John M Rossi is Vice President of Translational Medicine at Syncopation Life Sciences. John is an experienced Cell Therapy and Biotechnology leader with over 22 years of experience building robust clinical pharmacology, predictive biomarker, and correlative science processes to support oncology drug development. Most recently John was Senior Vice President of Research and Head of Translational Medicine at CERo Therapeutics. At CERo, John helped to guide Research, Process Development and Vector Sciences teams to advance preclinical initiatives. Prior to CERo, John was Senior Director and Head of Clinical Pharmacology at Kite, a Gilead Company. At Kite, John played an instrumental role in supporting global approvals of both Yescarta® and Tecartus® as well as IND approvals to advance investigational autologous T cell therapy products (KITE-363 and KITE-222). Among John’s notable achievements at Kite, he has represented the organization through numerous external scientific presentations and collaborative manuscripts with leading academic researchers in the cell therapy field. Significant scientific accomplishments include the discovery of novel metrics to characterize CAR T cells based on functionality and fitness, novel biomarker knowledge helping to elucidate CAR T-cell mechanism of action in humans, mechanistic information on CAR-related toxicities, novel insights into the biology of the tumor immune microenvironment, and the pivotal role of IL-15 in the context of CAR T-cell function. John began his tenure in clinical pharmacology and biomarker development at Amgen in 2002, leading global biomarker development for Phase III registrational trials in oncology (trebananib, AMG386), and preclinical, first-in-human and Phase II clinical trials (AMG780, AMG224 and AMG176). John has co-authored over 35 publications in the field of cell therapy and is co-inventor on 9 issued or submitted patents. John earned his Master of Science degree in Molecular Biology at Portland State University and his B.S. degree in Biology at Pitzer College in Claremont CA.
Julius Goepp is the founder and CEO of Scaled Microbiomics, LLC, a pre-clinical stage biotech company focused on passive immunotherapy in the microbiome. Dr. Goepp trained in Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at Children’s Hospital, Boston, and in Pediatric Infectious Disease at Johns Hopkins, where he was active in the promotion of Oral Rehydration Therapy for childhood diarrheal disease. In 2017, he founded Scaled Microbiomics after recognizing the potential for microbiome modulation through the use of little-known avian antibodies, or IgY. Since that time, his energies have been devoted to exploring the characteristics of those antibodies and developing a drug discovery platform based on their use as selective immunomodulators of complex microbiome signaling pathways and event cascades. In addition to his work, Goepp is passionate about cooking, flying, and exploring the outdoors.
Ph.D. founded Primal Health, LLC in 2017 to focus on improving the dental health of both humans and animals by producing oral microbiome modulation products. She has spent 12 years developing SMMRT technology at Primal Therapies, Inc., which is focused on using metabolic influencers to re-engineer disease-causing bacterial biofilms into those that are health-promoting, to decrease inflammation and to improve outcomes. Prior to that, she spent 7 years as a research fellow at Stanford University in Rheumatology and Immunology focused on the neuro-endocrine-immune axis in autoimmune and chronic inflammatory diseases. She holds a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of California at Berkeley where she studied inter- and intra-cellular signaling pathways involved in stress response and community development in bacteria and received her B.S. in Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Iowa where she studied the interaction between M. tuberculosis and innate immune cells.
Yug Varma, PhD, is the cofounder and CEO of Phi Therapeutics, a venture-backed microbiome company focused on skin disorders based in San Francisco. He has an extensive background in bio-organic chemistry, microbiology, synthetic biology, and microbiome research. Yug received
his scientific training at several distinguished academic institutions, including Johns Hopkins University (PhD) and University of California, San Francisco
Nicole is a domain expert in the microbiome and data science who has spent the last 6 years in startups doing everything from marketing, business strategy, IP, data analysis, and fundraising. She studied at the University of Michigan and University of Chicago with Dr. Jack Gilbert, and was the first employee at Dr. Rob Knight’s microbiome startup Biota. She is cited more than 2000 times, published in prestigious journals such as Science and Nature, and is the author of several book chapters and patents. She also serves as an advisor to several other life science and biotech startups.
