of cancer genetics (Payne and Kemp, 2005). 6) Discovery of a novel p53 independent apoptotic pathway that is regulated by DNA-PK (Gurley et al., 2009). 7) Discovery that the DNA binding protein CTCF is a haploinsufficient tumor suppressor gene (Kemp et al., 2014). 8) Pioneering the application of proteomics to mouse models of cancer for early detection research (Pitteri et al., 2011; Whiteaker et al., 2011; Taguchi et al., 2011). 9) Development and application of a functional genetics platform to both human and mouse derived tumor cells to identify new cancer drug targets (Moser et al., 2014, Xu et al, 2018).

Associate Professor
Dr. Khatri is an electronics and communications engineer turned software engineer turned computational systems immunologist. He is an associate professor in Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection and Division of Biomedical Informatics Research in Department of Medicine at Stanford University. His research focuses on developing novel methods for leveraging heterogeneity present across independent cohorts to better understand human immune system for developing novel diagnostics and therapies for inflammatory diseases, including autoimmune and infectious diseases, organ transplant and cancer.

Senior Scientist & Lead, In vivo Pharmacology Function, Nektar Therapeutics PhD in genetics and biochemistry from Rockefeller University.
Postdoctoral studies at UCSF in mouse genetics, disease modeling and developmental biology. At Nektar Therapeutics since2016. In vivo pharmacology function lead at Nektar Theraputics in immuno-oncology.

Associate Professor and Vice Chair, Pharmacy Practice
Donald Klepser, MBA, PhD, is Associate Professor of Pharmacy at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Pharmacy. Klepser’s interest is in helping patients make informed decisions about their health care. His current research is in the areas of the expanded role for pharmacists in the changing healthcare environment, rural pharmacy access, cost containment, and managed care benefit design. Klepser has studied the use of point-of-care testing in community pharmacies for the past eight years and is one of the developers of the National Association of Chain Drugstores’ Point-of-Care Testing Certificate Program. He is currently the primary investigator on grants to improve patient access to care through collaborative practice models for the management of diseases such as hepatitis C, HIV, diabetes, hypertension, influenza, and group A streptococcus. Klepser is also the primary investigator on grants to better understand how state and local health departments perceive the role of pharmacists conducting Point of Care tests. Klepser has a PhD in Pharmaceutical Socioeconomics from the University of Iowa, an MBA from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, and a bachelor’s degree in Communications from the University of Michigan. Klepser previously served as a member of the Advisory Panel on Addressing Disparities.

Vice President, Research and Development
Dr. Klingemann had a long-standing career in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. As part of his research he developed the NK-92 cell line that has become a tool for NK researchers worldwide. He also developed NK-92 cells into a clinical immunotherapeutic. Dr. Klingemann is the co-founder of NantKwest and is currently its VP of Research and Development – he maintains an academic appointment at Tufts University in Boston.

Computational Biologist; Principal Investigator, Battelle Center for Mathematical Medicine, Research Institute, Nationwide Children’s Hospital; Tenured Professor, Department of Pediatrics, The Ohio State University College of Medicine
Andrzej Kloczkowski, computational biologist, is Principal Investigator in the Battelle Center for Mathematical Medicine in the Research Institute of the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and tenured Professor of Pediatrics in the Department of Pediatrics of The Ohio State University College of Medicine. He published over 180 peer reviewed papers, and a co-edited a book Prediction of Protein Secondary Structure (Humana Press, New York, 2016). His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He has been invited to lecture at multiple institutions and conferences in the U.S. and abroad, and served as a reviewer for numerous journals, and several funding agencies, including NSF, NIH, and Foundation for Polish Science. He is on the editorial board of several journals, and organized numerous scientific conferences and meetings.

Professor Of Immunology, Director, Mayo Clinic Florida Discovery And Translation Labs, Cancer Research Program, Director, Mayo Clinic Cancer Center Immunology And Immunotherapy Program
Keith L. Knutson, PhD, is a faculty member in the Department of Immunology at the Mayo Clinic, where he also serves as director of the Discovery and Translation Lab’s Cancer Research Program on the Mayo Clinic Jacksonville Campus. Dr. Knutson joined the staff of Mayo Clinic in 2005 and holds the academic rank of Professor of Immunology. Dr. Knutson is also Director of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center’s Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Program. Dr. Knutson received his B.S. in Microbiology at the University of Washington. He earned his PhD in Physiology and Pharmacology from the University of Georgia and completed two postdoctoral fellowships in immunology, one at the University of British Columbia and the other at the University of Washington. Dr. Knutson is internationally recognized in the field of cancer immunology. His research focuses on the immunology and immunotherapy of breast and ovarian cancers, both the basic immunobiology and clinical translation, including clinical trials. His contributions to science, include clinical development and testing of self-tumor antigen-specific vaccines in patients with breast and ovarian cancers. He currently has three FDA-approved vaccine trials underway and is Principal investigator of 3 Department of Defense grants to test vaccines aimed at preventing recurrence breast cancer, including triple negative breast cancer for which there are no targeted therapies. Dr. Knutson is frequently invited to give presentations on his research both domestically and internationally, and he has authored numerous journal articles, abstracts and other written publications, consistently publishing in high-impact scientific journals. Additionally he holds reviewer responsibilities for several prominent publications. In recognition of his work, Dr. Knutson has received many awards and honors, including the Young Investigator Award-Pharmingen, conferred by the American Association for Cancer Research, and the prestigious Howard Temin Award, conferred by the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute. He is also recognized as the 2017-18 Investigator of the Year at the Mayo Clinic campus in Florida. Dr. Knutson’s has several current and past memberships with professional organizations which, include the Breast Cancer Research Program and the Ovarian Cancer Research Program of the United States Department of Defense, the Tumor Microenvironment Study Section of the U.S. National Institutes of Health Center for Scientific Review, and the Education and Training Committee for the Society for the Immunotherapy of Cancer. He is a Principal Investigator of the Artemis Project, National Breast Cancer Coalition, where he is leading efforts to produce prevention vaccines for breast cancer.

Director
Andreas Kogelnik, MD, PhD, is the Director of the Institute. He completed his MD at Emory University School of Medicine and his PhD in Bioengineering at Georgia Tech. He trained as a resident in Internal Medicine and fellow in Infectious Diseases at Stanford University and remained there as a post-doc and research faculty before founding the Clinic in 2009 and Institute in 2011. Dr. Kogelnik’s experience with software, bioinformatics and bioengineering stood him in good stead as he founded the Open Medicine Institute which is committed to revolutionize the study and treatment of difficult chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. The Open Medicine Institute’s OMI-Merit Initiative created a consensus set of funding priorities for the chronic fatigue syndrome field, and the OpenMedNet project optimizes data collection and sharing for doctors and patients. A Patient Registry and Biobank are also part of the OMI. Dr. Kogelnik is also a practicing physician and is a member of Health Rising’s Ask the Doctors Panel.

Assistant Professor; Associate Director, Genetics and Solid Tumors Laboratory
Eric Konnick, MD, M.S., is a board-certified pathologist at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and UW Medical Center, a UW assistant professor of Laboratory Medicine and associate director of UW Medicine's Genetics and Solid Tumor Lab. Dr. Konnick is responsible for the design, implementation and clinical evaluation of advanced lab methods to help patients with a wide variety of diseases. He is excited to use his medical training and technical expertise to bring cutting-edge diagnostic methods to patients. Dr. Konnick earned his MD at the University of Utah. He is board certified in Molecular Genetic Pathology, Clinical Pathology and Anatomic Pathology by the American Board of Pathology. His academic interests include the intersection of germline and somatic mutation testing in malignancy and the use of automation and software to reduce laboratory errors.

Associate Director, Head of Oncology, Drug Development Division
For nearly two decades Michael Koratich has been committed to meeting client needs in the world of cancer therapeutic development. His department is currently focused on establishing and characterizing models for development of immuno-oncology therapeutics and oncolytic viruses.

Director, Point-of-Care Testing Center for Teaching and Research (POCT•CTR), Emeritus Professor, School of Medicine,
, Dr. Kost studied Engineering at Stanford University (BS, 1967) and in Venezuela, then received the Master’s degree in Engineering-Economic Systems (EEP) from Stanford prior to entering Medical Scientist MD-PhD training at the University of California (UC). He received his PhD in Bioengineering (NIH Bioengineering Traineeship) from UC San Diego and his MD from UC San Francisco. He was elected to Mu Alpha Theta (mathematics), Phi Kappa Phi (scholarship), and Sigma Xi (science) Honor Societies. Dr. Kost’s clinical residency included Internal Medicine and Neurology at UCLA, and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he was Chief Resident and a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Jim Bassingwaighte in Bioengineering. Dr. Kost was boarded in Clinical Pathology by the American Board of Pathology. At UC Davis for nearly 30 years, Dr. Kost is Director of Point-of-Care Testing and Clinical Chemistry for the UCD Health System. He is a tenured Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, the Quality Program Chair, and faculty in Biomedical Engineering and Comparative Pathology.

Instructor, Department of Pediatrics
Prachi Kothari, DO received her medical degree from Nova Southeastern University. After completing pediatric residency at the University of Connecticut and pediatric hematology oncology fellowship at the combined programs at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and New York Presbyterian-Hospital, Weill Cornell Medicine, she is presently a clinical instructor in the department of pediatrics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She is also working in the Tsui Laboratory under the mentorship of Dr. Dana Tsui on understanding the feasibility and utility of noninvasive molecular profiling with cfDNA in patients with pediatric solid tumors. Her research projects have allowed her to now work alongside the clinical teams to implement the use of cfDNA analysis into the routine workflow allowing for real-time molecular profiling.

Patent Attorney with Bioscience Focus and Shareholder
Mr. Kovarik practices intellectual property law, with an emphasis in patent prosecution, patent litigation, mediation of patent disputes and in the licensing of intellectual property rights. With his technical training in biochemistry and molecular, cellular and developmental biology, Mr. Kovarik represents many innovators in the medical device and biosciences fields. Mr. Kovarik’s varied practice includes both patent prosecution and enforcement of intellectual property rights, often involving the mediation, arbitration or litigation of intellectual property issues. For over 25 years, Mr. Kovarik has prosecuted hundreds of patents to issuance, structured numerous licensing transactions, and participated in arbitrations, mediations, litigations and appeals. He has developed a varied practice directed towards the appreciation of intellectual property values and the pursuit of opportunities to advance the interests of his clients. Mr. Kovarik is involved with various charitable groups, previously serving on the board of The Children’s Hospital Research Foundation. He has also taught intellectual property law classes as an adjunct professor at the University of Denver, is a guest lecturer at CU’s Entrepreneurship school and presents at various inventor groups in the Denver area.

Assistant Professor of Immunology, Microbiology & Immunology and Dermatology
My laboratory is interested in the unbiased high-dimensional analysis of the immunome in steady sate and during inflammation, such as autoimmunity and cancer. We use single cell high-throughput mass cytometry and RNAseq combined with machine-learning algorithms to create a complete picture of the immune system, as we call them “immune instagrams”. In order to achieve this we collaborate with clinicians, wet lab and computer scientists in academia and industry alike and hope to identify biomarkers and new therapeutic avenues to benefit patients.

Chief Scientific Officer
Joseph Krueger, PhD is the Chief Scientific Officer of Flagship Biosciences, Inc. His past experience, Includes biomarker and drug development at OSI Pharmaceuticals and Pfizer. Joseph has led Flagship’s growth as a life sciences company that leverages its digital computational platform to deliver tissue-based biomarker data and strategies to support pharmaceutical development of precision medicines. He received his PhD in Cancer Biology from Wayne State University.

Principal Scientist, Data Science, Data Science pRED Informatics, Roche Innovation Center Munich
Dr. rer. nat. Jan Kuentzer is a principal scientist in pRED Informatics at the Roche Innovation Center Munich. With a background in computer science and mathematics, he did his PhD at Saarland University in Bioinformatics with a primary focus on Integrative Systems Biology. During his research he spent a year at Leeds University in the UK and did a research fellowship at Kyoto University in Japan. Dr. Küntzer joined Roche 2008 with a Roche Postdoc Fellowship working on a biological information system for cancer genome mutation. Within pRED Informatics he is leading the pRED Data Commons Service providing operational support for multiple pRED Data Commons components, pRED analytic workflows, data stewardship of exploratory studies and operational support for scientific applications used by Data Scientists to support pRED drug projects.

Professor
Peter Kuhn is a scientist and entrepreneur with a career long commitment in personalized medicine and individualized patient care. He is focused on the redesign of cancer care. Kuhn’s research team in physics oncology has discovered new ways of how cancer spreads to the human body and is using those breakthroughs to impact patient care. Dr. Kuhn is the Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences and Professor of Medicine and Engineering at USC, a founding member of the Michelson Center for Convergent Biosciences, a co-founder of The Bridge@USC and director of the Southern California Physics Oncology Center. Dr. Kuhn’s strategy is to advance our understanding of the human body to improve the human condition. His research is shedding new light at how cancer spreads through the body. This new science will lead to a personalized care strategy that is biologically informed and clinically actionable. Dr. Kuhn is a physicist who trained initially at the Julius Maximilians Universität Würzburg, Germany, before receiving his Masters in Physics at the University of Albany, Albany, NY in 1993 and his Ph.D. in 1995. He then moved to Stanford University where he later joined the faculties of Medicine and Accelerator Physics. From 2002 to 2014, he established a translational science program at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA bringing together over forty scientists from basic, engineering and medical sciences to work on understanding the spread of cancer in the human body. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles and patents as a result of his research. He founded Epic Sciences, Inc. in 2009 to develop cancer diagnostic products. Today Epic Sciences is a premier partner to most pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the development of precision companion diagnostics for cancer care.

Head of Oncology Research
Kimary Kulig joined Verily Life Sciences in June 2016 to lead oncology research within the science organization. Prior to Verily, Kimary was the Lead for Molecular Oncology Research at Bristol-Myers Squibb, where she designed and directed a large lung cancer immuno-profiling cohort study and a multi-center study for pathologists to compare lab-developed and FDA-cleared PD-L1 IHC assays. Before BMS, Kimary was Vice President, Clinical & Translational Outcomes Research for the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) where she directed the Oncology Outcomes Database team and created a blueprint for a next generation, cloud-hosted database. Prior to NCCN, Kimary spent 8 years at Pfizer leading Outcomes Research programs in colorectal, breast, and lung cancers and melanoma. Kimary designed and conducted biomarker-linked outcomes research projects supporting the successful launch of crizotinib (Xalkori) in lung cancer, including IHC-FISH concordance evaluation for ALK translocation. Kimary earned her doctorate in Immunology and Molecular Oncology from New York University and a master’s degree in Public Health from Columbia University.

Assistant Professor, Medicine and Radiation Oncology
Dr. Rajan Kulkarni is a clinician and scientist at UCLA who focuses on identifying and analyzing circulating markers in cancer. He has worked for the last several years on development of several technologies for isolation and analysis of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and on understanding how these markers can be utilized to help gain information about tumor evolution and patient response to treatment, in order to improve their predictive capacity.

President and CEO
Dr. Kumar is President and CEO of Anixa Biosciences and its subsidiary Anixa Diagnostics. He has many years of experience working in the diagnostics and biotechnology industry as a scientist, executive, venture capitalist and director. He took his previous company, NASDAQ-listed CombiMatrix Public and ran for roughly a decade. CBMX was recently acquired. He completed his doctoral studies at Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard.

Head, Connected Sensing and Wearables Venture
Ravi heads the Connected Sensing and Wearables Venture (CSV) at Philips. Ravi is a medical industry entrepreneur, with over 20 years of experience in patient monitoring, and healthcare IT. Prior to CSV, Ravi co-founded multiple startup companies in remote and cloud computing-based wearables monitoring. Ravi also served as the Vice President of Research and Development at Draeger Medical, a global powerhouse in patient monitoring, anesthesia delivery, and respiration, and headed R&D efforts at SpaceLabs Medical, in Seattle, where he was instrumental in driving the development of key technologies and products in patient monitoring solutions and was the General Manager for their India operations. In addition, Ravi holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a PhD and MS in biomedical engineering from Louisiana Tech University and University of Miami respectively, and a BSEE from Bangalore University.

Phage Lab Coordinator
I received my BS in mathematics from the University of Washington in 1962. I was supported by an NSF fellowship to complete my PhD in Biophysics in 1968, on the transition from host to viral metabolism after infection of E. coli by bacteriophage T4 and the role of substituting 5 HMdC for C in its DNA. I have taught and maintained a phage research lab at Evergreen State College since 1972, and have put on 22 biennial Evergreen International Phage Meetings; the most recent, in Aug. 2017, drew 250 people of all ages from academia, government and industry in 41 countries. As emeritas, I still have a research lab, focusing on both basic phage biology and medical applications. I am also board chairman of the Phagebiotics Research Foundation, which I started in 1997 to foster phage therapy-oriented work and spreading of information both locally and internationally.

Surgery
Dr. Jasmina Kuvendjiska is resident at the clinic for General and Visceral Surgery at the University hospital Freiburg, Germany. Research field: Circulating Tumor Cells.

Assoc Prof, Clinical Surgery
Julie Lang, MD, FACS is an Associate Professor at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. She earned her medical degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She then went on to complete a Surgery residency and a postdoctoral research fellowship in breast cancer research at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her breast surgical oncology fellowship at the UT-MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2007. She served as the Director of Breast Surgical Oncology at the Arizona Cancer Center for 5 years, then joined the faculty of USC in 2012. Dr. Lang is an expert in the field of breast surgical oncology, with strong expertise in both clinical care and research in the field of breast cancer. She is experienced with advanced breast surgical techniques, such as skin sparing, nipple sparing mastectomies, and coordinating reconstructive surgery with colleagues in Plastic Surgery. Her research focuses on circulating tumor cells, clinical trials, locally advanced/inflammatory breast cancer and radiation-induced sarcoma. Dr. Lang is an avid breast cancer researcher and leads the Breast Surgical Oncology Translational Research Laboratory at the Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Lang is very patient centered and strives to utilize technology and evidenced based medicine to the benefit of her patients. She has published numerous peer reviewed articles and book chapters on the topic of breast cancer.

Scientist, Health R&D
Dr. Sarah Laskey joined 23andMe in 2016. She works as a Research Scientist on a small team focused on developing the next generation of 23andMe's consumer health product. This team works to keep 23andMe at the forefront of science and technology, driving the development of interventional studies and predictive models for human health that utilize genetics, lifestyle, and environment. Sarah earned her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Director of Emerging Technology, Office of the CTO
Dr. Patryk Laurent is a cognitive neuroscientist with experience in neural networks, robotics, software development, and information technologies. His research career began in his first year of undergraduate study, in a laboratory using recurrent neural networks to model learning of time and space representations in the hippocampus. In his PhD work he studied the basal ganglia and its involvement in reward-mediated actions. This led to the surprising result of non-motor actions having the strongest reinforcement signals in a classical motor brain region. A postdoc at the Johns Hopkins University afforded him the opportunity to pursue that topic in more depth, as well as to integrate his prior hippocampal neural networks research. Dr. Laurent then transitioned to industry where he spent 4 years working at a Qualcomm-funded robotics startup, Brain Corporation. Quickly promoted to Director of R&D, Laurent led a group of researchers on several cutting-edge projects in real-time visual perception and motor learning. His final year at Brain Corporation was funded in part by a DARPA grant awarded towards solving problems in robotics perception and awareness through the integration of spatial and temporal visual dynamics. In his current work as Director of Emerging Technology at DMGT, plc, Dr. Laurent supervises and mentors data scientists across DMGT's portfolio of operating companies, providing them with guidance on machine learning in a wide range of problems, including image time series, signal processing, and multisensory integration.

Vice President, Translational Medicine and Regulatory Affairs
Theresa LaVallee has more than 25 years of research and industry experience with a broad knowledge in the discovery and development of drug candidates. Theresa is Vice President, Translational Medicine and Regulatory Affairs at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and previously served as Senior Vice President, Regulatory and Precision Medicine at Celldex Therapeutics and prior to that was Senior Vice President Translational Medicine and Product Development at Kolltan Pharmaceuticals. She also was Senior Director Translational Medicine at MedImmune and EntreMed. In these roles, she has advanced drugs in oncology, immunology and inflammatory diseases from discovery through late state development. Theresa has a depth of expertise in Translational Medicine to enable science driven development decisions and to implement effective use of biomarker assays in clinical studies. She is author or co-author of more than 50 publications and abstracts with a focus on Translational Medicine approaches in clinical development. She received her PhD degree from University of California, Los Angeles and her B.A. degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Assistant Professor, Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, School of Medicine
Dr. Lawson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, Irvine Medical School. She has affiliations with the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and the Center for Complex Biological Systems (CCBS), and she is leader of UCI’s Breast Disease Oriented Team (DOT). Her laboratory studies the basic cellular and molecular mechanisms of breast cancer metastasis, and focuses on using single cell approaches to investigate intratumor heterogeneity and define the basic biological properties that enable rare cancer cells to metastasize. Her lab has diverse expertise in bioinformatics, computational biology, advanced human-in-mouse modeling, and basic cancer biology. Her lab has utilized these approaches to discover key differences in differentiation, metabolism, and immune modulation which define metastatic cells and promote metastasis. The long-term goal of research in her lab is to identify new strategies for targeting metastatic cells and preventing progression to lethal metastatic disease in cancer patients.

Senior Manager, Biologics Marketing, Marketing
Andrew LeBeau, PhD, is Senior Manager of Biologics Marketing at Dotmatics. He joined Dotmatics in 2017, bringing more than 15 years of experience in the life sciences industry. At Dotmatics, Andrew leads efforts to highlight the capabilities of Dotmatics software to support the rapidly growing field of biologics drug discovery.

Director, Bioinformatics, Partners Personalized Medicine; Instructor, Pathology, Brigham and Women’s and Harvard Medical School
Matthew Lebo, PhD joined Partners Personalized Medicine as an Assistant Laboratory Director for the Laboratory for Molecular Medicine in 2011 after completing his ABMG molecular genetics fellowship training at the Harvard Medical School Genetics Training Program. In the fall of 2013 Dr. Lebo became the head of Bioinformatics at Partners Personalized Medicine and Associate Laboratory Director for the Laboratory for Molecular Medicine, and in 2018 become the Director of the Laboratory for Molecular Medicine.

Professor and Vice Chair, Pathology and Medical Director
Dr. Ledeboer received his B.A. Degree from Dordt College in 2000 and his PhD Degree in Microbiology from the University of Iowa in 2005. Following two years of fellowship training in clinical and public health microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis, MO, he became an Assistant Professor of Pathology at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Medical Director of Clinical Microbiology and Molecular Diagnostics at Froedtert Hospital and Dynacare Laboratories in Milwaukee, WI where he has remained for more than 5 years. In addition to his service activities as director of clinical microbiology and molecular diagnostics at a large academic medical center, Dr. Ledeboer continues to develop his research career. His research endeavors, particularly in the area developing diagnostic tools for infectious diseases, have led to numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals. He has been Chairman of Public and Professional Affairs for the South Central Association for Clinical Microbiology and served on the American Society for Microbiology’s Clinical Microbiology Task Force. Dr. Ledeboer is currently a member of the American Board of Medical Microbiology Exam committee, a member of the Committee on Postgraduate Educational Programs through the American Society for Microbiology, and is the microbiology scientific program chair for The Association for Mass Spectrometry: Applications to the Clinical Laboratory. He is currently a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology and serves as an ad hoc reviewer for numerous other journals in infectious diseases and clinical microbiology. He has delivered nearly 100 invited lectures in various medical-scientific educational forums worldwide and has served as an investigator on more than 75 funded research projects. In 2011, he received the distinguished Siemens Young Investigator Award from the American Society for Microbiology.

Director, Cellular Therapy and Cancer Immunology Program, Nationwide Children’s Hospital; DiMarco Family Endowed Chair in Cell-Based Therapy, Professor, Pediatrics, The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center
Dr. Lee is Professor of Pediatrics, DiMarco Family Endowed Chair, and director of the joint Cellular Therapy and Cancer Immunotherapy Program for Nationwide Children’s Hospital and The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - James Cancer Hospital. Dr. Lee identified a crucial role for IL- 21 and STAT3 signaling in NK cell function and proliferation, resulting in a field-leading platform for ex vivo NK cell expansion that has been tested in nearly 100 adult and pediatric patients with leukemia, brain tumors, and solid tumors in investigator-initiated Phase I trials. Dr. Lee leads the Cellular Therapy Strategy Group for the Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Consortium, is a member of the Cell Therapy Steering Committee for the Children’s Oncology Group, and co-founded the NK cell company, CytoSen Therapeutics. His work in immunotherapy and cellular therapy has led to numerous government and foundation research grants, patents, and commercial licenses.

Helen C. Kurtz Professor, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
, , Dr. Lee is the Emeritus Helen C. Kurtz Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at The Ohio State University (OSU) and the founder of Nanomateial Innovation Ltd. (NIL). He founded and led the NSF Center for Advanced Polymer and Composite Engineering (CAPCE), NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center for Affordable Nanoengineering of Polymer Biomedical Devices (CANPBD), and Ohio Center for Multifunctional Polymer Nanomaterials and Devices (CMPND) at OSU. He received a BS degree in chemical engineering from National Taiwan University and a PhD degree in chemical engineering from University of Minnesota. He has more than 400 refereed journal publications, 30 patents and invention disclosures, and 15 book chapters. He was elected as the Fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2006. Dr. Lee received the 2008 Malcolm E. Pruitt Award from Council of Chemical Research and 2010 International Award from the Society of Plastic Engineers. Dr. Lee’s research is on biomaterials-based micro/nanotechnologies for drug/gene delivery, disease diagnosis, and cell reprogramming for regenerative medicine.

Professor and Vice Chair for Strategic Technologies, Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
Richard Levenson, MD, FCAP, is Professor and Vice Chair for Strategic Technologies, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, UC Davis, where he develops novel imaging technologies. Board-certified in Anatomic Pathology, he received his MD at University of Michigan and pathology training at Washington University. A faculty position at Duke was followed by appointment at Carnegie Mellon University. He subsequently joined Cambridge Research & Instrumentation (now part of PerkinElmer), becoming Vice President of Research before returning to academia. He has helped develop multispectral microscopy systems and software for molecular pathology and diagnostics, multispectral and three-dimensional small-animal imaging systems, optical dynamic contrast techniques, orientation-independent birefringence microscopy, multiplexed ion-beam imaging, and most recently, real-time slide-free microscopy. He serves on multiple review panels, is section editor for Archives of Pathology and on the editorial board of Laboratory Investigation. Regrettably, he also taught pigeons histopathology and radiology. He is co-founder of MUSE Microscopy, Inc. and a recipient of the UC Davis Chancellor’s Innovator of the Year (2018) award.

Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics, Director, Center for Statistics in Big Data, Chair, Biostatistics Graduate Program, Vice Chair for Integrative Research, Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics
Dr. Hongzhe Li is a Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He is Vice Chair of Integrative Research and Director of Center for Statistics in Big Data in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics. He is an elected fellow of AAAS, ASA and IMS and served on Board of Scientific Counselors of NCI. His research focuses on developing statistical and computational methods for analysis of genetics, genomics and metagenomic data. He has over 200 publications, including papers in Science, Nature Medicine, Nature Genetics, Nature Methods, Cell Host & Microbe, Journal of American Statistical Association, Biometrika, Annals of Statistics, etc.

Research Chair, Oncology
Minetta C. Liu, MD, earned her MD at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She completed her internal medicine residency and hematology/oncology fellowship at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. She is currently a Consultant in the Department of Oncology and the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at Mayo Clinic Rochester. She serves as Research Chair for the Division of Medical Oncology; co-chair of the Breast Cancer Pathology Disease Oriented Group; and leader of the Circulating Tumor Cell and Cell Free DNA Working Group. She is also the Medical Director for Specialty Contract Operations and an Associate Medical Director in the Department of Development. As a physician and translational scientist, Dr. Liu specializes in breast cancer management and clinical and laboratory-based cancer research. She is dedicated to improving patient outcomes through access to novel therapeutic agents and molecular diagnostic tools. Her laboratory efforts focus on expanding the clinical applications of circulating nucleic acid and circulating tumor cell assays for solid tumor malignancies. Her funding sources, include the National Cancer Institute, Department of Defense, Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering Department
Liu is an associate professor in the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut. He received his PhD in Physical Electronics at the Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IECAS), China. He has a highly interdisciplinary background and training spanning Engineering (i.e., electronic, mechanical), Chemistry and Biomedicine. Dr. Liu's research interests, include the development of microfluidic chips, BioMEMS (Biomedical MicroElectroMechanical Systems) devices, biosensors, wearable devices and their biomedical applications with a focus on point-of-care (POC) diagnostics. He is a recipient of the NIH Career Development Award (K25) in 2012-2017, the Penn One Health Award in 2015, and the W.W. Smith Charitable Trust Research Award in 2016.

Clinical Research Scientist & Analyst
Mingjie is a clinical research scientist in the clinical biomarker group at Eisai, working on the Immuno-Oncology studies. Before that, he was a scientist at Novartis doing companion diagnostics development for oncology drugs.

Fred W. Bull Professor, Chemical Engineering
Dr. Chang Lu is the Fred W. Bull professor of chemical engineering at Virginia Tech. Dr. Lu obtained his B.S. in Chemistry with honors from Peking University in 1998 and PhD in Chemical Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. He then spent 2 years as a postdoc in Applied Physics at Cornell University. His lab has been developing a variety of microfluidic tools for gene delivery, single cell analysis, and molecular biology over the years. Their recent interests have been in developing biotechnologies for profiling cell-type-specific epigenomes using a low number of cells. These technologies have proven useful for generating new insights into diseases ranging from cancer to mental disorders. His lab has published in leading journals such as Nature Methods, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Science Advances, and Nature Protocols. Dr. Lu received Wallace Coulter Foundation Early Career Award, NSF CAREER Award, and VT Dean’s award for research excellence among a number of honors.

CSO, Office of Advanced Molecular Detection
Duncan MacCannell is the chief science officer for the CDC’s Office of Advanced Molecular Detection (OAMD), where he helps coordinate the implementation and support of pathogen genomics, bioinformatics, high-performance computing and other innovative laboratory technologies across the CDC’s four infectious disease centers. With a broad focus on public health laboratory science and strategic innovation, he manages the agency's high-performance computing center of excellence, and works to integrate standardized, sustainable capacity for advanced laboratory technologies and scientific computing into routine public health practice. As a public health microbiologist and molecular epidemiologist, Duncan has worked with the PulseNet program on the development and validation of next-generation subtyping and characterization methods for Shiga-toxin producing Escherichia coli (STEC), as a general subject matter expert in bacterial molecular epidemiology and antimicrobial resistance, and as the CDC laboratory surveillance lead for healthcare-associated pathogens such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile. His current research interests, include the application of comparative pathogen genomics and metagenomics to public health microbiology, and the development, validation, and implementation of molecular diagnostics, next- generation straintyping and bioinformatics for pathogen identification, outbreak investigation and large- scale molecular surveillance.

Director, Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI); Associate Professor, Oncology, Georgetown University Medical Center
Dr. Subha Madhavan is the Chief Data Scientist at the Georgetown University Medical Center and Director of the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) and Associate Professor of Oncology. She is a world-class leader in data science, clinical informatics and health IT who is responsible for several biomedical informatics efforts, including the software development of Georgetown Database of Cancer (G-DOC) a resource for both researchers and clinicians to realize the goals of personalized medicine and co-directs Lombardi Cancer Center’s Biostatistics and Bioinformatics shared resource. In her role as the CTSA biomedical informatics director, she has enabled access to over 2.5 million patient records from 10 MedStar Health hospitals to translational researchers. She was the PI on the Breast and Colon Cancer Family Registries data center that coordinates public health and epidemiology data across 12 sites in the US, Australia, and Canada. More recently, she has partnered with the FDA on the Center for Excellence in Regulatory Science program to develop evidence bases for pharmacogenomics and vaccine safety. She collaborated with the Inova translational medicine institute to help manage 1000’s of patient genomes on the Amazon cloud to facilitate large-scale statistical analysis and genotype-phenotype association testing. She has contributed to novel information sciences findings in research articles published in journals such as Nature, Bioinformatics, Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB), AJPM, Frontiers in Oncology, Bioinformatics, Cancer Informatics, and Molecular Cancer Research (MCR). Prior to joining Georgetown, Dr. Madhavan served as the Associate Director of Product and Program Management in the Life sciences informatics area at NCI’s Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information technology. At NCI she led a group of scientists, physicians and software engineers in building REMBRANDT (REpository for MolecularBRAin Neoplasia DaTa) – a data platform that hosts and interconnects clinical data points with various genomics datasets from large brain tumor clinical trials. This effort won the Service to America Award. While at NCI she also established the data coordination center for The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), managing genomic data of approximately 100 TB over a period of 3 years. Dr. Madhavan has a Master’s degree in Information Technology from University of Maryland and a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biological Sciences from the Uniformed Services University for the Health Sciences through a highly ranked Indo-US Collaborative program.

Professor (Research), Microbiology & Immunology
Holden Maecker received a BS in Microbiology from Purdue University and a PhD in Cancer Biology from Stanford University. He did postdoctoral work with Ronald and Shoshana Levy at Stanford, and was an Assistant Professor of Biology at Loyola University Chicago, as well as a Senior Scientist at BD Biosciences, San Jose, CA. He is currently a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, and Director of the Human Immune Monitoring Center, at Stanford University. His research focuses on measuring immune competence, as well as how specific cellular immune responses correlate with immune protection. https://profiles.stanford.edu/holden-maecker

Professor, Radiation Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Dr. Makrigiorgos is a Professor of Radiation Oncology and Director of the Medical Physics & Biophysics division at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals, Harvard Medical School. He also directs his DNA technology laboratory and the radiation pre-clinical facility. His research interests include the development of novel DNA technologies for molecular diagnostics in Oncology and the identification of circulating cancer biomarkers. Dr. Makrigiorgos is the inventor of several PCR-based techniques for molecular diagnostics, including Balanced-PCR, NaME-PrO technology and COLD-PCR. He is a Member of the Editorial Board of Clinical Chemistry and has published over 150 articles, reviews and book chapters. He received his undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Athens, Greece, his PhD in Medical Physics from the University of Leeds, UK and his postdoctoral training in radiation biology from Harvard Medical School, Boston.

PhD Candidate
Paymaneh Malihi is a 5th year PhD candidate of molecular biology at University of Southern California. Her work at Dr. Peter Kuhn and Dr. James Hicks’s laboratory has been focused on the characterization of circulating tumor cells and metastatic tumor cells isolated from peripheral blood and bone marrow aspirate, respectively, of prostate cancer patients during different stages of the disease. Through close collaboration with clinicians from Johns Hopkins Hospital, Veterans Affair Hospital Los Angeles, and MD Anderson Cancer Center, Paymaneh has had the opportunity to explore implications of liquid biopsy in localized disease, newly diagnosed hormone-naïve, and aggressive variant metastatic prostate cancer. Using Dr. Kuhn’s High Definition-Single Cell Analysis Platform, Paymaneh can investigate enumeration, genomic, and proteomic characterization of circulating rare cells as well as ctDNA genomic analysis from the same sample. In addition to her laboratory commitments, Paymaneh mentors three undergraduate students as they each lead their own projects.

Senior Medical Director, Oncology & Genetics
Jennifer Malin, MD, PhD, is a Senior Medical Director, Oncology and Genetics, at UnitedHealthcare. In this role, she provides clinical and strategic leadership for improving the health and outcomes of cancer and genomic medicine for United Healthcare members. After graduating from Harvard University, Dr. Malin received her medical degree and doctorate in public health from UCLA. She is board certified in internal medicine and medical oncology. A Clinical Professor of Medicine at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, she is the author of more than 90 peer-reviewed articles and is widely recognized for her research on the quality of cancer care. She has served on a number of advisory boards and national committees, including the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s Quality of Care Committee and the National Quality Forum’s Cancer Steering Committee. Prior to joining UnitedHealthcare, she was the architect of the cancer care quality program at Anthem. Dr. Malin continues her clinical practice by volunteering at the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Health Care System. She lives in Santa Monica, California with her two children and three dogs.

Vice President, Translational Immunology
Dr. Mandl is responsible for leading PACT’s personalized neoTCR-T cell engineering, adoptive T cell therapy product characterization and immune monitoring/biomarker development. She has extensive experience in the development of immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer and infectious disease. Prior to PACT, she has held positions at Cidara Therapeutics, Bavarian Nordic, Bavarian Nordic ImmunoTherapeutics (BNIT) and Exelixis. Dr. Mandl’s experience in cancer immunotherapy began in Berlin, where she received her MS in Biology from Freie Universität Berlin, she earned her PhD in Immunology at the University of California San Francisco and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.

General Manager, Oncology
Mani currently is leading the partnership of GEHC and Roche Diagnostics to execute the strategy of precision health in the field of Oncology. Key responsibilities include building and delivering digital diagnostics solution leveraging in vivo and in vitro capabilities between the two companies. Mani has a Masters in Bio medical engineering from Drexel university, Philadelphia and also an MBA from Marquette university at Milwaukee. He has been in the healthcare industry for the last 30 years focused primarily in the area of product development and has held various engineering and product development roles across GEHC. He has a passion of creating solutions leveraging data across the system to enable better workflow and decision making across care continuum.

Head, Clinical Biomarkers, Early Clinical Development
Jean-Claude currently serves as a senior director in Early Clinical Development (ECD), leading the Clinical Biomarker group within Precision Medicine. His group oversees development of regulated biomarkers encompassing Mass Spectrometry, Flow Cytometry, Ligand Binding and Genetics platforms for early clinical trials across the Pfizer portfolio. He previously led the Clinical Genetics and Biospecimens group for Pfizer, and prior to that headed the CLIA certified Pharmacogenomics lab. Prior to joining Pfizer he served as the laboratory manager for a CLIA certified sequencing laboratory providing both targeted and whole genome/exome NGS data for clinicians and researchers. Jean-Claude’s academic research was in pre-clinical drug and biomarker discovery in metastatic breast cancer and uveal melanoma.

Application Specialist, Digital PCR
Alexandra is a Biomedical Engineer and has worked on collaborative projects in the Advance Research Department of a Medical Device Company after which, she completed her Ph.D. in Molecular & Biological Electrochemistry at Paris Diderot University. She now assists Stilla as a broad Application Specialist to help the worldwide Naica System Users optimize their protocols and applications in Crystal Digital PCR!

Professor, Physiology, Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum NCI Comprehensive Cancer Center
Dr. Martin received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego, after training as a Howard Hughes undergraduate research fellow at the University of Virginia. Dr. Martin completed a Damon Runyon postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School that combined functional genomic studies with mouse models of breast tumor metastasis, under the mentorship of Dr. Phil Leder. In 2004, Dr. Martin joined the Greenebaum Cancer Center at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Dr. Martin is working to apply physical science and engineering approaches to the study of cancer metastasis. In 2010, Dr. Martin was one of only three investigators nationwide recognized with an Era of Hope Scholar Award from the Congressionally-directed Medical Research Program for his innovative research on breast cancer metastasis.

Assistant Professor, Pathology, Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School; Associate Laboratory Director, Laboratory for Molecular Medicine, Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine
Heather Mason-Suares, PhD, is an Associate Laboratory Director at Partners’ Laboratory for Molecular Medicine, Associate Laboratory Director for the Cytogenetics Laboratory at Brigham & Women’s Hospital Center for Advanced Molecular Diagnostics, Program Director of the Harvard Medical School Clinical Molecular Genetics Training Program, and an Assistant Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Mason-Suares is a board-certified Clinical Cytogeneticist and Molecular Geneticist actively involved in molecular diagnostics, translational research, and education. Her research and clinical interests concern the application of molecular diagnosis using next-generation sequencing and microarray technologies in prenatal cases, RASopathies, cardiomyopathy, and hearing loss. She also a member of the Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen) RASopathy expert panel, which is optimizing ACMG variant classification criteria for the RASopathies.

Director and Diagnostic Lead, Companion Diagnostics
Marielena Mata, PhD is Director and Diagnostic Lead at Pfizer, where she Leads the development and commercialization efforts of companion diagnostics for Oncology assets from Early to late development.
Prior to Pfizer, Maty was Head of Personalized Medicine and Companion Diagnostics at GSK where she was responsible for implementation of the Precision Medicine strategy across the GSK portfolio encompassing technical, development, regulatory, commercial, IP and business development efforts. Previously, at Janssen R&D, Inc. Dr. Mata was responsible for the design and implementation of biomarker strategies for Oncology assets, where she led the development of Circulating Tumor Cell based assays as companion diagnostics as well as the development of next generation circulating tumor cell isolation technologies based on microfluidics. Earlier, she established and managed the Biomarkers biobank. Dr. Mata obtained a B.A. in Biology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and her PhD and postdoctoral training in Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Vice President, RCM Reengineering and Service, Revenue Cycle Management
Kurt Matthes currently serves as Vice President of Revenue Cycle Management Reengineering and Service at TELCOR and has more than 25 years of experience in laboratory systems. Mr. Matthes holds a BA in Allied Health from Doane College. Prior to joining TELCOR, Mr. Matthes held a variety of roles in laboratory systems and operations for Bryan Health Systems and Quest Diagnostics.

Professor, Emergency Medicine; Director, Emergency Department Antibiotic Stewardship
Larissa May, MD, MSPH, MSHS - Dr. Larissa May is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Emergency Department Antibiotic Stewardship at the University of California-Davis. She is a national expert in antibiotic stewardship in the emergency department (ED). Dr. May received her MD, her MSPH in Public Health Microbiology and Emerging Infectious Diseases, and her MSHS in Clinical and Translational Research from The George Washington University. Dr. May’s research interests center on clinical infectious disease epidemiology and management, with a particular focus on the application of rapid molecular diagnostic assays to improve antibiotic stewardship in the ED. Dr. May has served as an investigator on several federally-funded and industry-sponsored trials evaluating new molecular assays in the ED. She has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles. She has also served on committees and task forces for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and professional organizations, including the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America and is a member of the Diagnostics Subcommittee of the Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Luis & Nelly Soux Professor of Microbiology in the Division of Biology & Biological Engineering
He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles, where Dr. Mazmanian also received his PhD training in microbiology and immunology. He was a Helen Hay Whitney Post-doctoral Fellow and subsequently appointed assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in 2006, and later that year moved to Caltech. Dr. Mazmanian has won numerous awards including a Searle Scholar, Young Investigator of the Year at Harvard Medical School, Damon Runyon Innovation Award, was named by Discover Magazine as one of the “Best Brains in Science under 40”, “Life Science Superstar” by Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, and recently received the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award. His laboratory focuses on the study of beneficial bacterial molecules from the human gut microbiome as novel therapies for immunologic and neurologic disorders, with a specific focus on developing probiotic treatments for autism. He is a founder of 2 biotech companies, and has or currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of over a dozen companies, academic centers and not-for-profit foundations.

Associate Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine
As a Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine faculty and co-director of The McCormick Genomic & Proteomic Center at The George Washington University (GW) and while working at National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at NIH, and UniProt (collaboration between Georgetown University, European Bioinformatics Institute and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics), Dr. Mazumder has worked closely with colleagues and collaborators in developing international molecular biology resources and using these resources to identify therapeutics, diagnostics and vaccines targets. His current research focus is on developing novel methods for data-to-knowledge national and international initiatives in biomedical sciences such as GlyGen and OncoMX, and community driven bioinformatics projects such as Cancer Disease Ontology initiative and High-throughput Sequencing Computational standards development (BioCompute Objects). He has over fifteen years of experience in scientific coordination, bioinformatics infrastructure building, and through NCI, NSF, NIGMS, NIAD, pharmaceutical, non-profit and FDA funding he has been involved in genomic and bioinformatics research associated with cancer biology, glycobiology, and metagenomics. He is the co-developer of High Performance Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE) which is approved for use in a regulatory environment at US FDA. Dr. Mazumder in addition to his research activities, mentors PhD and M.S. students, and directs the Bioinformatics M.S. graduate program track and co-directs the PhD Bioinformatics and Genomics program at GW. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8823-9945; https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajamazumder

Vice President, Oncology Biomarker Development & Companion Diagnostics
Abhijit “Ron” Mazumder obtained his B.A. from The Johns Hopkins University, his PhD from the University of Maryland, and his MBA from Lehigh University. After working in several biotech companies, he joined Johnson & Johnson in 2003 and led molecular diagnostics programs and biomarker collaborations. In 2008, he joined Merck as a Senior Director and Biomarker Leader in External Discovery where he was responsible for the development of pharmacodynamic and predictive biomarkers. Ron rejoined Johnson & Johnson in 2010 and led the development of companion and complementary diagnostics across the therapeutic pipeline and co-led several late stage oncology biomarker programs. In October 2016, he joined Genentech where he is currently Vice President and Global Head of Oncology Biomarker Development and Companion Diagnostics.