Matt Davis PhD joined Gritstone Oncology (NASDAQ: GRTS) in 2015 and is currently the Director of Molecular Biology and Sequencing responsible for various neo-antigen discovery and translational genomics efforts. Prior to Gritstone, Dr. Davis conducted post-doctoral research at Warp Drive Bio in the discovery biology group. He holds a PhD in Genetics from Yale with thesis research under the supervision of Dr. Joseph Schlessinger and previous to his graduate work he conducted cancer genomics research at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute.
Miten is an Assistant Research Scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz. He did his PhD in Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics at UC Santa Cruz in the nanopore group. His prior work and research interests include developing biological methods and software for: 1) analyzing genomics data; 2) long read sequencing of DNA and RNA; 3) resolving homopolymers and base modifications; 4) the nanopore MinION and PromethION sequencing platforms; and 5) sequencing and analysis of different classes of RNA (mRNA, rRNA, tRNA, non-coding RNA). His long term interests include combining sequence and structure information from DNA (genomics), RNA (coding and non-coding), and proteins, to better understand genome organization and function.
Matteo D’Antonio is an assistant project scientist in Kelly Frazer’s lab at UCSD, where is main focus is identifying the molecular mechanisms underlying the associations between genetic variation and disease. He got his Bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering at Politecnico di Milano in Italy and his Master’s in Bioinformatics at the Technical University of Denmark. After that, he obtained his PhD at the European Institute of Oncology, where he studied the evolution of protein interaction networks and cancer genes. He joined UCSD in 2013 where he transitioned from cancer genomics to human genetics.
Carl Saab, MS, MA, PhD, Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering & Neurological Institute, Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University and adjunct Professor, Brown University, Department of Engineering.
Scientific Director, Cleveland Clinic Consortium for Pain.
Santhoshi N Krishnan is a 5th-year doctoral student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. She also holds a joint position as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan, working under Dr. Arvind Rao. Her research interests lie in leveraging machine learning and spatial statistical methods to develop robust frameworks that characterize the disease microenvironment, with a special focus on cancer biology. Through her projects, she has been able to establish strong collaborative research relationships with healthcare providers, statisticians, and epidemiologists, with the aim of developing solutions that are in tune with real-world problems.
She holds a master’s degree in Bioengineering from Rice University, where she worked on quantifying the difference in treatment models in nuclear medicine. When not working, she enjoys reading science fiction books, baking, and plans to visit and hike through all the national parks in the Midwest region during her stay there.
Joshua Campbell received his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Boston University. He performed his postdoctoral research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT where he worked with The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) to identify novel mutational drivers of lung cancer. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine where he develops novel Bayesian approaches to analyze data from single-cell genomic technologies to analyze cellular heterogeneity in lung and prostate cancer.
Mr. Arun Devotta is an Associate Research Scientist in the lab of Jean-Pierre Saint-Jeannet. Arun has a Masters in Biomedical Engineering from Polytechnic Institute of NYU. His research interests include developmental Biology, genetics and cell signaling. He is currently studying the signaling pathways regulating neural crest and cranial placode progenitors specification in Xenopus, two embryonic cell populations which form most of the craniofacial skeleton and sensory organs, respectively. When he is not in the lab, he’s probably enjoying an espresso in room 1007S.
I am a Research Assistant Scientist at the University of Florida in the College of Medicine. My research interests revolve around molecular evolution and epidemiology of infectious diseases both within and among hosts, with a focus in phyloanatomy, sociovirology, and transmission cluster dynamics. The goal of my research is to identify relationships among genetic sequence data that can inform us as to the driving factors of pathogen evolution, interaction, and spread using state-of-the-art sequencing approaches and technology.
Manoj Bhasin, PhD, MS, holds joint appointments as Acting Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Bhasin serves as Director of Genomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology and as Aflac Director of Single Cell Biology Program at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. Prior to joining Emory, he was assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-director of Genomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Dr. Bhasin is a member of the Cancer Immunology research program at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University.