Adjunct Associate Professor, Duke University; Founder, Precision Medicine Advisors
eanette McCarthy is a UC Berkeley trained genetic epidemiologist and spent the early part of her career in industry at Millennium Pharmaceuticals before transitioning to academia. She currently holds adjunct faculty positions at Duke University and UCSF. Her previous research had focused on the genetic underpinnings of complex diseases, both infectious and chronic. More recently, she has become a leading educator in the field of genomic and precision medicine involved in demystifying genomics for non-technical audiences, including health care providers, patients and other stakeholders. In 2014, she helped launch the first consumer-facing magazine in this field, Genome, where she served as editor-in-chief until 2016. She teaches genomic and precision medicine through UCSF and UC Berkeley Extension and online through Coursera and through the Precision Medicine Academy (precisionmedicineacademy.org). She also designs and delivers custom workshops and courses to international audiences through her consulting business (precisionmedicineadvisors.com). Jeanette is coauthor of the new book, Precision Medicine: A Guide to Genomics in Clinical Practice (2016, McGraw Hill Education).

Senior Scientist, Translation Science Laboratory
Megan McCausland, a Senior Scientist in the Translational Science Laboratory at Q2 Solutions, is responsible for development, validation and global implementation of multi-parameter flow cytometry assays to support clinical trials. Prior to joining Q2 Solutions 5 years ago, Megan spent 13 years in academia studying the generation and maintenance of immune memory at Emory University and La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology. She holds a BS in Biology from James Madison University.

Deputy Director, Biomedical Engineering Department, Northwestern University, Center for Innovation in Point-of-Care Technologies for HIV/AIDS
Sally McFall, PhD is the Deputy Director of the Administrative Core and Director of the Technology Development/Refinement Core C-THAN. C-THAN was established in 2018 as part of the Point-of-Care Technologies Research Network created by National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Dr. McFall has extensive experience in technology development for low and middle-income countries as the Director of Research of the Center for Innovation in Global Health Technologies (CIGHT) in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. She possesses a broad background in molecular and clinical microbiology and has co-developed point-of-care assays and instruments side by side with CIGHT’s engineering team.

Executive Director, Molecular Discovery, Translational Medicine
Dr. McClanahan is currently the Executive Director of the Profiling & Expression group in Translational Medicine at Merck Research Laboratories. Her group combines multiple molecular, cellular and tissue-based approaches to interrogate disease mechanisms, working closely with discovery biologists and drug development teams to provide mechanistic data, disease association and biomarkers of drug response. She oversees and integrates the work of several key areas utilizing multiple tissue-based methodologies, including histopathology, flow cytometry, cell sorting and molecular profiling, to support projects spanning from the earliest novel discovery projects to IND-enabling mechanistic studies, tissue, cell type and disease tissue expression profiling, and translational biomarker discovery, with a specific emphasis on immune regulation and immune-oncology. Dr. McClanahan and her group provided important molecular insights in the discovery and characterization of Th17 cells, the mechanism of action of IL-23/IL-23R, IL-17 and additional targets involved in autoimmune diseases, and provided key data to progress these molecules towards development. Her group has contributed to the molecular understanding of immune regulation in anti-tumor responses to anti-PD-1 and additional immunomodulatory pathways, including biomarkers associated with response to immune therapy in oncology. During her career, she has contributed to over 100 published scientific articles, contributed to IND filings for anti-IL- 10, anti-IL-17, anti-IL-23, anti-TSLP, anti-PD-1, anti-GITR, anti-LAG3 and is a co-inventor on numerous patents. She received her PhD in Biological Chemistry from University of California, Los Angeles, and conducted postdoctoral research fellowships at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL and at DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA.

CEO and Founder
Dave is passionate about changing the food system. After losing a close family member to a nutrition-related disease, he decided to do something about it. He's passionate about empowering dietitians so that they can help more people in the world.

Chair, Executive, Investigational Cancer Therapeutics
Funda Meric-Bernstam is the Chair of the Department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics (the Phase I Program) at MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Medical Director of the Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy (IPCT), and Professor in the Divisions of Cancer Medicine and Surgery at MD Anderson Cancer Center. She has a basic and translational research program that is focused on molecular therapeutics, predominantly on PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling, to delineate the mechanism of action of each agent targeting this pathway and the molecular alterations useful to prospectively identify patients who will benefit most from each agent, and optimal combination therapies. Her research to identify a range of molecular markers for predisposition testing, disease screening and prognostic assessment, as well as markers used to predict and monitor drug response, is being fostered through numerous efforts. As the Medical Director of IPCT, she has not only led large efforts of genomic testing within the institution, but has a) helped build a framework for rapid assessment of actionability of genomic alterations; b) established a Precision Oncology Decision Support Team who can provide point of care input for actionability; c) launched the public website “www.personalizedcancertherapy.org” providing access to expert curation of information on therapeutic relevance of specific genes/variants; d) created databases and clinical trial alert systems to facilitate accrual to genotype-selected trials across the institution; and e) monitors trial enrollment after genomic testing to identify approaches to obstacles to trial enrollment.

CSO & CEO
Dr. Miller is a scientist, inventor, and serial entrepreneur who founded Invivoscribe in 1995 on the premise that healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and, most importantly patients, benefit from better standardization and more consistent performance of molecular diagnostic tests.

Vice President, Regulatory Affairs
Dr. Morteza Minaee has more than 25 years of experience in the global and FDA-regulated in vitro diagnostics and medical devices industry leading regulatory, quality-systems, and clinical-affairs organizations with focus in molecular diagnostics and precision medicine. He is currently Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at Guardant Health in Red Wood City California where he has been working with FDA and in collaboration with major pharma companies mapping out the regulatory strategy for Guardant Health’s next generation sequencing based non-invasive liquid biopsy technology platform for applications across cancer management continuum including companion diagnostics in targeted therapy, immunotherapy, molecular residual testing, recurrence monitoring and early cancer detection. Prior to Guardant Health he served as Senior Director, Regulatory Affairs at Roche leading regulatory strategies in NGS, microarrays as well digital pathology technologies and obtaining many FDA clearances including breast cancer biomarkers. Dr. Minaee also held several senior positions in Regulatory, Clinical Affairs, and Quality for companies such as Abbott Molecular and Siemens Healthcare. He holds a doctorate in law and policy from Northeastern University, and MS in administration from Boston University.

Assistant Professor, Radiation Oncology, Harvard Medical School; Department of Radiation Oncology, Center for Cancer Research, Massachusetts General Hospital
David Miyamoto, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School, a radiation oncologist in the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and a Principal Investigator in the Mass General Center for Cancer Research. He is a board-certified radiation oncologist specializing in the treatment of patients with genitourinary malignancies. His research focuses on the development of novel biomarkers to guide prostate and bladder cancer therapy, including the molecular analysis of rare circulating tumor cells in the blood. His research has been supported by the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Department of Defense, National Cancer Institute, and the Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center.

VP Precision Medicine, Precision Medicine
Dr. Weike Mo had his PhD degree from Oregon Health & Science University in 2012 after he finished his undergraduate in Tsinghua University in China. His research in graduate school focused on understanding the genetic mechanism of hearing loss. After worked three years in the US as a Clinical Scientist and CLIA laboratory director, Dr. Mo started his own company in China to build genetic testing and data analysis pipeline for inherited diseases. He joined Digital China Health as a Vice President to lead the bioinformatic analysis for big data in early 2018.

Principal Scientist
I joined Genentech in 2004 and throughout the past 14 years I have managed a core laboratory that provides a full suite of genomic technologies, including Sanger sequencing, Microarrays and NGS technology. The genomic technologies that my lab provides is supporting Genentech’s research effort towards drug discovery and development. Prior to Genentech, I worked as a Scientist at, Incyte Genomics, a company that provided an integrated platform of genomic technologies designed to help understand the molecular basis of disease. Before, Incyte Genomics I was a Group Leader at ID Biomedical, Vancouver where I managed a product development team working on gene-based diagnostics. I hold a PhD in plant molecular genetics from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and a BSc and MSc in biology from the University of Zagreb, Croatia.

Head Translational Pathology and Clinical Biomarker Laboratories, Translational Medicine
Dr. Montalto is currently the Executive Director and Head of Translational Pathology and Clinical Biomarker Laboratories in Translational Medicine at Bristol-Myer Squibb. In this role, he leads genomics, genetics, flow cytometry, histology, immune-histochemistry, exploratory technologies and pathology laboratories in support of clinical trials, exploratory biomarker research and companion diagnostics development. Prior to this role, Dr. Montalto was a co-founder and executive of Omnyx, LLC, formerly a joint venture of GE Healthcare and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center that commercialized diagnostic pathology imaging and software products. Omnyx was sold to Inspirata in 2017. Dr. Montalto has patented and published on novel pathology-based multiplexing technology (MultiOmyx™, Clarient/Neogenomics) for oncology biomarker discovery. He has designed and led global clinical trials for in vitro diagnostic digital pathology devices and served as chair of the regulatory taskforce of the Digital Pathology Association (DPA). He currently sits on the board of directors and is President of the DPA, as well as a scientific advisor to several digital pathology companies. He has served as a member of NIH study sections for in vivo molecular imaging centers. Dr. Montalto earned his PhD in tumor biology from Albany Medical College and received his post-doctoral training in anti-inflammatory drug discovery and whole animal physiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

Principal Researcher, Samsung Genome Institute, Samsung Research Institute for Future Medicine
Hui-Sung Moon received BS and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from Yonsei University in 2005 and 2011 respectively. His research topic was Microfluidics and Lab-on-a-Chips for biomedical applications using cell manipulation. He was a Research Staff Member of Bio Lab to 2013 and of Samsung Biomedical Research Institute (SBRI) to 2016 at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT). He has worked on microfluidic and device technologies for Circulating Tumor Cell research. Now he is a Principal Researcher in Samsung Genome Institute (SGI) at Samsung Medical Center and working in developing various biomedical devices especially for Single Cell Genomics and Precision Medicine.

Branch Chief, Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research Branch
Dr. Moore leads the NCI Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research Branch (BBRB). As Chief she sets the direction and strategic vision for the Branch and oversees a complex set of projects related to biobanking: Biospecimen Science research conducted under the Biospecimen Research Network (BRN), Acquisition of biospecimens for the Cancer Moonshot℠ Biobank and the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Program, The Biospecimen Research Database, a Web-based Biospecimen Science literature database, Biobanking economics research, and The NCI Best Practices for Biospecimen Resources. Dr. Moore speaks nationally and internationally about BBRB and biobanking, publishes articles related to BBRB and related initiatives, and serves as expert reviewer and as member of advisory boards. Dr. Moore previously led BBRB’s Biospecimen Research Network (BRN). Under her leadership, the BRN grew from concept stage to an internationally known, multidimensional program. Dr. Moore is a molecular biologist with a broad background in research and development. She came to NCI from Celera Genomics, where she led and managed cross-functional teams to develop bioinformatics products focused on comparative genomics and data visualization; developed new drug targets for complex diseases using multiple approaches, including genetic analysis of disease association study data, biological pathways analysis, literature mining, and genomic analysis; and contributed to the assembly and annotation of the human genome. Dr. Moore earned her doctorate at Cornell University and her B.A. degree at Wellesley College.

CSO, Biochem
Dr. Morin is the CSO of Two Pore Guys, Inc. Prior to 2PG, Dr. Morin directed research and development at MassBiologics, a monoclonal drug discovery, development and manufacturing company. He has also held positions at University of California designing HIV vaccines, and University of Massachusetts managing sequencing facilities. He received his PHD from the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Scientific Director, Clinical Cancer Cytogenetics; Clinical Director, Center for Personalized Diagnostics, Department of Pathology
I am the scientific director of Clinical Cancer Cytogenetics and the clinical director of the Center of Personalized Diagnostics.

Senior Vice President, Products & Strategy
Mr. Moshkevich is passionate about improving patient outcomes and lowering healthcare costs through non-invasive technologies and innovative reimbursement models. He began his career in New York as a consultant with Bain & Company, and then moved to Moscow, Russia in 2007 to lead a regional growth strategy for SABMiller. Returning to Boston, he joined the investment team at Parthenon Capital Partners where he invested in healthcare and business services companies. Later with the Disease Management team of OptumHealth (a UnitedHealth Group company), he was the first to identify and measure the value of provider engagement in Optum’s disease management services, which led to lower costs and improved patient outcomes. More recently, as a member of the start-up team at Organ- I, he developed a commercialization strategy for a non-invasive genetic test that detects the acute rejection of solid organ transplants. Since joining Natera in 2011, he has been responsible for launching Natera’s brands in more than 40 countries worldwide, and developing key channel partnerships in the United States. Mr. Moshkevich graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University with a B.A. in Economics and Mathematics and has an M.B.A. from Stanford University.

Technology Director
Katreena Mullican is Technology Director and Cloud Whisperer at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama. She is an advocate of DevOps and open-source and has over 20-years experience architecting Linux, virtualization, and hybrid cloud solutions. Katreena and her team strive to automate as many processes as possible, including the provisioning and scaling of on-premises and public cloud infrastructure for containerized applications and workflows.

Product Manager, Data Sciences Platform
Ruchi is a Product Manager at the Data Sciences Platform within the Broad Institute. She studied biochemistry and started off as a bench scientist developing processes for sequencing clinical data. Over time she transitioned into a software engineering role with a focus on building tools for bioinformatics analysis, and she uses her experience both as a researcher and developer to drive product development for Cromwell + WDL, tools to run large-scale genomics workflows.

Assistant Professor, Co-Director
Dr. Muhammed Murtaza received his medical degree from Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan before moving to Trinity College and Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute to get a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He started his research career investigating germline determinants of disease predisposition in South Asians before moving to Cambridge to work with Dr. Nitzan Rosenfeld on cell- free DNA analysis. He moved to TGen from Cambridge in 2014 and is co-appointed as Research Faculty at Mayo Clinic Arizona. Dr. Murtaza continues development of minimally invasive cancer diagnostics at TGen supported by awards and grants from Mayo Clinic Arizona, Ben and Catherine Ivy Foundation, Science Foundation Arizona, The V Foundation for Cancer Research, Stand Up To Cancer, Baylor Research Institute and the Tanner Project Foundation.

Founder & CEO
Dr. Myatt is the founder and CEO of MBio Diagnostics, Inc. He is an entrepreneur with a proven track record for building technology companies, securing patents and licensing technology, raising funding, establishing commercial operations, and leading through growth. Prior to MBio Diagnostics, Chris successfully founded and led Precision Photonics Corporation, a successful laser and optical technology supplier that is now a division of IDEX. Trained as a physicist and measurement scientist, Chris invented and developed multiple technologies that formed the basis of his companies. He earned a B.S. in Physics and a B.A. in Mathematics at Southern Methodist University. Chris also earned a Ph.D. in Atomic Physics at the University of Colorado. He studied Bose-Einstein Condensation under Carl Wieman (Nobel Prize, 2001), helping to create the first BEC condensate in the Wieman lab. He also studied quantum information under David Wineland (Nobel Prize, 2012) as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder.

Scientific Manager, Cancer Immunology, Research
Deepti Nagarkar obtained her Bachelor’s Degree at UCLA followed by her PhD at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She was a fellow at Northwestern University prior to joining Genentech in 2011. Her research interests have spanned human physiology, mucosal disease in asthma and IBD, and more recently has been applying her insights in the field of cancer immunology. She is currently a Scientific Manager where she leads a team dedicated to patient stratification based on use of concomitant medications. This data science driven approach is helping to reverse translate observations in the clinic, providing new opportunities for combination therapy that are being tested by discovery scientists. Additionally, she supports academic / industrial collaborations as part of the imCORE Network, helping to establish a robust and shared vision for personalizing care for cancer patients.

Chief Scientist, 711 Human Performance Wing
Dr. Rajesh R. Naik, a member of the Senior Executive Service, is the Chief Scientist of the 711th Human Performance Wing of the Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Materiel Command, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. He is the primary science and technology adviser to the wing commander. In this position he provides technical vision and strategy for the wing’s science and technology plans. He also leads research efforts in biomimetic materials and sensors. Dr. Naik joined AFRL in 1999 as a visiting scientist and became a federal employee in 2004, where he was assigned the position of Biotechnology Group Leader. In 2007 he was appointed the technology adviser for biotechnology in the Nanostructure and Biological Materials Branch. Dr. Naik also served as the Chair for AFRL’s Bio-X Strategic Technology Team from 2008 to 2011. Scientifically, Dr. Naik has research interests in the areas of bionanotechnology and biomimetics, with focus on biosensing, bioelectronics, nanostructured materials, and protein engineering. He has published over 210 peer-reviewed articles, several book chapters and has 10 awarded patents. He is also active in numerous technical communities.

Co-Founder, President & CEO
Niven R. Narain, PhD, is Co-Founder, President, & CEO of BERG; inventor of BERG’s flagship, proprietary Interrogative Biology® platform and has 100+ US & international patents covering multiple disease areas and AI-based technologies. He has overseen development of BERG’s clinical stage assets and pipeline and forged strategic partners with industry leaders, academia, and US and UK governments. Narain is most passionate about improving patient care and enabling increased access to innovative medicines to improve healthcare outcomes. Narain is an industry thought leader on precision medicine and drug development, frequently speaking at The Economist, Bloomberg, Financial Times, and Aspen Ideas meetings in addition to being featured on CNN, BBC, CNBC, Forbes, Fox Business, and the Wall Street Journal. He serves on the NASA/Gene Lab Steering Committee and works closely with DoD leadership on breast and prostate cancer initiatives. Narain is a recipient of the Sylvester Cancer Center’s Zubrod Prize, an NIH/NIDDK Award of Excellence and was named to the Boston Business Journal top 40 leaders under 40 in 2014.

CSO
Dr. Anil Narasimha received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He then received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego under Dr. Steven Dowdy, working on the regulation of the retinoblastoma protein in cell cycle. He then completed his postdoctoral work at Stanford University under Dr. Michael Snyder, where he worked on numerous projects in personalized medicine. Anil co-founded Mekonos with Steven Banerjee and Greg Sitters in 2015, and is currently the Chief Scientific Officer overseeing the biological operations of the company.

Head of Commercial
Born in Australia and raised in Slovenia, Mia is a global citizen who has spent the last 20 years focused on taking scientific innovation and turning it into profitable revenue. She is a creative commercial leader with an international network in both technology and life sciences. Mia is passionate about nurturing diverse talent and building fun, high performing teams. Her entrepreneurial spirit has taken her from launching Dell Computer’s mining, oil and gas business, to pioneering a new health industries strategy for Hewlett Packard, to multiplying PwC’s Life Science consulting revenue. She is now part of Arivale’s senior leadership team, responsible for building partnerships that leverage the muti-omic data, created via Arivale’s consumer program. The goal is to use the data to accelerate research in areas of unmet medical need. Mia graduated with a BA from Macquarie University in Sydney Australia and hopes to finish her MBA once her teenage children leave for college. She is an avid athlete, Ironman 140.6 and 70.3 finisher, marathon runner, mountaineer and snow skier. Since 2014, Mia has served in various Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association board roles.

CMO
Bijan Nejadnik MD is a biotech leader with scientific, clinical and regulatory expertise with strong business acumen. He has more than two decades of academic experience (including Johns Hopkins, Cornell and Stanford Universities) and pharma and biotech industry, including Johnson & Johnson, Jazz pharmaceuticals, Galena Biopharma and Eureka Therapeutics leading teams and organizations in developing, FDA approval, and marketing. He developed the company’s global product portfolio strategy, in hematology-oncology, immune-oncology and auto immune diseases, built and managed partnerships and alliances, performed due diligence, obtained financing from major funds successfully. He has held active faculty positions at Stanford University school of medicine, University of California and State University of New York and mentored a number of professionals currently leaders in academia and industry. He received his premedical degree and medical degree with honors from Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) in Belgium and trained in internal medicine, hematology-Oncology at UCL, in clinical pharmacology at Weil-Cornell school of medicine and in GI-Hepatology at Johns Hopkins University.

Medical Laboratory Doctor, Point-of-Care Coordinator
Dr. NGUYEN THUY LOAN CHI is currently a laboratory doctor and Point-of-care Coordinator of Franco- Vietnamese Hospital (FV Hospital) - Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam. She graduated general medicine from Medical University Pham Ngoc Thach in 2004 in HCMC then from 2005, worked as a lecturer of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology - Medical University Pham Ngoc Thach for 5 years and finished a three-month internship of Molecular Biology at Pathology and Genetics (IPG), Gosselies, Belgium in 2005. After receiving the Master’s degree in Medicine of Blood Transfusion at University of Leuven (UCL), Brussels, Belgium in 2009 and the Master degree in Biology and Cellular Development at the University of Paris Descartes, Paris, France in 2010, she continued her career in the laboratory of Immunology Department at Blood and Transfusion Hospital. Dr. Chi participated in FV Hospital since July 2011 as a medical physician in the general laboratory. Meanwhile, from early of 2015, FV started the Point-of-care Testing program and Dr. Chi is also the Point-of-care Coordinator of the hospital. Since then, she often gave presentations in Scientific Activities of other hospitals throughout the country of Vietnam to share the experience in implementation and management a POCT program and participated in the International symposium for Point-of-care testing education-Medical University of Hue (Jul 4th- 5th 2017) as a speaker.

Professor, Applied Life Sciences
Angelika Niemz received her undergraduate degree in chemistry in 1992 at the University of Konstanz (Germany), and her PhD in biophysical chemistry in 1999 at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). After a postdoc in chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, she joined Keck Graduate Institute in 2002, where she is now the Arnold and Mable Beckman Professor. In 2009, she worked during a 6-month sabbatical for Roche Molecular Diagnostics. From 2009-2014, she served as Director of Research at Keck Graduate Institute. Her current research focuses on developing and commercializing assays and devices for near patient infectious disease diagnosis via nucleic acid testing.

Principal Scientist, Oncology Research
Olivier Nolan-Stevaux is a Principal Scientist in the Department of Immuno-Oncology Research at Amgen in South San Francisco, California, focused on creating novel and effective anti-cancer therapies. He joined Amgen in 2009, after completing his post-doctoral training at UCSF studying mouse models of pancreatic cancer and his PhD training at the MGH Cancer Center in Boston, Massachusetts. At Amgen, Olivier has led a research group and international teams dedicated to the pre-clinical development of several bi-specific T cell engager antibodies targeting a range of malignancies, including AMG 424, currently in Phase I clinical trial for the treatment of Multiple Myeloma, and multiple programs against kidney, prostate, lung and breast cancer at different stages of the pre-clinical pipeline. Olivier’s team also developed genetically engineered mouse models to study the mechanism of action and resistance to T cell engager therapies in vivo.

CIO, Director, NIH Center for Information Technology, Health and Human Services
Andrea Norris serves as both the NIH Chief Information Officer and the Director of the NIH Center for Information Technology. As the NIH CIO, Ms. Norris oversees NIH’s $1 billion information technology portfolio, which supports scientific research and discovery. As the Director of the Center for Information Technology she is in charge of several NIH-wide IT services, including a state-of-the-market, high-speed research network; the Biowulf high-performance scientific computing system ranked in the top 100 in the world by TOP500; cloud-based collaboration and communication platforms and tools; bioinformatics research programs; business solutions and applications; and not to forget, the NIH Data Center and 24 x7 operations of NIH’s distributed IT environment. Prior to her tenure at NIH, Ms. Norris worked at the National Science Foundation (NSF) where she was responsible for establishing the Foundation’s strategy, policies, and programs and managing its information technology systems and services. Before joining NSF, Ms. Norris was the Deputy Chief Information Officer for Management for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), providing senior leadership and management of the agency’s complex $2 billion information technology portfolio.

Division Chief, Medical Genetics
During his ten years with Kaiser Permanente in Southern California, Dr. Nunes has contributed to the ongoing integration of three major genetic innovations into broader clinical practice: the evolution of next-generation sequencing (NGS) panels, the introduction of fetal cell free DNA testing (cfDNA) or non- invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), and the emergence of whole exome sequencing (WES). An undergraduate degree in Population Genetics from UC Davis was followed by medical school at the Uniformed Services University, a military Residency in Pediatrics, and Fellowships in Clinical Genetics, Clinical Molecular (Laboratory) Genetics, and Teratology at the University of Washington, Seattle. His 25 years of clinical experience in Genetics have spanned prenatal diagnosis to Alzheimer disease, the birth and infancy of cancer genetics, and the revolution of gene discovery in Pediatric dysmorphology “unknowns”. Before “settling down” in San Diego, he directed the USAF DNA Diagnostic Laboratory, and introduced genetics to the Metabolic Bone Clinic he co-directed at the Ohio State University. Like most practicing clinical and diagnostic laboratory geneticists, the span of topics within the field of Genetics and Genomics he is interested in remains fairly broad. In addition to the translational activities described above, he is an expert in metabolic bone disease; an authority on genetic diagnoses confused with child abuse; a successful advocate for patients encountering genetic discrimination; and a voice in the Ethics, Legal, and Social Issues community at the local, national, and international levels.

Chief Medical Officer
Robert L. Nussbaum, is the Chief Medical Officer of Invitae, a genetic information and diagnostic company, after joining the company in 2015. He is board certified in internal medicine, clinical genetics and clinical molecular genetics, and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics. From 2006-2015, he was the Holly Smith Professor of Medicine at UCSF, Chief of the Division of Genomic Medicine and Medical Director of both the Cancer Risk Program and the UCSF Program in Cardiovascular Genetics. He is the co-author of over 230 peer- reviewed publications in basic and applied human genetics as well as numerous commentaries, editorials, and textbook chapters. He was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, the National Academy of Medicine (IOM) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Nussbaum served as a member of the Board of Directors and President of the American Society of Human Genetics, on the Board of Directors of the American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics, and was a founding fellow and served on the Board of Directors of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics.

Vice President and General Manager, Genetic Science Division
Andrea Ockhardt has a PhD in organic Chemistry and has worked over years as scientific group leader in an institute for biotechnology and later for Invitek (since 1996) as a leader of the Marketing and Sales division. Within the STRATEC group she is further responsible for the product management for OEM business and business development of the BU Molecular.

CSO and Co-Founder
Jonathan is the inventor of QuantuMDx’s proprietary sample preparation, amplification and detection technologies. Following studying for his PhD in genomics, he began his career working in pathology laboratories in the UK. He was consistently frustrated by the speed at which the laboratory was able to turn tests around, whether that be through the need to batch samples, transportation of samples, or simply the long analysis time. During his time in the pathology lab he defined the specifications for a POC MDx device and then set to build and alter the technologies to facilitate his dream in his garage at home. This early work was the foundation for which QuantuMDx’s technology is built upon. Jonathan spent two years in Cape Town, working to develop QuantuMDx’s technology in the market that will benefit the most from it. He spent many hours a week talking with frontline health workers, who routinely perform POC Dx, to understand the field. This valuable experience and knowledge has been channelled into QuantuMDx’s device, which will make it one of the most complete POC devices when it is launched. Jonathan was recognised for his achievements in 2015 when he was awarded European CTO of the Year.

Associate Dean, Informatics and Technology
Lucila Ohno-Machado is Associate Director of the Department of Radiology Decision Systems Group at Brigham & Women's Hospital and Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. She also is an Affiliated Faculty member in the Health Sciences and Technology Division for Harvard and MIT. Dr. Machado earned an MD from the University of Sao Paulo School of Medicine in Brazil, an MHA from Escola de Administracao de Sao Paulo, FGV, Brazil, and a PhD from Stanford University.

Professor of Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco Member
As a physician–scientist, Dr. Okada has been dedicated to brain tumor immunology and development of effective immunotherapy for brain tumor patients for over 20 years. His team was one of very first to discover cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) epitopes in glioma-associated and glioma-specific antigens. Dr. Okada also found critical roles for the integrin receptor very late activation antigen (VLA)-4 and the chemokine CXCL10 in facilitating entry of CTLs to the brain tumor site. Dr. Okada has translated these discoveries into a number of innovative immunotherapy clinical studies in both adult and pediatric brain tumor patients. Dr. Okada’s discoveries have also led to two currently active multicenter trials (NCT02078648 and NCT02960230), each involving 15 or more sites. Most recently, Dr. Okada has developed a novel chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) against epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)viii and cloned a high affinity T-cell receptor against H3.3K27M, both of which are glioma-specific antigens. Based on these studies, Dr. Okada currently leads a novel PICI project developing TCR-transduced T-cell therapy for patients with H3.3K27M+ glioma. Dr. Okada’s team has also pioneered in discoveries of novel immunoregulatory mechanisms in gliomas, such as one mediated by myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC) and mutations of the isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) enzymes IDH1 and IDH2. To improve radiologic evaluation criteria for brain tumor patients undergoing immunotherapy, Dr. Okada leads an international group of brain tumor immunotherapy experts to develop novel iRANO criteria.

Professor of Pathology, The L.G. Koss Division of Cytology Montefiore Medical Center; Professor of Anatomy and Structural Biology; Director, Clinical Imaging Applications, Integrated Imaging Program, Michael F. Price Center for Genetic and Translational Medicine
I am a physician scientist, an anatomical pathologist with subspecialty training in cytopathology, PhD training in cancer cell biology and cell signaling pathways, and post-doctoral experience in extra-cellular matrix receptor signaling. My major interests are in cancer cell biology, the biology of breast cancer progression and metastasis, development of prognostic and predictive molecular biomarkers (digital pathology) and use of minimally invasive procedures for diagnosis and prognosis of human malignancies, such as fine needle aspiration (FNA) biopsy. I am a professor of Pathology, Anatomy and Structural Biology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center, the director of Clinical Imaging Applications at the Integrated Imaging Program and a member of Albert Einstein Cancer Center, Tumor Microenvironment program. I have been studying the role of actin regulatory protein Mena in metastatic progression of breast cancer and development and clinical utilization of immunohistochemical landmarks (TMEM doorways for hematogenous cancer cell dissemination, dissemination competent cancer cells expressing invasive set of Mena isoforms collectively called MenaCalc) associated with metastatic risk in patients. Most recently, I have led a study which showed that chemotherapy may induce pro-metastatic changes in the breast cancer microenvironment, including an, Inc.rease in: (a) the proportion of MenaINV-HIGH-expressing cancer cells, (b) TMEM density and function, (c) circulating tumor cells, and (d) lung metastasis. My team is now focusing on elucidating the mechanisms of chemotherapy-mediated induction of cancer cell dissemination in breast cancer and pharmacological approaches to counteract this previously unrecognized side effect of chemotherapy.

Director & Head, Diagnostics, Analytics & Biomarkers
Matt Onsum is the head of Diagnostics, Analytics, and Biomarkers at Seattle Genetics. Prior to joining Seattle Genetics he was at Merrimack Pharmaceuticals and Merrimack’s subsidiary company Silver Creek. At Merrimack Matt led the transnational research program for MM-111, a bi-specific antibody designed to treat ErbB2 positive gastric cancer. At Silver Creek, Matt helped lead the company from business plan and initial IP through to fundraising and growing a multidisciplinary team to develop of a bi-specific protein for treating heart disease. This molecule is now in IND enabling studies. Before joining Merrimack, he was a senior scientist at AstraZeneca R&D Boston, where he used computational model simulations to help identify new drug targets. He received his BS, MS and PhD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. His graduate work, under the supervision of Adam Arkin used both computational and experimental biology to study how immune cells track and capture invading microbes. His first real job was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he helped with the design of a laser spectrometer for measuring water on the surface of mars.

Chief Platform Officer
David O’Reilly is Chief Platform Officer of Proteus Digital Health and leads the company’s Digital Medicine development, manufacturing, corporate development and corporate strategy areas. Prior to joining Proteus, David spent over 15 years starting and building life sciences companies focused on novel platforms for drug discovery and personalized medicine. He was President of Catalyst Biosciences, Chief Business Officer and member of the founding management team at Iconix Biosciences, and Head of Corporate Development for ARIAD Pharmaceuticals (where he was also the general manager of a subsidiary company, ARIAD Gene Therapeutics). He began his career as a management consultant to healthcare and biotechnology companies at L.E.K. Consulting. David is a graduate of Wesleyan University, where he was named the Gilbert Clee Scholar, and Harvard Business School, where he received an MBA with distinction.

Assistant Professor, Neurosurgery; Member, Cancer Center
Dr. Orringer is an assistant professor of neurosurgery and director of the Translational Molecular Imaging Laboratory in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Michigan. He is also the Chief Medical Officer of Invenio Imaging, Inc. a Santa Clara, CA company dedicated to commercializing stimulated Raman histology. Dr. Orringer’s translational research bringing stimulated Raman histology from bench to bedside has been published in Science Translational Medicine and Nature Biomedical Engineering. The Congress of Neurological Surgeons recognized Dr. Orringer’s work with the 2017 Innovator of the Year Award. His clinical practice is focused on the surgical care of brain tumors.

Chancellor's Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering Bioengineering, UCLA; HHMI Professor, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Associate Director, California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI); Founder of Holomic/Cellmic LLC.
Dr. Ozcan is the Chancellor’s Professor at UCLA and an HHMI Professor with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, leading the Bio- and Nano-Photonics Laboratory at UCLA School of Engineering and is also the Associate Director of the California NanoSystems Institute. Dr. Ozcan holds 37 issued patents and >20 pending patent applications and is also the author of one book and the co-author of >500 peer-reviewed publications in major scientific journals and conferences. Dr. Ozcan is the founder and a member of the Board of Directors of Holomic/Cellmic LLC, which was named a Technology Pioneer by The World Economic Forum in 2015. Dr. Ozcan is a Fellow of the International Photonics Society (SPIE), the Optical Society of America (OSA), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has received major awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, International Commission for Optics Prize, Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award, Rahmi M. Koc Science Medal, International Photonics Society Early Career Achievement Award, Army Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Navy Young Investigator Award, IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award and Distinguished Lecturer Award, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award, National Academy of Engineering The Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Award and MIT’s TR35 Award for his seminal contributions to computational imaging, sensing and diagnostics.

CEO
Norman Packard has over two decades of experience in chaos theory, learning algorithms, predictive modeling of complex systems, statistical analysis of evolution, artificial life and complex adaptive systems. Prior to daptics, Packard co-founded Prediction Company, where he applied learning algorithms and statistical modeling to predict financial markets. Before 1991, Packard was associate professor of Physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the UC Santa Cruz.

Principle Scientist
Dimple Pandya, MD, MPT is a board-certified Anatomic and Clinical Pathologist at Bristol Myers Squibb in the Translational Medicine Group. She focuses on the development and implementation of novel automated assays to support immuno-oncology drug discovery and clinical development programs. In addition, she leads standardization and validation of image analysis methods to interrogate the dynamic relationship between cancer and the immune system.

Head, Genetics and Genomics Team
Saumya Pant completed her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), in Cell and Developmental Biology in 2009. She is a Senior Research Investigator, Head of Sequencing Technologies at Bristol-Myers Squibb. She leads a translational research group providing next-generation technologies focusing on pharmacogenetic, pharmacodynamic, biomarker development and molecular characterization across all phases of drug development lifecycle at Bristol Myers Squibb. She finished her Research Fellow, Clinical Development Lab/Molecular Biomarkers and Diagnostics Lab in August 2014.

Professor, Pathology & Biomedical Informatics
Dr. Pantanowitz is a Professor of Pathology and of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh in the USA. He is the Director of the Pathology Informatics Division and Director of the Pathology Informatics Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). He is also the Director of the Cytopathology Division at UPMC Shadyside. Dr. Pantanowitz is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Pathology Informatics. He is a member of the board of directors for the Digital Pathology Association (DPA), executive board of the American Society of Cytopathology (ASC), serves as a council member for the Association for Pathology Informatics (API) and is a member of the College of American Pathologists (CAP) Digital Pathology committee. He is widely published in the field of pathology informatics, including digital imaging and its application to pathology.

Professor and Founding Director, Institute of Tumor Biology, University
Prof. Pantel is Chairman of the Institute of Tumour Biology at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. The institute is part of the Centre of Experimental Medicine and the University Cancer Center Hamburg (UCCH). The pioneer work of Prof Pantel in the field of cancer micrometastasis, circulating tumor cells and circulating nucleic acids (ctDNA, microRNAs) is reflected by more than 400 publications in excellent high ranking biomedical and scientific journals (e.g., NEJM, Lancet, Nature Journals, Cancer Cell, Science Translational Medicine, Cancer Discovery, PNAS, JCO, JNCI, Cancer Res.) and has been awarded the AACR Outstanding Investigator Award 2010, German Cancer Award 2010, and ERC Advanced Investigator Grant 2011. Moreover, Prof Pantel coordinates the European TRANSCAN group “CTC-SCAN”, the European IMI consortium CANCER-ID (www.cancer-id.eu) on blood- based “Liquid Biopsies” and serves on the Editorial Boards of international cancer journals (e.g., Breast Cancer Res., Cancer Res.).

Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology
Thales Papagiannakopoulos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at the NYU School of Medicine. During his postdoctoral studies in Dr. Tyler Jacks’ laboratory at MIT, he studied the molecular mechanisms that contribute to cancer at an organismal level, using autochthonous mouse models of cancer. Dr. Jacks’ laboratory has been in the forefront of cancer research by developing elegant pre-clinical mouse models that accurately recapitulate human cancers. He performed a series of experiments to dissect the genetic and clonal mechanisms by which lung cancer progresses toward malignancy. The Papagiannakopoulos laboratory uses genetically engineered mouse models (GEMMs) of lung cancer, which recapitulate the genetics, histological progression and tissue microenvironment, to elucidate the interactions of tumor cell autonomous oncogenic events with alterations in tumor and whole-animal metabolism. He recently pioneered novel CRISPR/Cas9-based somatic genome engineering in lung cancer GEMMs. Using this tool, he developed novel mouse models of lung cancer based on clinically relevant mutations. Using CRISPR/Cas9-based genome engineering, he has developed a platform to rapidly characterize the function of genes that are highly mutated in lung cancer, characterize their mechanism of action and therefore model complex genetic subtypes observed in lung cancer patients. Since the establishment of his laboratory, they have made significant progress in applying our approaches to characterize a major genetic subset of lung adenocarcinoma with NRF2/KEAP1 mutations.

Senior Staff Scientist, Department of Medicine, Solid Tumor Division
Sonya Parpart-Li received her PhD in Tumor Biology from Georgetown University as part of a Graduate Partnership Program with the National Institutes of Health. Her dissertation work focused on deciphering heterogeneity among hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients at the molecular level using microarrays, functional assays and bioinformatics analysis to assess gene expression and methylation status. In 2014, she joined Personal Genome Diagnostics (PGDx) as part of their R&D team where she has developed next-generation sequencing based cancer diagnostics to address tumor heterogeneity and to detect clinically actionable genetic mutations in a multitude of cancer types. She helped launch the company’s first comprehensive noninvasive diagnostic test for detection of sequence mutations and structural alterations in circulating tumor DNA shed into the blood. Most recently, she led a product development team to create a class II device that detects microsatellite instability in CRC patients. Currently Sonya works as a Senior Staff Scientist in the Department of Medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering developing NGS based assays for variant detection in both cfDNA and tissue.

Application Scientist
Tim is a cheminformatics specialist with a history of contributions to drug discovery programs. His strengths, include data analysis and pipelining. As an organic chemist, Tim worked at Pfizer and Dart Neuroscience before he joined ChemAxon as an application scientist.

Chair, Radiology
Dr. Patel is a physician engineer, informatician, active teacher and researcher, he has a special interest in machine and deep learning, mathematical modeling of biological processes, informatics and 3D printing. He is the Chair of Department of Radiology and the Medical Director for 3D Imaging and Printing laboratory for Geisinger and leads informatics efforts in Radiology. Dr. Patel has published 90 research articles, review articles, textbook chapters and abstracts and has given several lectures at regional, national and international radiology meetings. Dr. Patel is an electrical engineer and clinically he is an Interventional Radiologist and his clinical research interests include dialysis access management and interventional oncology. He trained at Temple University Hospital and M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Patel began his career in 2001 as Assistant Professor of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and an Interventional Radiologist at Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He led Radiology and Interventional Radiology simulation program at Penn Medicine Clinical Simulation Center. He has been in various leadership positions at Geisinger for past 7 years. He is boarded in Diagnostic Radiology, Interventional Radiology and Clinical Informatics and a Fellow of the Society of Interventional Radiology.

Associate Professor
Abhijit Patel’s research group at Yale University is working to develop and develop and clinically validate novel noninvasive DNA- and RNA-based cancer diagnostics. He is an Associate Professor of Therapeutic Radiology at the Yale University School of Medicine. He completed residency training in radiation oncology at Harvard University, medical internship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and obtained his MD and PhD degrees at Yale University. His scientific background is in the field of nucleic acid biochemistry, having performed his PhD and postdoctoral training with Drs. Joan Steitz and Jack Szostak. As a physician-scientist, he also maintains an active clinical radiation oncology practice.

CTO
Sofie Pattijn (CTO and founder, ImmunXperts) has over 20 years of experience in the field of immunogenicity assessment (vaccines and biotherapeutics) and in vitro assay development. She has extensive hands-on lab experience and has managed and coached several In vitro teams over the last decade. From 2008 till 2013 she was Head of the In vitro Immunogenicity group at AlgoNomics (Ghent, Belgium) and Lonza Applied Protein Services (Cambridge, UK). Prior to that, she worked at Innogenetics, Belgium for over 15 years.

Head, Translational Research Laboratory, Belfer Center for Applied Cancer Science
Cloud Paweletz, PhD, is head of the Translational Research Laboratory (TRL) at the Belfer Center for Applied Cancer Science. Previously the Principal scientist, externalization lead, and proteomics site lead for Merck & Co.'s department of molecular biomarkers, Dr. Paweletz brings to the Belfer Center expertise in technology development and success in translating assay-based platforms into clinical practice. Dr. Paweletz holds a PhD and an M.S. in chemistry from Georgetown University, and a B.S. in chemistry from Baldwin Wallace College. He is a member of the American Association of Cancer Research, and has received multiple awards and honors throughout his career, including a Fellows Award for Research Excellence and a Cancer Research Training Award from the NIH.

Managing Director, Executive
Timothy Pearcy is an entrepreneur whose passion and primary activity for almost 35 years has been developing and commercializing advanced lyophilization technologies. Timothy's primary responsibility is leading the development of innovative new production processing and packaging technologies.

Data Science & NLP Lecturer
I am an MSc graduate at the IE&M Faculty of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Prof. Roi Reichart. My master's thesis presents the novel task of sarcasm interpretation, along with a publicly available dataset and a Machine Translation based sarcasm interpretation system with a sentiment analysis component (the Sarcasm SIGN). My main interest in NLP is that grey area where machines fail to understand humans - non literal communication such as humor, irony and sarcasm. I enjoy defining new tasks and approaching them with different methods, and currently am most interested in neural sequence to sequence models. I'm currently working as a Data Scientist and NLP researcher at Fiverr, building ML algorithms and Neural models for challenges in the online marketplace - soliciting for 5 stars reviews, sentiment analysis under complex settings, and much more.

Co-founder & CEO
Brad Perkins is a physician, scientist and entrepreneur. He is currently Co-Founder and CEO of Sapiens Data Science, Inc., (sapiensDS.com and @sapiensDS) based in San Diego, CA: “Sapiens turns science into action”. Prior to co-founding Sapiens in 2018, Brad was the founding Chief Medical Officer (2014-17) for Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI) where he designed, built and operated the Health Nucleus, a leading precision medicine research platform with genomics pioneer JC Venter. Brad served as EVP (2009-2013) for Strategy and Innovation and Chief Transformation Officer at Vanguard Health Systems, a multi-state integrated health system in the run-up to its IPO with 46,000 employees and revenue of $6B+ and subsequent sale to another publicly-traded healthcare company. Brad started his career (1989) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) where he led and was involved in many high-profile scientific successes and investigations in the US and globally; he led the 2001 US anthrax bioterrorism investigations following 9/11. He served as the Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer (2003-2009) at CDC. Brad has an MD and MBA and is Board-certified in Internal Medicine. He is an active private investor in human health and commercial spaceflight. He is a member of the RAND Health Board of Advisors, Esther Dyson’s Wellville Advisory Board and Patron Member of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. He lives and works in San Diego and San Francisco, CA.