Dr. Frazer is an internationally renowned leader in the field of genome biology and medicine. She is the director of UC San Diego Institute for Genomic Medicine and founding chief of the Division of Genome Information Sciences in the Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego.
Maya Ivanjesku holds master’s degree in chemistry from Polytechnic University, Brooklyn NY (NYU).
One of her passions is creating and developing skincare products. Inspired at the very young age, Maya learned early on that using natural remedies is most effective way to skin longevity.
Her formulation career started at the Estée Lauder companies where she was part of elite team of scientists developing products for Origins, Clinique, Estée Lauder, La Mer, MAC. Over the last 30 years, Maya became a creative visionary, developed formulations for many brands such as TooFaced, Benefit Cosmetics, Laura Mercier, Urban Decay, NARS and Sephora Cosmetics.
Most recently, Maya developed and created one of the first probiotic skincare brands where she was able to incorporate live and active probiotic cultures within the products without the need of refrigeration. Ivanjesku received a patent for this technology.
As a Chief Scientific Officer at M2B Pharma Maya and her team recently launched BLT Numbing cream - a prescription strength numbing cream available without prescription.
Maya is an entrepreneur, consultant and has been speaking at numerous conferences and educational speeches at the prestige spa and esthetician events.
Ross O. Youngs, Founder and CEO - Mr. Youngs has over 30 years of inventing products, technologies and processes for a variety of industries. Mr. Youngs holds over 75 patents worldwide and is driven to innovate by a focus on better, faster and less expensive. Recent major innovations have included an R&D 100 Award for collaboration on biopolymer technologies. In 2009, the Company was awarded a $6 million ARPA-E (U.S. Dept. of Energy R&D) grant for its algal harvesting technology which helped lead to the development of Biosortia’s drug discovery platform. In 1998, Mr. Youngs was awarded the Ernst & Young Ohio Entrepreneur of the Year award and the U.S. Small Business Administration honored Mr. Youngs as their national “Business Person of the Year” in a presentation made by Vice President Al Gore.
PhD is Associate Director of the Microbial Development Team at Takeda Pharmaceuticals. She leads a cross-functional Pharmaceutical Sciences team for Live Bacterial Products (LBPs) focused on treating dysbiosis of the gut microbiome. She also heads a functional line group that works on process development for microbial expression systems as well as LPBs. Prior to that she was Associate Director of Analytical Development and QC at Vedanta Biosciences, also working with LBPs, where she developed analytics in an uncertain regulatory landscape for a product now in Ph2 clinical trials. She was the Director of Microbiology R&D at Rapid Micro Biosystems, Inc., a company whose mission is to develop rapid microbiological techniques for pharma and food microbiology. And she also worked at Genomic Profiling Systems, a company whose mission was to develop rapid diagnostics for infectious disease. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, and her B.S. from MIT.
Naveen Babbar, Ph.D., is currently a Precision Medicine Leader at Novartis Oncology. Before joining Novartis in 2014, Naveen led product development teams at multiple diagnostic companies, including Genmark Diagnostics. Naveen holds a Doctorate from the University of Arizona and a Postdoctoral fellowships from Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Yisrael Katz is an industry physician with translational research experience spanning across immunology, oncology, and neuroscience. He is board certified in internal medicine and has most recently practiced inpatient medicine at the University of California, San Diego, where his responsibilities included acute care coverage of bone marrow transplant and CAR-T patients. Dr. Katz has served as medical lead in designing first-in-human studies of a novel diagnostic-therapeutic cancer vaccine platform at CALVIRI. As medical director at Exelixis, Dr. Katz was involved with multiple late phase programs in solid tumors, including immunotherapy combination trials. He currently serves as senior medical director at Viracta Therapeutics, a clinical-stage precision oncology company developing treatments for virally-associated malignancies. Dr. Katz has founded two medical education companies and is a nationally recognized expert in diagnostic reasoning, having delivered lectures to over 5,000 medical students and junior physicians across numerous US programs.