CSO
Dr. Emanuel F Petricoin has been the Co-Director of the Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine (CAPMM) at George Mason University since2005, where he is a University Professor. Prior to this position, he served as Co-Director of the FDA-NCI Clinical Proteomics Program and a Senior Investigator within the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA from 1993-2005. Dr. Petricoin received his PhD in Microbiology from the University of Maryland in 1990. The focus of the CAPMM is the invention and use of proteomics technologies for personalized therapy, and biomarker discovery and measurement for direct clinical applications at the bedside. He is a co- founder of 4 life science companies, Theranostics Health, Inc., Ceres Nanosciences, Inc., C-4 Diagnostics, Inc. and Perthera, Inc. He is a co-inventor on 40 filed and published patents, and has authored over 350 peer-reviewed publications and invited reviews. He has authored over 40 book chapters, is on the editorial board of Proteomics, Biomdical Microdevices, Proteomics- Clinical Applications, Proteomics- Protocols, Molecular Carcinogenesis, Journal of Personalized Medicine and is a Senior Editor for Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention Dr. Petricoin is a founding member of the Human Proteomic Organization (HUPO) as well as the US HUPO and served on the Executive Committee and Treasurer for HUPO from 2002-2004. He has received numerous awards, including the University Professorship at George Mason University, the NIH Director’s Award, FDA Distinguished Scientist Award, 2015 Innovator of the Year Award, GAP50 Top Virginia Entrepreneurs, Nifty 50 Award, American Society of Cytopathology Basic Research Award, the Roche Diagnostics/CLAS Distinguished Scientist Award and the Harvard University Leading Edge Award and is s Kentucky Colonel. He is the faculty representative to the George Mason University Research Foundation and represents GMU on the Board of Directors for the Virginia Health Research Biosciences Corporation.

Christos J. Petropoulos, PhD is Chief Scientific Officer, Monogram Biosciences and Vice President, Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp). Dr. Petropoulos is responsible for the development of Monogram’s diagnostic assay services, which focus on virology, oncology, neurology and gene therapy, and enable the development of drug and vaccine candidates and their utilization in routine clinical practice. Dr. Petropoulos joined Monogram as the Director of R&D in 1996 shortly after the Company was founded, was named Vice President R&D in 1999 and appointed Chief Scientific Officer in 2004. Monogram Biosciences was acquired by LabCorp in 2009. Prior to joining Monogram, Dr. Petropoulos was employed at Genentech, Inc., where he headed the Molecular Virology Laboratory (1992-96), Research Virology Laboratory (1994-96), and the Molecular Detection Laboratory (1994-96). Dr. Petropoulos received a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from Brown University and trained as a post-doctoral fellow at the NCI Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center, where he was funded by a fellowship from the Leukemia Society of America. Dr. Petropoulos is a world-recognized expert in antiviral drug resistance and molecular diagnostics and has directed the design, development and launch of 20 complex assays that are widely recognized as industry standards and have been used to support the regulatory approval and utilization of a majority of anti-HIV and anti-HCV drugs that have received FDA approval over the past 20 years. Dr. Petropoulos has co-authored over 170 scientific publications, is a named inventor on 16 US patents, and has served as principal investigator on 15 funding awards from the National Institutes of Health. Monogram Biosciences enjoys a long history of productive collaborations with a large number of academic, government/public health and industry partners.

Field Application Scientist
Bonnie L. Phillips is a Field Application Scientist at Ultivue. She has a PhD in Biomedical Sciences with a focus in immunology from Tulane University. Previously, she was a postdoctoral Fellow at UNC, Chapel Hill. Dr. Phillips has research experience in fluorescent immunohistochemistry assays, immunology and infectious disease.

Professor of Health Economics and Founding Director, UCSF Center for Translational and Policy Research on Personalized Medicine (TRANSPERS), Department of Clinical Pharmacy
Kathryn A. Phillips, PhD, a health services researcher and health economist and leader in the application of new technologies to improve healthcare, is the founding director of the Center for Translational and Policy Research on Personalized Medicine (TRANSPERS) in the School of Pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is also a professor of health economics and health services research in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at UCSF, with additional appointments in the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies and UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. Kathryn focuses on the value of new technologies and how to most effectively and efficiently implement them into health care. Her core specialty is personalized (or precision) medicine — a new era of healthcare where medical interventions can be tailored to individual patients based on their unique genetic make-up. Her work spans multiple disciplines, including basic, clinical and social sciences, and brings together leading experts in academia, industry, healthcare, payers, and government. Kathryn led one of the earliest studies on the societal implications of pharmacogenomics, underscoring its potential to reduce the incidence of adverse drug reactions (JAMA, 2001). Her pioneering research on the application of health services research to personalized medicine has revealed insights on how to bridge the gap between emerging technologies and their use in the clinic. Kathryn has also conducted seminal work on HIV, as her analysis of HIV home testing informed the FDA’s decision to approve the first home collection HIV test (New England Journal of Medicine, 1995). Kathryn has published ~150 peer-reviewed articles in major journals, including JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Health Affairs and has had continuous funding from the US. National Institutes of Health as a Principal investigator for 25 years. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the journal Health Affairs (rated as the top policy journal), Value in Health (a leading outcomes research journal), and all of the leading journals on personalized medicine. Kathryn has served on national and international scientific advisory committees and workshops, including work Board of Directors for GenomeCanada, National Academy of Medicine, Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. She has also served as an advisor to various international and industry organizations, including more than 35 biotechnology companies and venture capital firms. She was recently awarded a Rockefeller Foundation global and worked with the Patient- Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) - the largest funder of comparative effectiveness research in the world - developing a research agenda on personalized/precision medicine.

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

Managing Director
Jamie Platt has 15 years of leadership in NGS and Clinical Diagnostics. She has worked on the assay development & commercialization of more than 22 NGS & 35 high-complexity molecular LDTs. She propelled and directed a global $4.7B Fortune 500 diagnostics provider into the emerging genomics market through adoption of NGS technology (2005). She spearheaded development & validation of the first NGS-based HIV test for large commercial reference lab (secured NYS approval) and increased revenue by $1M within 6 months of launch. And has a strong track record of building NGS-based Genomics programs with FDA-aligned, design control development QMS and ISO 15189 readiness for growth from clinical into Pharma services markets.

Head, Early Discovery
Laurent Poirot is an immunologist with over 14 years of experience in biotech. His PhD thesis focused on the pathogenic mechanisms of autoimmune diabetes. In 2004, he joined the Genomics Institute of the Novartis research foundation (GNF, San Diego, CA) as a postdoctoral fellow where he performed high-throughput genetic/genomic studies in immune cells (cDNA/siRNA screens, mouse mutagenesis, microarray databases). In 2009, he joined Cellectis where he first studied gene therapy approaches in hematopoietic stem cells and developed gene-editing tools for CAR T-cells. In 2013, he became Head of Early Discovery and is in charge of developing innovative tools to improve immunotherapies based on gene-edited CAR T-cells. He splits his activities between Paris and New York.

Investigator III, Microscopy and Biophotonics (MiBs), Analytical Sciences and Imaging
As a research investigator in the Microscopy and Biophotonics (MiBs) group in Analytical Sciences & Imaging at NIBR, I am applying my expertise in biophysics, RNA biochemistry and single-molecule imaging to interrogate the biology of individual cells and to address key mechanistic questions in the development of new therapeutics. I came to Novartis in 2008 as a NIBR Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Novartis Biologics Center, where I worked on in vitro and in vivo studies for the optimization of RNAi therapeutics in collaboration with Ian MacRae at Scripps. Prior to joining Novartis, I earned my BA degree in Chemistry at Harvard and my PhD in Biophysical Chemistry at Stanford, where I carried out single-molecule fluorescence studies of DNA structure and polymerase activity in the labs of Eric Kool and W.E. Moerner.

Director, Complex Adaptive Systems
George Poste is the Del E. Webb Professor of Health Innovation and Chief Scientist, Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative, Arizona State University. This program integrates research in genomics, synthetic biology and high-performance computing to study the altered regulation of molecular networks in human diseases to develop new diagnostic tests for precision medicine with particular emphasis on oncology and infectious diseases. He is a Fellow of the U.K. Royal Society, the Royal College of Pathologists and U.K. Academy of Medicine. He has served as a member of the Defense Science Board of the U.S. Department of Defense and currently serves on advisory committees for several U.S. government agencies in defense, intelligence, national security and healthcare.

Global Head of Life Sciences Strategy, Parthenon-EY; Author, Personalizing Precision Medicine
Kristin is a managing director in the EY-Parthenon practice of Ernst & Young LLP and global head of the Life Sciences practice. Based in the Boston office, she has more than 20 years of experience in management consulting and research in medical innovation and the life sciences industry. Her primary areas of focus are commercial strategy and mergers and acquisitions for pharmaceutical, diagnostics, and consumer health companies, investors, and medical institutions worldwide. Kristin is a noted speaker, workshop leader and writer in life sciences. She is also a leader in clinical laboratory and medical innovation, developing product and service strategies and operations with on-the-ground experience in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, India, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Her book, Personalizing Precision Medicine: A Global Voyage from Vision to Reality, was published in 2017. Earlier in her career, Kristin was a partner and owner of a health care strategy firm and a research scientist at two major biotechnology companies. Kristin earned a BA in Biochemistry from Smith College and an MS in Epidemiology, Health Management, and Maternal and Child Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Director, Pharmacogenomics and Molecular Genetics Laboratories, Medical and Molecular Genetics, Indiana University School of Medicine; President Elect, AMP
Dr. Pratt is a Medical and Clinical Molecular Geneticist board-certified by the American College of Medical Genetics. Prior to joining Indiana University, Dr. Pratt was Chief Director of Molecular Genetics at Quest Diagnostics, Nichols Institute in Chantilly VA. In addition to her work, Dr. Pratt served on the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health and Society for the Oversight of Genetic Testing and the Advisory Committee on Hereditary Disorders in Newborns and Children. She also participated in the preparation of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for Best Practices in Molecular Genetic Testing for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr. Pratt also served as an advisory member of EurogenTest for genetic test validation. Dr. Pratt is Past Chair of the Clinical Practice Committee and is currently a member of the Professional Relations committee for the Association of Molecular Pathology. Dr. Pratt serves on the American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) Molecular Pathology Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) Molecular Pathology Advisory committee. She also continues to serve on the CDC’s GeT-RM program for reference materials for Molecular Genetics. Dr. Pratt is currently serving on Institute of Medicine’s Roundtable on Translating Genomic-Based Research for Health. Dr. Pratt has authored over 40 peer-reviewed manuscripts and book chapters. Additionally, she is the Associate Editor for the Journal of Molecular Pathology.

President & CEO
Dr. Corrado Priami obtained his Laurea and PhD degrees in Computer Science at the University of Pisa, visited as associate researcher at the laboratory LIX, École Politechnique, Paris (1995) and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris under an EC Marie Curie TMR grant (1996). He was a researcher and associate professor at the University of Verona (1997-2001). Currently, he is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Trento. The results of his PhD thesis on stochastic pi- calculus were the basis for the foundation of the Microsoft Research - University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology (COSBI), of which he is the President and CEO. Those same results, besides constituting the scientific foundation of COSBI, are recognized as fundamental in the field of systems biology by an expanding international community, which is using them to model the behavior of biological systems (the CMSB conference is a milestone of this). He was member of the expert group on the EU 7th FP of the CRUI and has participated in many projects promoted by the European Commission for the advancement of emerging areas of research. He regularly serves on the evaluation committees for projects presented by the European Commission, is an anonymous reviewer for many international journals, and serves in the review panels of the Science Foundation Ireland for institutes of systems biology and of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. His research covers computational methods for the modelling, analysis, and simulation of biological systems, programming languages, and formal computational theories. He published over 150 papers in international journals and conferences, given more than 50 invited talks and lectures at conferences and universities around the world, participated in the program committees for 27 international conferences (ten of which he was chair), is a member of three steering committees of international conferences (of which one he is president), is editor-in-chief of the international journal Transactions on Computational Systems Biology and member of the editorial board of the international journal Bioinformatics Research and Applications. He founded the international conferences “Computational Methods in Systems Biology (CMSB),” which is continuing to grow, and “Converging Sciences,” whose success has been described by many international journals. He was a member of ISTAG-FET (Information Society Technologies Advisory Group - Future and Emerging Technologies) of the European Commission.

Senior Vice President, Science Policy
Daryl Pritchard, PhD, is the Senior Vice President of Science Policy at the Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC), where he leads PMC’s efforts to increase awareness and understanding of personalized medicine; identify and address barriers to the adoption of personalized medicine into the health care system; and develop and promote appropriate clinical, health care infrastructure, regulatory, and payment policies. Before coming to PMC, Dr. Pritchard served as the Director of Policy Research at the National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC). Prior to joining NPC, he served as the Director of Research Programs Advocacy and Personalized Medicine at the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). Dr. Pritchard received his PhD and master’s degree in genetics from the George Washington University, and completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Children’s National Medical Center. He was awarded the first American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG)/National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) Fellowship in Genetics and Public Policy, where he worked as a health legislative assistant in the House of Representatives.

Investigator III, Lab Head, Immuno-Oncology
I use Bayesian statistics and frequentist statistical learning techniques to analyze large scale pharma- genomics assays, in order to (i) discover genomic correlates of sensitivity and resistance to cancer drugs, (ii) prioritize biomarker selections in key genes and pathways and (iii) find key phenotypes predictive of clinical response. One major focus area is CAR-T therapies both in the manufacturing and clinical spaces: statistical lead across manufacturing/clinical development programs, biomarker identification of response and/or in-vivo/in-vitro proliferation, as well as regulatory filling.

Director, Laboratory Science, MolDx
Girish Putcha is currently the Chief Medical Officer at Freenome, Director of Laboratory Science for Palmetto GBA’s MolDX program, the founding Medical Director for Orion Genomics, and Managing Director at Personalized Medicine & Diagnostic Solutions. Previously, Girish was the founding Laboratory Director and/or Chief Medical Officer at Ariosa Diagnostics, Crescendo Bioscience, Life Technologies, and VitaPath Genetics. Prior to this, he focused on investments across healthcare, from biopharmaceuticals and medical devices to diagnostics and services, at Panorama Capital and RiverVest Venture Partners, where he also served on the boards of several portfolio companies, including Presidio Pharmaceuticals, PowerVision, and Phenomix. He was also a founding team member at VeraCyte and a clinical development fellow at CardioDx, both venture-funded personalized medicine companies. Girish received a bachelor's degree from Rice University and master's degrees from the University of London and the Welcome Institute as a Marshall Scholar. He holds medical and doctoral degrees from Washington University School of Medicine, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular neuroscience. Girish completed his postgraduate medical training at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he also served as adjunct clinical faculty, specializing in molecular genetic pathology

Principal
Bruce Quinn, MD PhD, is a professional strategy consultant helping innovative companies achieve their goals under U.S. federal health policies. His consulting practice, with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco, works with leading genomic, medical technology, and biopharma companies. Originally trained as a neuropathologist, earlier in his career he held tenure-track faculty positions at NYU Medical School and the Northwestern University School of Medicine. As a physician executive, he has held positions with Accenture’s healthcare strategies practice, the Medicare program, and with health policy groups in two law and lobbying firms. Recent publications have included articles on defining clinical utility for diagnostic tests and a review of the emerging digital genomics industry. In addition, his blog, www.DiscoveriesInHealthPolicy.com, covers innovative health care policy developments and receives over 100,000 hits per year.

Senior Software Engineer, Bioinformatics
Vivek lives to blow things up: conventions, dogma, you name it. He started his career working in the department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago where he provided bioinformatics support for population genetics re-sequencing projects. He then transitioned to Genentech and the world of antibody engineering bioinformatics where he spent a number of years enabling the organization to blow up barriers related to scale and built a fully automated and robot-assisted system that enabled the organization to scale phage-centric drug discovery 100x. He has since transitioned back to the mother ship: human genetics and spends his time thinking about how to blow up conventions and dogma to enable discovery biologists to leverage genetics data in their work to form and validate therapeutic hypotheses to fuel drug and biomarker development pipelines.

Associate Vice President for Precision Health Sciences; Executive Director, Center for Applied Genetics and Genomic Medicine; Professor of Medicine, University of Arizona Health Sciences
Kenneth S. Ramos, MD, PhD, PharmB, is associate vice president for precision health sciences at the University of Arizona Health Sciences (UAHS), where he is responsible for developing precision-health strategies and approaches to health outcomes and health-care delivery. He is professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, and director of the Center for Applied Genetics and Genomic Medicine and the MD-PhD Program at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson. Dr. Ramos is an accomplished physician-scientist and transformational leader, designated as an associate of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 and elected to the National Academy of Medicine (formerly known as the Institute of Medicine) in 2015. He has vast depth of experience across the tripartite mission areas of education, research and clinical service, and he is recognized throughout the world for his scientific contributions in the areas of genomics, precision medicine, environmental health sciences and toxicology. With training in pharmaceutical sciences, chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology and medicine, Dr. Ramos is helping to steer the changing landscape of medicine and health care. In this context, he leads several translational, clinical research and educational programs that integrate diverse approaches to elucidate genomic mechanisms of disease and novel therapies for several oncologic, pulmonary and vascular diseases. Dr. Ramos also has provided academic, executive, administrative and scientific leadership in the areas of genetics and genomic medicine at several academic institutions, and over the course of his career has positively influenced the careers of numerous clinicians and scientists engaged in medical, veterinary and pharmaceutical practice. He is deeply committed to initiatives that advance modern technological applications to improve the quality of health care and reduce both disease burden and health-associated costs. One of his primary areas of focus in partnership with Banner – University Medical Center is the development of precision-health strategies and approaches to advance health-care delivery and outcomes.

Associate Professor, Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics
Arvind Rao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan. His group uses image analysis and machine learning methods to link image-derived phenotypes with genetic data, across biological scale (i.e. single cell, tissue and radiology data). Such methods have found application in radiogenomics and drug repurposing based on phenotypic screens. Arvind received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Bioinformatics from the University of Michigan, specializing in transcriptional genomics, and was a Lane Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in bioimage informatics.

Professor and Vice Chair, GME, Director of Residency Program; Director, Flow Cytometry & Immunology, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of California, Davis School of Medicine
Dr. Rashidi is a board certified hematopathologist with an extensive background in informatics. His bioinformatics background dates back to his graduate school years in the 90s (prior to entering medical school). That experience and expertise enabled him to co-author several popular textbooks in bioinformatics along with now being actively involved in developing several machine learning tools and platforms that he and his colleagues are using for their respective studies. In addition, he has also been very successful in publishing several very popular digital tools (including several Apps) in the medical education/hematology arena that are now used worldwide. His background and experiences give him a great perspective of how to convey this knowledge to those interested in the technology arena (specifically those interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence).

Genitourinary Pathology Fellow, CAP In-Vivo Microscopy Committee, Junior Member, Harborview Medical Center, Department of Pathology
Nicholas Reder, MD MPH, is an acting instructor in the Department of Pathology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. He was a clinical research fellow in 2016-2017, working with Dr. Jonathan Liu in mechanical engineering and Dr. Lawrence True in prostate pathology. His collaboration with Dr. Jonathan Liu's laboratory resulted in an open-top light- sheet microscope for imaging fresh and fixed specimens in 3D with sub-cellular resolution. Dr. Reder’s work focuses on building cloud-based solutions to the data processing, management, analysis, and visualization challenges presented by massive light-sheet microscopy datasets. His research interests include prostate pathology, 3D microscopy, data science, and machine learning.

Director, Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b); Director, Neurosurgical Translational Research, Division of Neurosurgery; Director, Scientific Chair, Children's Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium in Neurosurgery (CBTTC); Scientific Chair, Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC); Alexander B. Wheeler Endowed Chair in Neurosurgical Research, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Adam is focused on defining the cell signaling mechanisms of oncogenesis and tumor progression in brain tumors. His lab studies cell signaling cascades and their alterations in pediatric brain tumors to elucidate the molecular and genetic underpinnings of pediatric brain tumors in an effort to identify and develop targeted therapies. Additionally, related studies focus on the characterization of novel cell signaling cascades impinging on cancer biology, including the inositol polyphosphates and their associated metabolism. Adam is director of the Childhood Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC) at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, a collaborative multi-institutional cooperative research program dedicated to the study of childhood brain tumors. He received his PhD in Neuroscience from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Assistant Professor, Thoracic Head and Neck Medical Oncology
Dr. Reuben obtained his PhD at the University of Montreal, Canada where he studied antigen presentation. Since 2014, he has worked at MD Anderson performing translational melanoma and lung cancer research. His focus has been identifying biomarkers of response and resistance to checkpoint blockade immunotherapy. Most recently, Dr. Reuben has worked on characterizing the T cell repertoire in the context of non-small cell lung cancer.

Associate Director for Translational Research Ahmed Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine
Dr. Rhim is Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine/Gastroenterology and Assistant Director for Translational Research at the University of Michigan Medical School and Comprehensive Cancer Center. His work focuses on understanding novel cancer-specific mechanisms for targeted mutagenesis and post-transcriptional alterations that affect cancer progression, evolution and resistance to therapies. This work requires the creation of novel molecular tools for sensitive genetic and genomic analysis which are being evaluated for the detection of biomarkers for early cancer diagnosis.

Professor of Pathology and of Medicine (Medical Oncology); Director of Pathology Tissue Services; Director of Translational Pathology
Dr. David Rimm is a Professor in the Departments of Pathology and Medicine (Oncology) at the Yale University School of Medicine. He is the Director of Yale Pathology Tissue Services. He completed an MD-PhD at Johns Hopkins University Medical School followed by a Pathology Residency at Yale and a Cytopathology Fellowship at the Medical College of Virginia. He is boarded in Anatomic and Cytopatholgy. His research lab group focuses on quantitative pathology using the AQUA® technology invented in his lab, and other quantitative methods, with projects related to predicting response to both targeted and immune- therapy in cancer and standardization of those assays for CLIA labs. His lab is involved in testing new high-plex methods, including imaging mass cytometry (Fluidigm) and digital spatial profiling (NanoString) He also has supported projects related to rapid, low cost diagnostic tests and direct tissue imaging. The work is supported by grants from the NIH, BCRF, and sponsored research agreements from biopharma. He also serves on the CAP Immunohistochemistry committee and multiple scientific advisory boards for biotech and pharma. He is an author of over 350 peer-reviewed papers and 8 patents.

Senior Director, Immuno-Oncology, Early Development & Translational Oncology
Paul Robbins Ph D. is a Senior Director in Pfizer’s Translational Oncology group leading the development of avelumab/Bavencio (anti-PD-L1) and an array of immunotherapy combinations. He joined Pfizer from MedImmune/AstraZeneca where he previously led the translational science efforts for several early and late stage oncology and immuno-oncology assets, including durvalumab/Imfinzi (anti PD-L1) and tremelimumab (anti-CTLA-4) as well as agents targeting OX40, GITR, CEA-BiTE, IL-6 among others. He received his doctorate from the University of Southern California School of Medicine in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology and conducted research as a post-doc and as research faculty at Stanford University in the Program in Epithelial Biology on the genesis and treatment of melanoma, gene therapy, cell engineering and cell-based therapeutics, epithelial stem cell biology and genetic skin disease. He is currently focused on the optimization of therapeutic immune modulation for the treatment of disease with strategic emphases on patient enrichment, indication selection, exploratory biomarker discovery, diagnostic development and clinical trial design.

Global Research Leader
Jeff Rogers leads IBM’s global research efforts in using artificial intelligence and internet-of-things or devices for healthcare. His work focuses on creating systems of integrated sensors, models, and closed- loop controllers to support personalized health. He has overseen the deployment of these systems to homes, cars, and medical facilities to address applications ranging from managing chronic disease to wellness. Prior to IBM he held technical leadership positions in industry, government, and academia focused on creating innovative microsystem and healthcare technologies. He was a Director of Engineering at Google where he established a cardiac care portfolio and a DARPA program manager where he developed and fielded tools identifying battlefield brain injuries. While at DARPA he organized the efforts that discovered Topological Insulators and helped established a health division of the agency, the Biological Technology Office. Prior to joining DARPA he held positions as faculty at California Institute of Technology and as a scientist at HRL Laboratories. He received a PhD in Physics from Georgia Institute of Technology and an M.S. from Emory University. Dr. Rogers received the IBM Eminence and Excellence Award in 2016. In 2014 he was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service and was a Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal in Science & Environment finalist. He also received the Joint Meritorious Unit Award in 2012 and an excellence award from the US Special Operations Forces in 2011.

Founder and Owner
Dr. Margo Roman, DVM, CVA www.mashvet.com, is the owner of MASH (Main St Animal Services Of Hopkinton) in Hopkinton Massachusetts, establish 1983. It is a full service integrative veterinary clinic with acupuncture, homeopathy, ozone therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, chiropractic, herbal medicine, surgery and dentistry, with a large focus on nutrition and evaluation of the immune system with titers and other supportive testing. Margo Roman, D.V.M. graduated from Tuskegee University School of Veterinary Medicine in Alabama in 1978. She did her undergraduate work at the University of Florida. She was a student of the International Veterinary Acupuncture Course in 1976, 2000, 2001. Dr. Roman did her Externship in 1976 at The Animal Medical Center in New York City. Her internship from 1978 to 1979 was at Angell Memorial in Boston, MA. She was on faculty at Tufts University Veterinary School from 1979-1986. She was a student of Dr Luc Deschepper and Dr. Richard Pitcairn, and has lectured nationally and internationally, as well as written many articles and contributed to several books.

Chief, Molecular Genetics Branch, Division of Molecular Genetics and Pathology Devices, Office of In vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health
Donna Roscoe is the Branch Chief for the Molecular Genetics Branch in the Division of Molecular Genetics and Pathology in FDA’s Office of In vitro Diagnostic Device Evaluation and Radiological Safety. The branch is responsible for reviewing IVDs for oncology and rare diseases. Prior to coming to the FDA, Dr. Roscoe worked for various CROs and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) after completing a post-doctoral fellow in the clinical cancer research Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at NIH.

Supervisory Chemist, Office of in vitro Diagnostics Division of Microbiology
Kristian Roth, PhD is the Branch Chief of the Bacterial Respiratory and Medical Countermeasures Branch FDA/CDRH/OIR/DMD. He received his PhD in analytical chemistry from the University of California Riverside then completed a postdoc at the University of California Santa Barbara. Afterward he moved to the Seattle area to join a startup diagnostics company targeting infectious diseases using DNA microarray detection. Dr. Roth then moved to a diagnostics company in Maryland developing platforms for the detection of influenza, hepatitis and radiation biodosimetry. In 2011 he started at FDA as a scientific reviewer then later served as Branch Chief. The branch has been challenged with recent clearances utilizing mass spectrometry identification of clonal isolates, endogenous biomarkers of infection and ever-increasing numbers of syndromic infectious disease panels. Dr. Roth has also been a stakeholder in DMD’s emergency response to the recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks.

Director, Penn Center for Precision Medicine; Chair, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
David Roth attended Rice University, obtained MD and PhD degrees from Baylor College of Medicine, and completed a residency in Anatomic Pathology at the National Cancer Institute. Roth joined the faculty of Baylor College of Medicine in 1993, and moved to New York University in 2001, where he served as Chair of the Department of Pathology (2004-2011) and Director of the Medical Scientist Training Program (2008-2011). In 2011 Roth moved to the University of Pennsylvania as Chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. At Penn, he founded the Center for Personalized Diagnostics, which was developed to bring genomic diagnostics to cancer patients. In 2016, he was named the Director of Penn’s new Center for Precision Medicine. His most recent research efforts are in developing precision medicine in veterinary oncology.

Student, Laboratory of Dr. Alexander Marson
Theodore Roth aspires to further our understanding of the intricacies of the immune system and to apply that knowledge to developing curative therapies by targeted manipulation of its crucial cellular components. I started in science deciphering complex immune pathology with Dr. Dorian McGavern at the NIH and then with Dr. Jason Cyster at UCSF. During my undergrad and master’s degrees at Stanford University I developed novel synthetic biology assembly methods with Dr. Matthew Scott. With the rapid development of targetable gene editing technologies, there is now the opportunity to therapeutically apply that understanding of immunity through the genetic manipulation of primary human immune cells. At UCSF in the Marson Lab, we are at the intersection of these two trends. We recently described an efficient non-viral CRISPR/Cas9 methodology for rapid large scale targeted genetic engineering in primary human T cells (Roth et al. Nature 2018) and we are applying this technology towards the treatment of cancer and genetic autoimmune disease.

Director, Computational and Integrational Pathology; Associate Professor, Hematopathology; Medical Director, Laboratory Informatics
Dr. Mark Routbort is a practicing molecular pathologist and bioinformatician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he develops and supports the computational pipelines and reporting tools for next generation sequencing in the clinical Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory. Receiving a Master's degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Chicago, and later his MD and PhD degrees at Duke University, he joined the faculty at MD Anderson in 2004, where he has focused his informatics efforts on initiatives directed at improving pathologist and lab workflow, and on improving the generation, storage, reporting, and retrieval of pathology and laboratory data. In these roles, he publishes and maintains several open source pathology informatics-related toolsets (http://github.com/routbort ). He currently serves as Director of Computational and Integrational Pathology for the Division of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, facilitating the transactional and integrational use of genomic data both internally and with large scale multi-institutional collaborations like NCI-MATCH and AACR Project GENIE.

Director, Molecular Informatics, Genetics Services, & MGP fellowship, Molecular and Genomic Pathology
Somak Roy, MD., is Assistant Professor of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). He serves as the Director of Molecular Informatics and genetics Services at the Division of Molecular and Genomic Pathology at UPMC. Dr. Roy is a board-certified molecular and anatomic pathologist. His clinical and translational work focuses on the following; 1) Use of modern computational infrastructure and innovative software technology for high-throughput sequence analysis, genomic data visualization, and optimizing molecular laboratory workflow. 2) molecular characterization of urothelial carcinoma to identify clinically relevant, theranostic biomarkers. Since2014, he has been a member of Informatics Subdivision in the Association of Molecular Pathology (AMP). He served as a representative to the Clinical Practice Committee from 2014-2016 and currently to the Program Committee. Dr. Roy is chaired the AMP workgroup that developed the guidelines for validation of clinical NGS bioinformatics pipeline.

Senior Reimbursement Specialist
Joseph is the Senior Reimbursement Strategist for Cepheid’s Government and Reimbursement division, responsible for the incorporation of Cepheid’s role within the ACO and Healthcare integrated markets. He focuses on integrating laboratory services within healthcare payers and Bundled Payments. Joseph served as the Director of Health and Human Services for the state of New Jersey. Appointed to the position by Governor Chris Christie, he was responsible for the oversight and integration of health policy. Joseph and his colleagues developed one of the first Medicaid ACOs in the United States known as the Trenton Health Team. He is a nationally known expert on health policy. Joseph previously served as the Senior Director of Health Economics and Reimbursement for BG Medicine and Prometheus Laboratories. He has a PhD in clinical psychology from Hahnemann University and an M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania. He has also served as an Adjunct Professor of Health Economics for Rider University’s School of Business.

Instructor, Genetic and Genomic Sciences
Alex Rubinsteyn received his PhD from NYU, where his research focused on parallel computing and machine learning. He has sincebeen working at Mount Sinai on the computational aspects of personalized cancer immunotherapy. Alex has worked with Nina Bhardwaj’s lab to initiate several clinical trials at Mount Sinai and currently leads the OpenVax group, developing novel tools for computational cancer immunology.

Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology; Director, Melanoma Immunotherapy
As Director of Melanoma Immunotherapy and a member of the Pancreas Center, Dr. Saenger is a pioneer in the field of cancer immunotherapy. Dr. Saenger's laboratory is focused on developing new tools for the clinic designed to bring the benefits of immunotherapy to larger patient populations, in particular patients with pancreas cancer and patients with melanoma who do not respond to currently available immunotherapies. Dr. Saenger has recently developed a 53 -immune gene panel predictive of clinical outcomes in melanoma, and this immune gene panel is the basis for a multi-center validation trial in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Saenger's melanoma research is in the area of immunogenomics and she is working in collaboration with network biologists to better understand the networks of immune genes determinative of patient outcome. She has proposed CD2 as a novel biomarker in melanoma and is currently funded to use NanoString technology, a methodology whereby genomic information can be extracted from formalin fixed banked patient samples, to validate her 53-gene panel in a large population of patients from the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group E1697 study. Her current work focuses on understanding how immunotherapy causes perturbations in immune gene expression in blood and tumor samples. Dr. Saenger also has a strong research interest in oncolytic viruses and the benefits of combining oncolytic viruses with checkpoint blockade using anti-PD1 and anti-CTLA-4. She is studying these therapies in mouse models of melanoma and has recently initiated an initiative to administer oncolytic virus to pancreas cancer patients. Combining in situ vaccination with a live virus with checkpoint blockade offers the opportunity to combat immunosuppression within the tumor bed, a serious barrier to efficacy of immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer. Clinically, Dr. Saenger specializes in cancer immunotherapy and she tailors her treatments to individual patient needs based on available immune based medicines. Dr. Saenger's research is supported by a Cancer Clinical Investigator Team Leadership Award from the National Cancer Institute, a Cancer Immunology Innovator award American Association for Cancer Research, and the Melanoma Research Alliance. She has also been supported in the past by the Dermatology Foundation. Dr. Saenger speaks nationally and internationally on topics in immunotherapy and biomarkers.

Vice President, Head of Diagnostics
Hakan Sakul is currently responsible for companion diagnostics (CDx) across Pfizer’s portfolio, and held positions of, increasing responsibility since1999, most recently leading development and implementation of Pfizer’s diagnostics strategy. He led Pfizer’s flagship CDx program for Xalkori® and oversaw several others since then. Hakan’s pharma career started at Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals. He worked in biotech in statistical genetics, human genetics and pharmacogenomics before that. Hakan is a Board member of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, and on CA Gov. Brown’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. He holds a PhD in Quantitative Genetics from the University of Minnesota.

Chair and Professor Department of Biomedical Informatics, VP Clinical Informatics Stony Brook Medicine, Cherith Endowed Chair
Joel Saltz is Chair and Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Stony Brook, he is also Professor of Pathology, Radiology and Computer Science. He holds an MD-PhD from Duke University in Computer Science, is boarded in Clinical Pathology with residency training at Johns Hopkins. He is a pioneer in the area of Digital Pathology having developed the first whole slide imaging platform in the 1990’s. He has gone on to develop highly innovative deep learning/machine learning algorithms along with a variety of innovative Digital Pathology tools and platforms.

Chief Commercial Officer
Joel serves as Chief Commercial Officer for Click Therapeutics. Click develops software as prescription medical treatments to improve the lives of patients throughout the world. For over 25 years Joel has helped payers, employers, providers and suppliers achieve better patient outcomes at a lower cost of care using new health technology. Helping to lead the charge for healthcare innovation, Joel will share how employers, insurers, and other healthcare payers are adopting Click’s clinically-validated digital therapeutics as key components to population health strategies. While at Johnson & Johnson as Director of Payer Relations and with Walgreens as Vice President of Market Development Joel initiated pay for performance and shared savings models of value-based purchasing with payers and health systems. Joel also led commercial efforts with Sanofi Aventis to help providers contain the exploding costs associated with chronic conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Joel graduated from DePaul University in Chicago and later completed a Fellowship in healthcare leadership with the Washington DC based Advisory Board Company.

President & CEO
Dr. Sardesai has broad development and consulting experience in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, and in particular cancer immunotherapy and infectious diseases vaccine product development. He co-founded Geneos Therapeutics as a spinout of Inovio Pharmaceuticals and serves as its President & CEO. Previously, he served as Sr. Vice President, Research & Development at Inovio Pharmaceuticals before being promoted to Inovio’s Chief Operating Officer. At Inovio, Dr. Sardesai is responsible for leading the company’s corporate development function and product development programs in infectious disease and cancer vaccines and vaccine delivery systems. He led and served as the PI on multiple large multi-institutional program project grants from govt and non-govt funding agencies and private partnerships and was responsible for raising and managing over $150M in non-dilutive funding via grants and partnerships. Prior to Inovio, Dr. Sardesai was the Founder and President of NVision Consulting, Inc., a strategy consulting firm focused on entrepreneurial companies in the biopharma/lifesciences industry, and he served in senior leadership positions at Fujirebio Diagnostics, Inc. and IGEN International, Inc. At FDI, Dr. Sardesai oversaw all aspects of R&D activities and expansion of the oncology portfolio. Products developed under his leadership, include new-to-the-world tests for mesothelioma (MESOMARK™), bladder cancer and a multi-marker test for ovarian cancer (HE4). At IGEN, Dr. Sardesai’s group helped develop a high-throughput screening platform for drug-discovery. Dr. Sardesai has authored over 120+ peer-reviewed manuscripts and book chapters, delivered over 120+ invited talks and presentations, and filed several patents. He received a PhD in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the recipient of the Shils-Zeidman Award in Entrepreneurship. He was awarded fellowships at Scripps Research Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Sardesai received his bachelors and masters in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Dr. Sardesai was recognized by Pharmavoice magazine as one of the top 100 most influential and inspirational leaders from across the life sciences and healthcare industry (2015). He lives in Blue Bell, PA with his wife and their two sons they are raising to be responsible global citizens.

Director, Point of Care Testing
Andrew Sargeant is the Director of NSW Health Pathology’s PoCT Service and responsible for the establishment of the service in 2013. Andrew is passionate about using technology to improve patient care, developing large robust and sustainable systems and the provision of public health solutions.

Vice President, Data Science
As VP of engineering and analytics at Edifecs, Prasad Saripalli helps define, deliver, run and manage the company’s SaaS to streamline the exchange and processing of health care information in real time, using products rich in analytics. Prior to joining Edifecs, he was chief technology officer and VP of engineering at Secrata.com, which provides military-grade cloud security solutions. Previously, he worked as chief technology officer and executive VP at ClipCard and as chief architect for IBM's SmartCloud enterprise. He also served as principal group program manager on Microsoft's client virtualization team, which was responsible for shipping Virtual PC on Windows 7, and as a dev manager on the Citrix group that built Citrix Presentation Server (now Citrix XenApp). Prasad has a master’s in computer science from the University of Washington, doctorates in engineering and computer science from the University of Florida and post-doctoral training from the University of Texas.

Founder & President
Nadeem’s expertise stems from the intersection of innovation in human genetics and collaborative business models to accelerate delivery of novel, targeted therapeutics. He is the founder and president of the Eisai AiM Institute, an industry unique discovery innovation unit with an exclusive mission to realize human genetic driven drug discovery. Nadeem’s research has been published in leading medical journals (eg, NEJM, Lancet, JAMA), presented at international meetings (eg, American Diabetes Association, Prix Galien Foundation, Hitachi Innovation), and profiled by international media (eg, BBC, Bloomberg, Forbes). He has been invited to provide expert insights on human genetics and drug discovery for The World Dementia Envoy, Genomics England, The UK Minster for Life Sciences and Scottish Enterprise. Nadeem has served as Chair of: The US National Academies Workshop on “Drug Discovery from Genetic Bioresources”; The World CNS Summit; The Drug Discovery Stream of the Festival of Genomics; and The External Advisory Board of the NIA Longevity Genomics Study. In addition, he serves as industry lead for the ADNI Genetics Core; sits on the US Institute of Medicine Roundtable on Genomics & Precision Health; serves on the Genetics Scientific Advisory Group of the European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium; and facilitates the Industry Partnership for Human Genetics.

Scientific Director
Mary graduated with a PhD in Pharmacology from Columbia University studying neuron injury and regeneration. She joined Cephalon, Inc. (now Teva Pharmaceuticals) to study Alzheimer's disease (AD) drug discovery and translational sciences research, including amyloid and secretase biology, with application to secretase inhibition, transgenic AD model development, and tau kinase inhibitor biology and drug discovery. Mary continued her study of Alzheimer’s disease at Merck, joining in 2006, where she led translational efforts on several amyloid beta-, apoE-, and tau-targeted drug discovery programs. In 2009, Mary shifted to become the lead for AD biomarker development, working with consortia including ADNI, ADNI PPSB and GBSC and leading to the application of patient enrollment biomarkers in two Phase III clinical trials of beta secretase inhibitor. In 2013, Mary joined the companion diagnostic group at Merck to develop biomarkers for Keytruda, including PD-L1 and Microsatellite Instability High (MSI-H) biomarkers. Her work has led to the US approval of PD-L1 Agilent Pharm Dx IHC assay for selection of late line Gastric cancer patients to receive Keytruda monotherapy, as well as the filing in Japan of the FALCO PCR assay for MSI-H, also for patient selection to receive Keytruda monotherapy (under review). Mary leads Merck’s efforts to develop two companion diagnostic assays in the US for MSI-H (Next Generation Sequencing), and mismatch repair deficiency (Immunohistochemistry).

Associate Professor, PI Natural Language Processing Lab
Dr. Guergana Savova is Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. Her research interests are in natural language processing (NLP) especially as applied to the text generated by physicians (the clinical narrative). The focus of Dr. Savova's research is higher level semantic and discourse processing of the clinical narrative which includes tasks such as named entity recognition, event recognition, relation detection and classification, including coreference and temporal relations. The methods are mostly machine learning spanning supervised, lightly supervised and completely unsupervised. The result of Dr. Savova's research with her collaborators has led to the creation of the clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System (cTAKES; ctakes.apache.org) which has been applied to a number of biomedical use cases to mine the data. Dr. Savova is the Principal investigator of several NIH-funded projects, including the NCI-funded Deep Phenotyping for Cancer (DeepPhe). DeepPhe is a system for extracting rich cancer phenotypes from sets of EMR documents, combining approaches of information extraction and summarization. Dr. Guergana Savova serves the community in many way – she has been on the editorial board of the Journal of the Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), is a reviewer for several journals and many conferences/workshops, is a reviewer for NIH study sections. Dr. Guergana Savova holds a PhD in Linguistics with a minor in Cognitive Science and a Master’s of Science in Computer Science from University of Minnesota. Before joining Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2010, Dr. Savova was faculty at the Biomedical Statistics and Informatics Department, Mayo Clinic (2002-2010).

President, Regulatory Affairs & Compliance
Pamela Swatkowski is Director of Regulatory Affairs at Abbott Molecular responsible for strategic regulatory programs including companion diagnostics, oncology and infectious disease product regulatory and business development support, product life-cycle management, and global product registration for the molecular diagnostics product line. Notable are her twenty plus years and a regulatory and quality professional in the in vitro diagnostics and medical device industry. Pamela is the regulatory affairs lead, responsible for global regulatory strategy development and worldwide approval for the Abbott Vysis ALK FISH test used in identifying those non-small cell lung cancer patients eligible for treatment with the Pfizer drug XALKORI. She has a passion for personalized healthcare and works toward communication and conveying the importance of companion diagnostics products that are beneficial to patients. Pamela received a Bachelor of Science degree from Loyola University of Chicago and has worked in the Abbott Diagnostics group prior to joining Abbott Molecular in 2004.

Product Scientist II
Dr. Olga Sazonova joined 23andMe in 2015. Since2017, she is a member of the Product Science team and works at the intersection of health data science and product development to build genetic predictions that inform and delight 23andMe customers. Previously, Dr. Sazonova analyzed whole genome sequencing data to advance Parkinson’s Disease drug discovery as a scientist on the 23andMe Research team. Dr. Sazonova received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University. She also serves as a member of the Board of Directors at the Children’s Center of the Stanford Community, one of the largest coop childcare centers in the nation.

Senior Director, Health Policy and Reimbursement
Danielle Scelfo is Senior Director, Health Policy and Reimbursement for Hologic, Inc. and is based out of their diagnostic headquarters in San Diego, California. An experienced industry veteran, Ms. Scelfo has chaired the Reimbursement and Policy Workgroup for the Coalition for 21st Century Medicine, co-chaired the Diagnostics Workgroup for the California Healthcare Institute and is a member of the two leading US diagnostic trade associations, AdvaMed Dx and the American Clinical Lab Association. Ms. Scelfo has a comprehensive understanding of the US diagnostic industry, Medicare and Medicaid programs, and managed care delivery systems. Her extensive knowledge of government and commercial reimbursement policies and procedures lends valuable insights to the financial impact of reimbursement policy, legislation, and the regulatory rule-making process in healthcare. Ms. Scelfo has led efforts resulting in several successful coverage and payment policies for oncology therapeutics and advanced personalized diagnostic payment reform. Ms. Scelfo's current responsibilities, include representing Hologic in corporate reimbursement strategy, government affairs, coding, and payment of new technologies by payors.

Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Bioengineering, Molecular and Cell Biology, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute; Director, Berkeley Stem Cell Center
David Schaffer is a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Bioengineering, and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also serves as the Director of the Berkeley Stem Cell Center. He received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from MIT in 1998. He then conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies before joining the University of California at Berkeley in 1999. There, he applies engineering principles to enhance stem cell and gene therapies, work that includes novel approaches for molecular engineering and evolution of new viral vectors as well as new technologies to investigate and control stem cell fate decisions. David Schaffer has received an NSF CAREER Award, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, Whitaker Foundation Young Investigator Award, and was named a Technology Review Top 100 Innovator. He was also awarded the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Pharmaceutical and Bioengineering Award in 2017, the American Chemical Society Marvin Johnson Award in 2016, the American Chemical Society BIOT Division Young Investigator Award in 2006, the Biomedical Engineering Society Rita Shaffer Young Investigator Award in 2000 and was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering in 2010.

Assistant Professor, Pathology and Medicine (Medical Oncology); Director, Translational Immuno-Oncology Laboratory
I trained as cell biologist, surgical pathologist and served in clinical molecular diagnostics. In addition, during my postdoctoral work at Yale I focused in developing strategies to objectively and quantitatively measure key immunotherapy related biomarkers in immune cells and cancer tissues. Most of this work has been performed in close collaboration with other Yale researchers and published in peer-reviewed journals. Recently, I was appointed to lead the Translational Immuno-Oncology Laboratory (T.I.L.) in the Yale Cancer Center, that aims to produce and support high quality translational research in immuno- oncology through standardized analyses of biomarkers and cross-integration with other Yale resources.