Paul joined RAPT Therapeutics in 2016, bringing years of experience building and leading high-performance technical groups in various biopharmaceutical organizations. At RAPT, Paul oversees the teams building and executing assays to guide the chemistry team in developing structure-activity relationships. Additionally, Paul leads the team developing biomarker plans and assays and executing computational analyses to support clinical programs. Paul was Director of Research and Head of the Genome Analysis Unit at Amgen, Inc. During his eleven years at Amgen, he developed and implemented multiple high-throughput platforms for drug discovery and target identification across a broad spectrum of therapeutic areas. Prior to Amgen, Paul held scientific and leadership positions in several smaller companies, which enabled him to exercise his passion for creating novel technology platforms to enable drug discovery. Paul received his B.S. in Genetics and Development from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana before performing graduate research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and earning his Ph.D. in Immunology from Harvard University. He also completed postdoctoral work in Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego.
John M Rossi is Vice President of Translational Medicine at Syncopation Life Sciences. John is an experienced Cell Therapy and Biotechnology leader with over 22 years of experience building robust clinical pharmacology, predictive biomarker, and correlative science processes to support oncology drug development. Most recently John was Senior Vice President of Research and Head of Translational Medicine at CERo Therapeutics. At CERo, John helped to guide Research, Process Development and Vector Sciences teams to advance preclinical initiatives. Prior to CERo, John was Senior Director and Head of Clinical Pharmacology at Kite, a Gilead Company. At Kite, John played an instrumental role in supporting global approvals of both Yescarta® and Tecartus® as well as IND approvals to advance investigational autologous T cell therapy products (KITE-363 and KITE-222). Among John’s notable achievements at Kite, he has represented the organization through numerous external scientific presentations and collaborative manuscripts with leading academic researchers in the cell therapy field. Significant scientific accomplishments include the discovery of novel metrics to characterize CAR T cells based on functionality and fitness, novel biomarker knowledge helping to elucidate CAR T-cell mechanism of action in humans, mechanistic information on CAR-related toxicities, novel insights into the biology of the tumor immune microenvironment, and the pivotal role of IL-15 in the context of CAR T-cell function. John began his tenure in clinical pharmacology and biomarker development at Amgen in 2002, leading global biomarker development for Phase III registrational trials in oncology (trebananib, AMG386), and preclinical, first-in-human and Phase II clinical trials (AMG780, AMG224 and AMG176). John has co-authored over 35 publications in the field of cell therapy and is co-inventor on 9 issued or submitted patents. John earned his Master of Science degree in Molecular Biology at Portland State University and his B.S. degree in Biology at Pitzer College in Claremont CA.
Dr. Barron obtained her BS in Biochemistry/Cell Biology at UC San Diego where her emphasis was cancer and immunology. She received a PhD in Cell Biology, Stem Cells, and Development from the UC Denver where she elucidated a gene transcriptional pathway in lower jaw development. As a postdoc at Stanford, Dr. Barron used iPSC-induced cardiomyocytes as a drug toxicity model for novel anti-arrhythmics. Returning to San Diego, she was a Regulatory Affairs consultant, until she joined Cardea Bio in 2015. Cardea Bio is the first semiconductor company to produce Biosignal Processing Units (BPUs) providing a Gateway to Biology by translating real-time streams of multi-omics signals to digital information. As VP R&D and Regulatory Affairs, Dr. Barron launched the first drug discovery research tool utilizing mass-produced BPUs. In 2019, Dr. Barron became VP Innovation Partnerships; building commercial and academic partnerships to bring Powered by Cardea products from ideation to launch.
Mike Baratta currently serves as a Scientific Director for the Clinical Biomarker Innovation and Development group at Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, MA. He received his B.A. from Loyola University of Chicago and a Masters Certificate in Applied Healthcare Project Management from Villanova University. Mike began his career as a member of the Global Drug Metabolism group at Pharmacia/G.D. Searle and transitioned to a Principal Scientist role with Pfizer after the closure of the merger. Prior to joining Takeda in 2013, he served as a Director on Nonclinical Development, Pharmacokinetics and Biometrics with Duck Flats Pharma. Mike is a member of several FNIH biomarker consortia, industry committees and serves as a standing member of the NIH/NSD-B grant application reviewer. Mike’s research focus is mass spectrometry focused analytical assay development and clinical validation of post translation biomarkers supporting patient characterization/stratification strategies.