Senior Vice President, CMO
Dr. Schilsky is the Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of ASCO. He specializes in new drug development and treatment of gastrointestinal cancers. Dr. Schilsky is a Past President of ASCO, having served in the role during 2008-2009, and also a Past Chair (1995-2010) of one of the National Cancer Institute’s Cooperative Groups, Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB). Before joining ASCO, Dr. Schilsky spent the majority of his career at the University of Chicago where he joined the faculty in 1984, subsequently rising to the rank of Professor of Medicine and serving in many roles, including Associate Dean for Clinical Research in the Biological Sciences Division, Director of the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center and Chief of the Section of Hematology-Oncology in the Department of Medicine. Dr. Schilsky has extensive experience working with both the NCI and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) having served as a member and chair of the NCI Board of Scientific Advisors, as a member of the NCI Clinical and Translational Research Committee, and as a member and chair of the Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee of the FDA. Dr. Schilsky has served on the editorial boards of many cancer journals, including the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Currently, he serves on the editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine. Early in his career, he worked in the Clinical Pharmacology Branch of the Division of Cancer Treatment at the NCI and was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Hematology and Oncology at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine. He was also the head of the hematology/medical oncology unit at the Harry S. Truman Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Columbia, Missouri.

CMO, IDbyDNA, Inc.; Assistant Professor, Pathology, University of Utah
Robert Schlaberg is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of IDbyDNA, Inc., an Assistant Professor of Pathology at the University of Utah School of Medicine, and a Medical Director at ARUP Laboratories. His research is focused on next-generation sequencing-based infectious disease diagnostics. Robert co- developed Taxonomer, the metagenomics data analysis platform, utilized by IDbyDNA as its central technology. Robert received Medical degrees from the Julius-Maximilians-University in Wuerzburg, Germany and a Master of Public Health from Columbia University where he also trained in clinical pathology and served as Chief Clinical Pathology Resident. Robert is a board-certified Clinical Pathologist and Medical Microbiologist

Center Head; Professor, Division of Developmental Immunology
Dr. Schoenberger is a Professor in the Laboratory of Cellular Immunology at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, Adjunct Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at the UCSD Moores Cancer Center, and Co-Director of the San Diego Center for Personalized Cancer Immunotherapy. He received his PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from UCLA in 1993 and completed postdoctoral training in Immunohematology and Tumor Immunology at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands. Dr. Schoenberger was appointed to LIAI’s faculty in 1998 as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2002, gained Tenure in 2005, and became a Professor in 2007. He is a recipient of Scholar Awards from both The American Cancer Society and The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. In 2015 he joined Human Longevity, Inc. as Head of their Cancer Vaccines program.

Former Vice President, Precision Medicine, Global Product & Portfolio Strategy
Cecilia Schott is VP, Precision Medicine for AstraZeneca Global Product & Portfolio Strategy. Cecilia and her team are responsible for establishing external global collaborations and partnerships for diagnostic development and commercialization alongside AstraZeneca’s portfolio. Prior to her current role Cecilia held positions Global Marketing and US Medical Affairs. Cecilia’s background, Includes roles in the biotech and device industries. Before joining AstraZeneca she was part of Biogen’s Drug Safety and Medical Information function, and at Boston Scientific she was responsible for establishing the drug eluting stent franchise Medical Publications and Medical Information groups as part of Medical Affairs. Cecilia holds a BS in Pharmacy from University of Sao Paulo, Brazil; a Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, Boston, and a MBA from Babson College, Boston.

Assistant Professor; Director, Genomic and Molecular Pathology
Jeremy Segal, MD, PhD is the Director of the Division of Genomic and Molecular Pathology. Genomic and Molecular Pathology was created in order to bring together the latest in genomics technologies, computational biology approaches and scientific knowledge for the care of patients at the University of Chicago and the broader community. Today, it is well understood that the best hope for the treatment of many illnesses depends upon having the best possible information, both about the patient as well as his or her particular condition. For cancer and a host of other diseases, genetic information is a critical piece of the puzzle, and can help to better define disease, predict its progression and most importantly help to select the best possible treatment for each individual patient. Modern genomics technologies can provide unprecedented windows into the biology of disease processes. As a molecular pathologist in the division's Clinical Genomics Laboratory, Dr. Segal's clinical interest is in developing new genomic analysis tools and bioinformatics systems utilizing this technology to help support the care of University of Chicago patients. For more information about Genomic and Molecular Pathology, click here http://gmp.uchicago.edu. Dr. Segal's research interests dovetail with his clinical focus and is mainly related to the development of novel genomic analysis technologies for cancer. Current efforts are focused on development of assays to detect trace cancer signals, including minimal residual disease, therapy resistance mutations and circulating plasma tumor DNA.

Co-founder and Senior Vice President of Technical Sales and Research
Dr. Sequeda received his Ph.D. the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin and was a NSF Graduate Research Fellow. His research interests are on the intersection between relational databases and semantic web. Dr. Sequeda is the inventor of Ultrawrap, a patented system which virtualizes relational databases as Semantic Web data sources, which has spun-off into the company Capsenta. Juan was an invited expert to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Relational Database to RDF Working Group and is the editor of the Direct Mapping standard. Juan has received several awards for his research such as best paper and semantic application awards.

Landry Family Assoc Prof, Medicine
Dr. Sequist is originally from Michigan and studied chemistry at Cornell University. She received her MD from Harvard Medical School and trained in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and in hematology/oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she also received an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. She joined the faculty at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in 2005 and has an active clinical and translational research career, as well as a busy practice caring for patients with lung cancer. She is currently the Landry Family Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Director of the Center for Innovation in Early Cancer Detection at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has held grants from the NIH, the DOD, and many private foundations. Dr. Sequist’s research focuses on studying targeted therapeutics for lung cancer and bringing new non-invasive tests like circulating tumor cells and circulating tumor DNA to treat and detect lung cancer.

Associate Professor, Clinical Pathology, Keck School of Medicine
Dr. She is the Director of Microbiology at Keck Medical Center of USC. As a pathologist specialized in medical microbiology, she has devoted her career at USC to the development of the diagnostic capabilities at Keck for infectious diseases. Additionally, she is committed to educating medical students, residents, and fellows in the field of clinical microbiology. She is appointed as the associate program director for the pathology residency program at LAC+USC. Her research interests include analyzing the clinical impact of new rapid molecular diagnostic methods and using novel technologies for detection of human pathogens.

Medical Director, Diagnostics Lead, Medical Affairs
Mr. Sheives is the Director, Federal Health Policy & Reimbursement with Roche Diagnostics Corporation and is based out of their Government Affairs office in Washington, DC. In this role, Mr. Sheives heads Roche Diagnostic’s reimbursement strategies with federal health programs, and coding issues throughout the company’s portfolio. As a global leader in healthcare, Roche Diagnostics offers a broad portfolio of tools that help healthcare providers in the prevention, diagnosis and management of diseases like HPV, HIV, heart failure and diabetes, as well as other medical conditions, such as fertility and blood coagulation. With a background in molecular biology, regulatory law, and reimbursement counseling, Mr. Sheives has represented companies throughout the spectrum of biotechnology. Prior to joining Roche Diagnostics, Mr. Sheives served as Vice President, Reimbursement & Regulatory Affairs at the American Clinical Laboratory Association, and was Director for Personalized Medicine & Diagnostic Policy at the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). Before BIO, Mr. Sheives practiced in two large, international law firms as a legal associate and regulatory science advisor in the areas of FDA and reimbursement law. He holds a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center, a M.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and a B.S. in Microbiology from the University of Texas at Arlington.

Director, Center for Innovation and Bioinformatics, Neurological Clinical Research Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital; Principal Associate in Neurology, Harvard Medical School
Alex has 30+ years of experience in research, software development, software architecture, expert systems design, clinical trials systems design, data management and clinical trials management. As the Director of Systems at the Neurological Clinical Research Institute (NCRI), Mr. Sherman is responsible for the successful design, development and deployment of software systems for numerous clinical trials and biomarker studies in ALS, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, stroke and depression. Alex conceived and was instrumental in design, development and adoption by the international research community of NeuroBANK™, an accelerated clinical research platform, and ALSBANK™ platform, a virtual distributed biorepository currently utilized by numerous researchers and institutions. His team was responsible for design and implementation of PRO-ACT project that created the largest clinical dataset in ALS (10,700+ subjects) and is the de-facto reference dataset in ALS research. This platform was selected as the Best Bio-IT project of 2013 by the Bio-IT World Congress. Alex served on the NINDS Common Data Elements committee, is the Chair of the NeuroBANK™ committee of NEALS and is a Board Member of the ALS Research Group (ALSRG) and ALD Connect consortium. Mr. Sherman holds Masters of Science degree in Nuclear Engineering and graduated from a doctorate program in Nuclear Engineering. He is a Principal Associate in Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Alex's interests and passion are in developing collaborations in clinical research and building disease-specific research networks and consortia to achieve “Big Data” in rare diseases. He is a frequent speaker at academic and industry conferences and has many publications on the topics of collaboration in clinical research, data and biospecimen sharing and technology utilization for these purposes.

Viktor Shkolnikov at HP labs leads a team of scientists and engineers to develop novel microfluidic and electrokinetic technology for solving valuable diagnostics problems, such as minimally invasive diagnosis of cancer (a project he conceived and initiated). His interests and expertise lie at the interface between medicine and fluid mechanics (and the associated physics, chemistry, and engineering) and he constantly seeks ways of how these can be leveraged to alleviate pain and improve health. He is also the author of “Principles of Microfluidics,” a fundamental text in the field. Viktor Shkolnikov received his Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. all in Mechanical Engineering and all from Stanford University.

Research Fellow, Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division
Yannick Simoni earned his PhD at Paris-Sorbone University – France, where he studied the implication of immunity in Type 1 Diabetes. His work focused on the role of innate cells in the initiation of Type 1 Diabetes (Simoni et al, Clin Exp Immunol 2011; Simoni et al, Euro J Immunol 2013; Diana & Simoni et al, Nature Medicine 2013). In 2014, Yannick joined Evan Newell’s group at A*STAR/SIgN – Singapore, as research fellow. Using and mass cytometry and high-dimensional single cells analysis, he studied the heterogeneity of innate lymphoid cells in human tissues (Simoni et al, Immunity 2017). His work is now focusing on CD8+ T cells specificity and heterogeneity in human cancers (Simoni et al, Nature 2018). Since2018, Yannick is working at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center – U.S.

Vice President, Translational Medicine
John Simmons, PhD Vice President of Translational Medicine at PGDx. In this role, John focuses broadly on scientific strategy and biomarker discovery and diagnostics development partnerships with pharma/biotech. Previously, John was at the National Cancer Institute where his research focused on identifying novel therapeutic strategies for multiple myeloma through chemical genomic approaches with a particular focus on drug combinations. He received his undergraduate degree in Biology with honors from American University and Ph.D. in Tumor Biology from Georgetown University as part of the NIH Graduate Partnership Program. As a post-doctoral fellow, he received the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF) Research Fellow award to support his work in developing systems-level approaches for drug combination identification and prioritization.

Medical Dir & Diagnostics Lead, Medical Affairs
Dr. Sireci is a board-certified clinical pathologist with experience in clinical molecular diagnostics. He is currently a Medical Director and Loxo Oncology, where he is the medical diagnostics lead. He also serves on the Economic Affairs Committee in the Association for Molecular Pathology where he is the vice chair for new codes and pricing as well as the AMP representative on the Pathology Coding Caucus (PCC). Dr. Sireci received his BA in Chemistry at NYU and his MD at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He did his residency training in Clinical Pathology at NYPH-Columbia and received a Master’s in Biostatistics at the Mailman School of Public Health. He served as an Assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University for 6 years. He currently maintains a clinical appointment in the department.

Assistant Professor, Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute
Marina is currently an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Computational Health Sciences at UCSF. Prior to that she was the Lead Research Scientist in the Division of Systems Medicine at Stanford University and has worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Pfizer where she focused on developing Precision Medicine strategies in drug discovery. She completed her PhD in Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University. Dr. Sirota’s research experience in translational bioinformatics spans over 10 years during which she has co-authored over 40 scientific publications. Dr. Sirota has published her work in a number of high-impact journals, including Nature Communications, JCI, PLoS Computational Biology and Science Translational Medicine. Her research interests lie in developing computational integrative methods and applying these approaches in the context of disease diagnostics and therapeutics with a special focus on studying the role of the immune system in disease. Her laboratory is focused on leveraging diverse types of omics and clinical data and developing integrative approaches to understand the mechanisms of immune tolerance in the context of autoimmunity (multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis) and unresponsiveness (pregnancy, organ transplant, cancer). The Sirota laboratory is funded by several National Institutes of Health, including NIA, NLM, NIAMS, Pfizer, March of Dimes and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. As a young leader in the field, she has been awarded the AMIA Young Investigator Award in 2017.

Vice President, Corporate Development and Reimbursement
Stan Skrzypczak is a seasoned executive with 30 years of life science/pharma experience (Searle Laboratories, Genentech, Genomic Health, Invitae, and currently working for Guardant Health). His commercialization experience is in the therapeutic classes of oncology, immunology, cardiology, genetics, pulmonary diseases, and growth disorders. His experience ranges from commercializing drugs/biologics, tumor gene expression profiling assays, and NGS-based genetic laboratory tests to NGS liquid biopsy cancer diagnostics. Stan is currently the Vice President, Corporate Development and Reimbursement at Guardant Health. Guardant Health is a global leader in the field of liquid-based NGS somatic assays. He leads international commercialization and U.S reimbursement. Previously, Mr. Skrzypczak served as Vice President of Business Development at Invitae, a genetic testing and information services company for two years. Prior to Invitae, he was Senior Director, Marketing for a franchise product, Oncotype DX, and later he was promoted to SENIOr Director, Global Strategy at Genomic Health. Genomic Health is one of the world's leading providers of genomic-based diagnostic tests that address both the over-treatment and optimal treatment of early stage cancer, one of the greatest issues in healthcare today. He was at Genentech for 18 years prior to Genomic Health working across clinical franchise areas that included oncology and immunology from a varied sales, marketing and reimbursement role and was a sales division manager for Searle Laboratories just prior to Genentech. He has specific experience in global business and corporate development, life cycle management, marketing, sales, reimbursement, and product development. Stan has an M.S. in Immunology and an MBA in Marketing.

Translational Medicine Consultant
John Sninsky, PhD is a translational medicine consultant with deep understanding of diagnostics and diagnostics paired with medicine intervention. John has served in senior management positions in small and large CLIA service companies and small and large in vitro diagnostic kit companies, including Cetus, Roche Molecular Systems, Celera, Quest and CareDx. His primary focus has been the application of genetic and genomic tools to identify diagnostic, prognostic and predictive biomarkers to address critical patient unmet needs. John is the author of numerous scientific papers, including pioneering applications of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to virology and cancer, inaugural genome-wide genetic association studies for common, complex disease and most recently clinical-grade NGS sequencing for solid organ transplantation.

President & CEO
Mr. Snyder has been at MolecularMD since its inception in 2006 and assumed the role of President and CEO in 2014. With more than 15 years of experience in the life science research and diagnostic fields, Mr. Snyder has worked extensively in supporting new product introductions and rapid market adoption for novel proteomic and genomic technologies.

Stanford W. Ascherman Professor and Chair, Department of Genetics; Director, Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine
Dr. Snyder received his PhD training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and proteomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project. His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics. These, including the development of proteome chips, high resolution tiling arrays for the entire human genome, methods for global mapping of transcription factor binding sites (ChIP-chip now replaced by ChIP-seq), paired end sequencing for mapping of structural variation in eukaryotes, de novo genome sequencing of genomes using high throughput technologies and RNA-Seq. These technologies have been used for characterizing genomes, proteomes and regulatory networks. Seminal findings from the Snyder laboratory, include the discovery that much more of the human genome is transcribed and contains regulatory information than was previously appreciated, and a high diversity of transcription factor binding occurs both between and within species. He has also combined different state-of-the-art "omics" technologies to perform the first longitudinal detailed integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) of person and used this to assess disease risk and monitor disease states for personalized medicine. Snyder is a cofounder of several biotechnology companies, including Protometrix (now part of Life Tehcnologies), Affomix (now part of Illumina), Excelix, Personalis and founder of Qbio, and he presently serves on the board of a number of companies.

Professor, Micro and Nanofabricated Tools for Biological Discovery and Medical Diagnostics
Prof. Steven A. Soper received his PhD from the University of Kansas in 1989 followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked on single-molecule detection for high speed sequencing of the human genome. In 1991, he joined the faculty at Louisiana State University (LSU) within the Department of Chemistry, where he filled the William H. Pryor Distinguished Chair of Chemistry. Prof. Soper also held joint appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Biological Sciences. While at LSU, he founded the Center of BioModular Multi-Scale Systems for Precision Medicine, which has as its primary charge to develop enabling and transformative tools for making health-related measurements from rare disease markers, such as liquid biopsy markers, with full process automation. This Center has recently been awarded funding from the National Institutes of Health as part of their Biotechnology Resource Center Program (funded through the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering). In 2011, Prof. Soper accepted a position within the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Prof. Soper is currently a Foundation Distinguished Professor in Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Prof. Soper also holds an appointment at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Ulsan, South Korea, where he is a World Class University Professor. He is also serving as a Science Advisor for a number of major worldwide companies. Prof. Soper is currently the Editor of the Americas for the Analyst and on the Editorial Board for Journal of Fluorescence and Journal of Micro- and Nanosystems. Prof. Soper is also serving as a permanent Member of the Nanotechnology study panel with the National Institutes of Health. As a result of his efforts, Prof. Soper has secured extramural funding totaling >$89M and has published over 315 manuscripts (h index = 62) and is the author of 14 patents. He is also the founder of a startup company, BioFluidica, which is marketing devices for the isolation and enumeration of circulating tumor cells. His list of awards, Includes Chemical Instrumentation by the American Chemical Society, the Benedetti-Pichler Award for Microchemistry, Fellow of the AAAS, Fellow of Applied Spectroscopy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, R&D 100 Award, Distinguished Masters Award at LSU and Outstanding Scientist/Engineer in the state of Louisiana in 2001.

Senior Data Scientist, Personalized Healthcare Data Science
Dr. Vic Spain is Senior Real World Data Scientist in Genentech’s Personalized Healthcare Group. Vic’s role includes the evaluation of new or evolving data sources from routine clinical practice that can inform strategic decisions in Genentech’s development programs. Vic is an epidemiologist and veterinarian by training, having obtained his PhD in Epidemiology from Cornell University, NY, and Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from UC Davis. He has spent several years in the pharmaceutical industry, working at GSK and Merck in Health Economics and Outcomes Research. Prior to his work in the pharmaceutical industry, Vic was the Bioterrorism Epidemiologist for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and an animal-welfare researcher at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. When he is not working, Vic is often playing cello with the Bosworth string quartet.

Co Founder & CEO
Richard Spero is co-founder and CEO of Redbud Labs, and co-inventor of Redbud’s biomimetic cilia technology. Trained as a physicist and systems engineer, Dr. Spero has contributed to the discovery of novel methods for fluid processing at the microscale, including pumping, mixing, cell sorting, and analyte isolation. Prior to founding Redbud Labs, Dr. Spero earned his PhD in Physics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied blood clot rheology and developed novel systems for magnetic manipulation and time-dependent high content screening

Senior Director, Head, Translational Research, Immuno-Oncology & Combinations
Roopa Srinivasan earned her doctorate in Immunology and has extensive experience in Infectious Disease Immunology and Tumor Immunology in academia and industry. She has led translational research programs for cancer immunotherapy for more than 15 years, and has authored several publications. She is the Head of Translational Research in Immuno-Oncology & Combination DPU at GlaxoSmithKline overseeing activities that define a scientific strategy for clinical biomarkers for immuno- modulatory molecules and immune cell therapies within Oncology. This includes characterization of biomarkers to aid selection of appropriate cancer patients in clinical trials, and explore mechanisms of action and resistance for our immuno-modulatory assets.

Program Manager
Margaux is the Program Manager of Immunotherapy Foundation (IF), joining the team in 2017. Most recently, Margaux worked as a communications consultant for life science companies on both coasts. She began her career in life sciences in 2012 as a research analyst for the New York-based corporate finance advisory boutique Torreya Partners, progressing to vice president of knowledge management for subsidiary Torreya Insights, where she product managed the creation of AvaRx, now deals.bio, a web-based life sciences asset marketplace. Margaux then moved into the life sciences communications field, working for New York- based Russo Partners and San Diego-based Canale Communications. Margaux holds a bachelor’s degree from Fordham University, where she graduated cum laude in philosophy and anthropology and as a member of Phi Sigma Tau.

Scientist II, Clinical Pharmacology and DMPK
Nathan Standifer received his PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in San Antonio, Texas. Afterwards, he performed his post-doctoral studies in the laboratory of Gerald T Nepom MD, PhD at the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason in Seattle, Washington. As a post-doctoral fellow, Nathan’s work focused on characterizing autoreactive T cell specificities in type 1 diabetes (T1D) patients and identifying predictive biomarkers of T1D development. After completing his post-doctoral fellowship, he worked in the Clinical Immunology department at Amgen and specialized in development of clinical flow cytometry assays in trials of therapeutics for inflammation-mediated disease. Currently, Nathan is a Scientist II in the Clinical Pharmacology and DMPK department at MedImmune, the biologics development arm of AstraZeneca, at which he supervises development and implementation of flow cytometry-based biomarker assays and the analysis of resulting data in over 35 immune oncology trials. He has authored or co-authored articles in numerous journals, including Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, Journal of Immunology, Clinical Immunology and Clinical Cytometry.

Director, Office of In vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health (OIR), Center for Devices and Radiological Health
Tim joined the FDA in July 2018 and has an extensive background, spanning more than 20 years, in executive leadership, innovation, companion diagnostics, research and development, FDA regulations, and clinical laboratory operations. He received his MD and PhD, in Microbiology and Immunology, focusing on the Molecular Biology of DNA Replication, from Duke University after graduating with Honors in Chemistry from Grinnell College. In his last position, from 2014 to 2018, Tim served as Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Invivoscribe, focusing on Companion Diagnostics and Next Generation Sequencing/Massively Parallel Sequencing in Oncology. During his career, he has played important roles in the development and launch of more than 30 IVD products, as well as numerous unique LDT services, including the FDA approved companion diagnostic for Novartis’ drug Rydapt and the world’s first clinical microRNA assay (for pancreatic cancer detection). Other experience includes serving as Chief Scientific Officer and founder of the Molecular Diagnostics franchise at Quidel, Chief Medical Officer and Vice President of Research and Development at Asuragen, and Senior Director for Medical, Regulatory and Clinical Affairs at Abbott Molecular. Dr. Stenzel served as a Board Director at the ACMG Foundation for Genetic and Genomic Medicine from 2008 to 2013. He has served on the ACMG/CAP Biochemical and Molecular Genetics Resource Committee from 1996 to 2005, the AMP Finance Committee from 2012 to 2018, the AMP Strategic Planning Committee from 2007 to 2009, as the AMP Chair-Elect and Chair of the Solid Tumor Division from 2003 to 2004, the CAP Molecular Oncology Committee from 2013 to 2018, and as a Member of the CAP House of Delegates from 2011 to 2017. As the OIR Director, Tim will advise Center leadership on all regulatory (premarket and postmarket) in vitro diagnostic, radiological medical device, and radiation-emitting product issues that have an impact on Center and Agency level decisions, policy development, nationwide program execution and short and long-range program goals and objectives as well as provide executive leadership and scientific direction to the OIR staff.

Executive Vice President and COO
Mark Stevenson has been Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Thermo Fisher Scientific since August 2017, with responsibility for all of Thermo Fisher’s life sciences-related businesses as well as the company’s innovation and digital strategies. He joined the company as Executive Vice President and President, Life Sciences Solutions, through the acquisition of Life Technologies in 2014. Mark previously served as President and Chief Operating Officer of Life Technologies, and President and Chief Operating Officer of Applied Biosystems prior to its merger with Invitrogen Corporation in 2008. Mark received his MBA from Henley Management School in the U.K. and his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Reading, also in the U.K.

Vice President, Science Policy, Friends of Cancer Research
Mark leads Friends’ research and policy agenda and oversees research projects. He also establishes partnerships to develop policy proposals and consensus-driven solutions, and accelerate drug development. Mark received his PhD in cancer biology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Director, East Bay Center for Digestive Health Research Center; Chairman, Division of Gastroenterology, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, Oakland; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, Division of Gastroenterology, University of California San Francisco; Elected Governor for Northern California, American College of Gastroenterology (ACG)
Dr. Neil Stollman is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology. He attended Wesleyan University and New York University School of Medicine. He completed an Internal Medicine Internship and Residency at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons. He completed a Fellowship in Gastroenterology and Advanced Hepatobiliary Endoscopy at Jackson Memorial Hospital/University of Miami School of Medicine. Dr. Stollman is a member of the American Gastroenterology Association, American College of Gastroenterology, American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy and Alameda-Contra Costa Medical Association.

Asst Prof, Medicine
Shannon Stott, PhD, is a Mechanical Engineer who has been working at the interface of technology, imaging and medicine. Dr. Stott has a broad background in microfluidics, optics, tissue engineering and cryopreservation, with a focus on their applications in clinical medicine and cell biology. As a postdoctoral fellow in Mehmet Toner’s laboratory, she co-invented the herringbone circulating tumor cell chip (HBCTC-Chip) a device that can successfully capture cancer cells circulating in the blood stream of localized and metastatic cancer patients. This technology has been used to explore the biology of these extremely rare cells, identifying novel pathways for metastasis and bringing us a small step closer to understanding how cancer spreads and kills. Recently, this device has been scaled for large scale production, enabling the distribution of the HBCTC-Chip to multiple cancer centers across the country. Additionally, Dr. Stott is an expert in high speed video microscopy, an imaging technique that has enabled the exploration of novel fluidic flow inside microfluidic devices and biological processes that occur at a micro-second time scale. Dr. Stott has authored over 30 publications and is frequently invited to speak at national conferences. In 2014, she received the American Cancer Society’s Women Leading the Way to Wellness Award.

SVP & CMO, NA
Zhen Su, MD is the Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of EMD Serono, North America. He leads medical strategy for all products in North America and drives execution of key medical initiatives focusing on improving patient outcomes in key therapeutic areas, including Neurology, Immunology, Oncology, Fertility, and Endocrinology. A physician executive with nearly 20 years of experience, Dr. Su has strong clinical expertise in Oncology, Urology, and Immuno-Oncology.

President
As President and Founder of Smithwise, Eric Sugalski drives processes to attract and retain top talent and great clients, while maintaining an active role in the product development process. During the first decade of his career as a hands-on design engineer with IDEO and Insight Product Development, Eric focused on surgical instrumentation, robotic systems, and drug delivery devices. When Eric launched Smithwise, he collaborated with technical innovators to translate their lab-based medical technologies into market-ready products. Throughout this process, Eric leveraged his technical background to provide clients with production-ready designs, functional prototypes, and smooth transfers into manufacturing. Eric now leads business development efforts for Smithwise while maintaining a day-to-day connection to ongoing client projects and his engineering and design teams. Eric holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.B.A. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a frequent lecturer at MIT Sloan and mentors students from MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and Temple University. Eric lives in the Philadelphia suburbs with his wife and three children. In his free time he enjoys spending time outdoors with his family and catching up on the latest sci-fi TV series.

Group Leader, Cell Pharmacology
Tom Sundberg has expertise in chemical biology and translational immunology in the Center for Development of Therapeutics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The focus of his work at CDoT is developing approaches to enhance anti-inflammatory functions of immune cells. As part of these efforts, he serves as a project lead for a collaboration with a biopharmaceutical industry partner developing first-in-class therapies for autoimmune/auto-inflammatory disorders. Tom received a Ph.D. in chemical biology from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and upon its completion in 2010 was awarded the American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University; in the course of the fellowship, he studied new chemical biology approaches to targeted protein degradation.

CEO
Tim Sweeney, MD, PhD is the co-founder and CEO of Inflammatix, Inc., which focuses on using robust informatics and machine learning to derive novel HostDx™ diagnostics based on ‘reading’ patterns in the immune system. Inflammatix’s first tests are focused on diagnosing acute bacterial and viral infections and sepsis. The company is funded by Khosla Ventures, Stanford-StartX Fund and the U.S. government’s DARPA program. Dr. Sweeney completed his MD and PhD at Duke University, after which he was a surgery resident at Stanford. While training as a surgeon, he became frustrated with the limitations of current diagnostic tools for infection. During his residency, he completed a postdoctorate MS in Biomedical Informatics, mentored by Dr. Purvesh Khatri. Together they designed the custom informatics algorithms for sifting through heterogeneous ‘big data,’ which formed the core technology on which Inflammatix is based.

Global Head, Computational Biology
Sándor Szalma is Global Head, Computational Biology in Takeda Pharmaceuticals. He is responsible for computational biology, computational and statistical genetics, machine learning and informatics approaches supporting target discovery/forward translation and reverse translation/biomarker and patient stratification in oncology, neuroscience and gastroenterology. He serves as a member of the governance board of Open Targets and leads the Takeda engagement in the Regeneron Whole Exome Sequencing of UK Biobank Consortium. Before joining Takeda, he was head of Translational Informatics and External Innovation, R&D IT in Janssen Research & Development, LLC. Previously, he was member of the industry advisory committee of ELIXIR, member of the board of the Pistoia Alliance, member of the Translational Medicine Advisory Committee of the PhRMA Foundation and led the Data & Knowledge Management Strategic Governance Group of Innovative Medicine Initiative. His past positions included president of MeTa Informatics, general manager of QuantumBio and senior director of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Accelrys, Inc. He was co-founder of Acheuron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He lectured at UCSD Extension and was adjunct professor at Rutgers University in the Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics program. He is the author of 45 scientific publications and book chapters and two patents. He received his doctoral degree in physical organic chemistry from A. Szent- Györgyi Medical University in Szeged, Hungary.

Senior Scientific Researcher
Rachel Tam has been working in Genentech as senior scientific researcher for 8 years. She is a technical expert on multiple molecular biology technologies, including qPCR, ddPCR and NGS. She has developed a high throughput multiplex microfluidics qPCR platform to detect mutations in fresh frozen, FFPE, TMA and cell free DNA samples from multiple clinical trials routinely. Recently, she has been developing ultra-sensitive assays utilizing ddPCR and NGS technologies to detect mutations from circulating tumour DNA, paving the way to develop personalized medicine for cancer patients.

VP Global Partners and Alliances, Sales, Lucidworks
Simon leads Lucidworks' search, discovery, and AI indirect channel business with resale, OEM, and integrator partners. Outside of this, Simon specializes in big data & analytics for finance, pharma and life sciences sectors aligned to the insight engine market.

Founder & Chairman
Marty Tenenbaum is a renowned computer scientist, Internet entrepreneur and cancer survivor. He founded Cancer Commons and CollabRx (NASD: CRLX) to help each cancer patient obtain the best possible outcome. He is an Internet commerce pioneer and visionary, having founded EIT (1990) and CommerceNet (1994) to accelerate business use of the Internet, and later, was an officer and director of Commerce One, Webify Solutions (sold to IBM in 2006), and Medstory (sold to Microsoft in 2007). He currently serves on the boards of Efficient Finance, Patients Like Me, and the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Dr. Tenenbaum is a fellow and former board member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and a former consulting professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a Ph.D. from Stanford.

Commercial Officer & Board of Directors
Patrick is a +25yr veteran of the precision medicine industry. He has been involved in delivering hundreds of medical innovations into routine clinical care around the world. He has raised over $2 billion dollars in risk capital investing for companies in the international marketplace.

Director, Clinical Applications
Dr. Peter Trabold is Director, Clinical Applications at Rheonix. He received his Ph.D. and MBA from the University at Buffalo. He has held a variety of roles in diagnostic industry over the past 15 years.

Vice President, CIO
Matthew Trunnell is Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Fred Hutch Information Technology (IT). In his role Matthew Trunnell oversees enterprise and scientific computing services and leads a team of data analysts and software engineers building new capabilities to leverage clinical data for research. Trunnell is also working to forge connections between the Hutch and the broader technology community in Seattle to help power cancer research. Trunnell came to the Hutch from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard where he had served as head of CIO and manager of research computing during the period of explosive growth in research data infrastructure capabilities in support of the growth in next-generation sequencing activities. As IT and informatics became more central to the large-scale generation of data, Trunnell initiated a new organization within the Institute bringing together computational biologists and professional software engineers focused on developing advanced informatics capabilities. Having started his professional life as a computational oceanographer, Trunnell found his way into the genomics world in the late 90’s and has been supporting applied scientific computing in both academic and commercial environments since.

Associate Professor, Medicine, Duke University School of Medicine; Founder, Predigen, Inc.
Ephraim Tsalik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology at Duke University. His clinical training is in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases although Dr. Tsalik’s clinical practice is in the Emergency Department of the Durham VA Health Care System. Dr. Tsalik has spent the past decade focused on diagnostics research leading to his current role as the Associate Director of the ARLG Laboratory Center. Through these various roles, Dr. Tsalik evaluates existing and emerging biomarkers, supports the development of diagnostic platforms for pathogen identification and characterization, and has supported a new paradigm for host response-based diagnostics. The latter endeavor is where Dr. Tsalik has focused most of his time. Specifically, he has combined machine learning with systems biology measurements to define a growing number of diagnostic and prognostic disease signatures. He has recently worked to translate these signatures onto rapid, simple, clinically relevant diagnostic platforms, which is being promoted through a recent Duke spin-out – Predigen, Inc.

Commercial Director
Dr. Vanessa Tumilasci holds an MSc. degree in Biotechnology from Sao Paulo University (Brazil) and a PhD in Microbiology & Immunology from McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Vanessa joined THB in 2016 to manage biospecimen procurement and is instrumental in the formation of new partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and biorepositories and plays an active role in corporate development initiatives.

CSO
Kate Lillard received her PhD in Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry from the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, followed by a Howard Hughes postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. While conducting research in the area of stem cell biology and oncology as a graduate and postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Lillard developed a keen interest in IHC and image analysis. Following this, she joined Aperio in 2007 where she supported and then managed image analysis products for digital pathology. After acquisition of Aperio by Leica in late 2012, Dr. Lillard joined Indica Labs as CSO where she supports, promotes, and helps guide the development of digital pathology image analysis and artificial intelligence solutions for the life sciences.

Katherine is a seasoned biotechnology entrepreneur with a focus on business development, startup entrepreneurship, fundraising and strategic business planning for clinical diagnostic companies and investors. She has a breadth of experience in development and commercialization of new technologies for clinical diagnostics, including diagnostic reimbursement, financial analysis, operations, and product development. Katherine has served on and continues to work closely with the economic advisory committee for the Association of Molecular Pathology (AMP). She is actively sought after to speak and moderate sessions at industry meetings on the topics of reimbursement, new technologies and commercial challenges for emerging diagnostic tests. As a consultant, Katherine has worked with a number of early stage and established diagnostic companies guiding them through product development choices, market entry strategies, funding ($21M raised) and a diverse range of business development transactions. Prior to consulting, Katherine was at Vitra Bioscience (VP of Strategic Marketing), a venture-backed biotechnology tools company, where she managed a broad range of functional areas, including marketing, business development, operations, finance, legal, IP and participated in raising over $15M in capital. Previously, Katherine worked at Applied Biosystems in strategic planning (including Celera and Celera Diagnostics), business development, research management and product development roles. Prior to Applied Biosystems, Katherine directed the Molecular Genetics Department for Oncogenetics / Datagenetics, a start-up esoteric diagnostic services company (acquired by Impath and subsequently by Genzyme). Katherine also conducted post-doctoral studies on Marfan Syndrome at Stanford University and in conjunction with the Human Genome Project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She was board certified by the American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) in Clinical Molecular Genetics from 1993 through 2003. Katherine holds a PhD in Human Genetics from the University of Calgary, Canada and a B.S. (Hons) in Microbiology from University College Galway, Ireland.

CSO
Dr. Uger has spent the past 18 years developing novel agents targeting the immune system. He began his industry career in cancer vaccine research with Aventis Pasteur, and then joined start-up Trillium Therapeutics (private company) as Director, Research & Development, later serving as Vice President, R & D. At Trillium, Dr. Uger has overseen the growth of the company’s pipeline and guided several compounds from concept to the clinic. His expertise spans both innate and adaptive immunology, and he has overseen programs in the fields of immuno-oncology, autoimmunity and transplantation. He received his PhD in immunology from the University of Toronto.

Co-CEO and CSO, R&D
David is a co-founder of Numab. From 2004 until 2010, David was at Esbatech, as Head of Research & Development. He designed Esbatech’s antibody discovery platform, and was responsible for the discovery and preclinical development of ESBA1008 (now RTH258), a best-in-class anti-VEGF scFv for the treatment of age-related macular edema. His work on the pharmacokinetic properties of antibody fragments led to the development of ESBA105, a TNF-inhibitory scFv – the first antibody fragment to be applied topically by eye drops. David is an inventor on numerous patents and patent applications and has published widely in leading peer-reviewed journals. David holds an MSc in Molecular Biology and Neurosciences from the University of Zurich, and a PhD in Biochemistry from the Biocenter in Basel.

Fyodor Urnov, PhD was until recently the Associate Director at the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences, where he shared broad responsibility for defining and leading the overall scientific effort. Prior to joining Altius, Dr Urnov was Vice President, Discovery and Translational Research, at Sangamo Therapeutics, where he co-developed human genome editing with engineered nucleases (2005), and then led the Company’s R&D efforts to deploy genome editing for crop trait engineering in partnership with Dow AgroSciences (2009), and co-managed Sangamo’s partnership with Sigma-Aldrich for the generation of engineered cell lines for manufacturing, transgenic animals and research reagents (2010). During 2010-16, he lead IND-enabling efforts on new disease indications, including genome editing for the hemoglobinopathies (parnered with Biogen, IND accepted 2017), and allele-specific targeted gene regulation with engineered transcription factors for neurodegenerative disease (partnered with Pfizer). He is an author of more than 70 scientific publications and an inventor on more than 130 issued and pending U.S. patents related to genome editing and targeted gene regulation technology. Prior to joining Sangamo, Dr. Urnov was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health in the laboratory of Dr Alan P. Wolffe, where he trained in the study of chromatin-based genome regulatory processes in metazoa. Dr. Urnov received his Ph.D. in Biology from Brown University, where he studied chromatin-based integration of genome control in the laboratory of Dr Susan A. Gerbi, and his B.Sc. in Biology from Moscow State University, where he was a student in the Department of Virology led by Dr Joseph G. Atabekov.

Alexander Vadas is a Managing Director and Partner in L.E.K. Consulting’s Biopharmaceuticals and Life Sciences practice. He joined L.E.K. in 2000 and focuses on diagnostics, research tools and personalized medicine. Within those areas, Alexander has worked with a range of established and emerging clients in the areas of corporate strategy, product strategy, and planning and transaction support. He received both his BS and his Doctor of Philosophy in chemical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Chief Dev Officer
Bahram (Bob) Valamehr is the Chief Development Officer at Fate Therapeutics, overseeing the company’s early development activities including “off-the-shelf” cell therapy products derived from the company’s induced pluripotent stem cell platform. Previously, Dr. Valamehr was the Vice President of Cancer Immunotherapy at Fate and prior to that played key scientific roles at Amgen, the Center for Cell Control (a NIH Nanomedicine Development Center) and the Broad Stem Cell Research Center developing novel methods to control pluripotency, to modulate stem cell fate including hematopoiesis, and to better understand cellular signaling pathways associated with cancer. He has co-authored numerous studies and patents related to stem cell biology, oncology and materials science. Dr. Valamehr received his PhD from the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA, his MBA from Pepperdine University and his BS from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA.

CSO
Andrea van Elsas became Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) in September 2017, following his tenure as Chief Scientific Officer of Aduro Biotech Europe since November 2015. Prior to its acquisition by Aduro in 2015, Dr. Andrea van Elsas co-founded BioNovion and served as Chief Scientific Officer focusing on the development of innovative therapeutic antibodies in the field of immune oncology. From 1999 to 2011, he held numerous positions at Organon in Oss, The Netherlands, and Cambridge, Massachusetts (acquired by Schering-Plough Corporation in 2007 and later by Merck & Co.), and as the Director of Tumor Immunology he ran the immune oncology portfolio, including the program that later became known as pembrolizumab. As a postdoctoral researcher from 1997-1999, Andrea worked at the University of California, Berkeley, studying antibodies blocking CTLA-4 for the treatment of cancer and is a co-inventor on the original patents that formed the basis for the development of Yervoy® (ipilimumab), the first checkpoint inhibitor approved in 2011 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of melanoma.

Assistant Professor
Professor Vannberg obtained his doctorate in Statistical Genetics from University of Oxford in 2009. He then served a two year Post Doctoral Fellowship at Oxford’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics before joining Georgia Tech in July 2011. His research is focused on using modern genomics and proteomics to study the host pathogen relationship. He has developed an international reputation in the field of immunogenetics and understanding human genetic susceptibility to infectious diseases. During the past year the Vannberg lab has focused on clinical metagenomics for infectious disease diagnostics, building a large team to utilize next generation DNA sequencing to detect pathogen associated nucleic acids from normally sterile sites such as serum and BAL. His laboratory is also studying the role of nanovesicular exosomes during infection. He has won a number of prizes and fellowships including the Syngenta Prize at the UK Young Entrepreneurship competition, a UK Overseas Research Student Fellowship and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Fellow of Green Templeton College (Oxford University). He is an Associate Editor of BMC Medical Genetics and is on the editorial board of Dataset Papers in Medicine.

Director, Biomarker Discovery Program
Dr. Vasmatzis is an Associate Professor in Molecular Medicine at Mayo Clinic School of Medicine, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science. He is a Consultant in the Department of Molecular Medicine and a member of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, as well as the co-director of the Biomarker Discovery Program within the Center for Individualized Medicine. The Biomarker Discovery Program consists of bioinformatics specialists, molecular biologists, epidemiologists, and pathologists. This team has demonstrated success in discovery and translation of several biomarkers as well as developing evidence- based models that should help clinicians stratify (cancer) patients in order to provide each individual with the appropriate care. With the recent advances in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies, Dr. Vasmatzis’ program has been engaging in massive sequencing to scan the genome of cancer cells for abnormalities that can be used for clinical purposes - such as diagnosis and stratification of patients for optimal treatment. Dr. Vasmatzis has published papers in Journal of Clinical Oncology, Cancer Research and BLOOD, which further demonstrate he and his colleagues’ discovery, validation and translation capabilities. Recently, Mayo Clinic launched MPseq, a whole genome NGS test that was developed by Dr. Vasmatzis’ program.

Assistant Professor, Department of Biology
In my first major project, I worked on the proliferative signaling of breast cancer through the hetero-dimerization of ACKR3. Next, I contributed to the therapeutic development program of a novel antibody against this chemokine receptor for the treatment of glioblastoma. That work led me to study the role of this receptor family in tumor endothelial cells (TEC), and how chemokine receptor levels in TEC can impact response to therapy. I also studied the role of the adipokine chemerin in tumor immunity and surveillance in breast, melanoma, and prostate cancers. For a fourth major project, I used transgenic mice to identify the role of chemerin and its receptors in experimental pulmonary fibrosis using adenovirus-driven pulmonary overexpression of TGF-beta. These projects along with several minor projects have increased our knowledge of the dysregulation of transmembrane receptors in cancer and inflammatory disease with the goal of developing therapeutics based on those findings.

Professor of Pathology
Dr. Voelkerding is a professor of pathology at the University of Utah School of Medicine and past president of the Association for Molecular Pathology. He is the former chair of the College of American Pathologists’ Next-Generation Sequencing Project Team, which has developed laboratory accreditation requirements and proficiency testing programs for clinical next-generation sequencing. Dr. Voelkerding is currently chair of the newly formed College of American Pathologists’ Genomic Medicine Resource Committee. Dr. Voelkerding received his MD from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and is board certified in clinical pathology and molecular genetic pathology. His applied research focuses on the translation of genomics technologies into clinical diagnostics. During the past few years, his basic research has centered on the utilization of genomic approaches to elucidate the genetic basis of primary immune deficiencies, which has resulted in the discovery of two new genes being associated with common variable immunodeficiency.

Professor, Immunology, Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences
Dr. Bruce Walcheck is Professor of Immunology at the University of Minnesota with appointments in the Masonic Cancer Center, Center for Immunology, and the Stem Cell Institute. Dr. Walcheck completed his postdoctoral training at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, CT, and his PhD training at Montana State University. Dr. Walcheck's research is funded by the National Institutes of Health.