Matteo D’Antonio is an assistant project scientist in Kelly Frazer’s lab at UCSD, where is main focus is identifying the molecular mechanisms underlying the associations between genetic variation and disease. He got his Bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering at Politecnico di Milano in Italy and his Master’s in Bioinformatics at the Technical University of Denmark. After that, he obtained his PhD at the European Institute of Oncology, where he studied the evolution of protein interaction networks and cancer genes. He joined UCSD in 2013 where he transitioned from cancer genomics to human genetics.
Miten is an Assistant Research Scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz. He did his PhD in Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics at UC Santa Cruz in the nanopore group. His prior work and research interests include developing biological methods and software for: 1) analyzing genomics data; 2) long read sequencing of DNA and RNA; 3) resolving homopolymers and base modifications; 4) the nanopore MinION and PromethION sequencing platforms; and 5) sequencing and analysis of different classes of RNA (mRNA, rRNA, tRNA, non-coding RNA). His long term interests include combining sequence and structure information from DNA (genomics), RNA (coding and non-coding), and proteins, to better understand genome organization and function.
Matt Davis PhD joined Gritstone Oncology (NASDAQ: GRTS) in 2015 and is currently the Director of Molecular Biology and Sequencing responsible for various neo-antigen discovery and translational genomics efforts. Prior to Gritstone, Dr. Davis conducted post-doctoral research at Warp Drive Bio in the discovery biology group. He holds a PhD in Genetics from Yale with thesis research under the supervision of Dr. Joseph Schlessinger and previous to his graduate work he conducted cancer genomics research at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute.
Nicole is a domain expert in the microbiome and data science who has spent the last 6 years in startups doing everything from marketing, business strategy, IP, data analysis, and fundraising. She studied at the University of Michigan and University of Chicago with Dr. Jack Gilbert, and was the first employee at Dr. Rob Knight’s microbiome startup Biota. She is cited more than 2000 times, published in prestigious journals such as Science and Nature, and is the author of several book chapters and patents. She also serves as an advisor to several other life science and biotech startups.
Yug Varma, PhD, is the cofounder and CEO of Phi Therapeutics, a venture-backed microbiome company focused on skin disorders based in San Francisco. He has an extensive background in bio-organic chemistry, microbiology, synthetic biology, and microbiome research. Yug received
his scientific training at several distinguished academic institutions, including Johns Hopkins University (PhD) and University of California, San Francisco
Ph.D. founded Primal Health, LLC in 2017 to focus on improving the dental health of both humans and animals by producing oral microbiome modulation products. She has spent 12 years developing SMMRT technology at Primal Therapies, Inc., which is focused on using metabolic influencers to re-engineer disease-causing bacterial biofilms into those that are health-promoting, to decrease inflammation and to improve outcomes. Prior to that, she spent 7 years as a research fellow at Stanford University in Rheumatology and Immunology focused on the neuro-endocrine-immune axis in autoimmune and chronic inflammatory diseases. She holds a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of California at Berkeley where she studied inter- and intra-cellular signaling pathways involved in stress response and community development in bacteria and received her B.S. in Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Iowa where she studied the interaction between M. tuberculosis and innate immune cells.
Julius Goepp is the founder and CEO of Scaled Microbiomics, LLC, a pre-clinical stage biotech company focused on passive immunotherapy in the microbiome. Dr. Goepp trained in Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at Children’s Hospital, Boston, and in Pediatric Infectious Disease at Johns Hopkins, where he was active in the promotion of Oral Rehydration Therapy for childhood diarrheal disease. In 2017, he founded Scaled Microbiomics after recognizing the potential for microbiome modulation through the use of little-known avian antibodies, or IgY. Since that time, his energies have been devoted to exploring the characteristics of those antibodies and developing a drug discovery platform based on their use as selective immunomodulators of complex microbiome signaling pathways and event cascades. In addition to his work, Goepp is passionate about cooking, flying, and exploring the outdoors.
