'I am a senior scientist at the UK Stem Cell Bank with a background in stem cell biology, neuroscience and transcriptomics. The UK Stem Cell Bank is the sole public repository of all UK-derived human embryonic stem cell lines, holding over 139 stem cell lines and distributing research and clinical-grade lines. We engage in research to improve the standardization, quality and safety of cell therapies. The UK Stem Cell Bank is also active in the UK regenerative medicine infrastructure, providing support and advice on international best practice, policies and guidelines relating to stem cell use and regulation around the world.'
Dr. Cátia Moutinho is a group Leader at the Garvan-Weizmann Centre for Cellular Genomics, at the Garvan Institute. Her team focuses on single-cell genomics development. She is a biologist by training, with a PhD in Biomedicine and a master’s in clinical Trials and Medical Affairs. She has an extensive experience in the wet-lab, with a strong background in single-cell technology, as well as cancer genetics and epigenetics. She has more than 45 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals including original papers and a book chapter. After starting her professional career in Oporto, Portugal, and working in Madrid and Barcelona for more than 10 years, she decided to embark on a new journey in Sydney, Australia, where she is currently residing.
Jean joined OnRamp Bio after more than 25 years experience in Genomics, Bioinformatics and Information Technology at Illumina and UCSD. He uniquely brings deep experience and knowledge of biology, wet lab operations, microarrays, and next generation sequencing together with advanced bioinformatics, software development and enterprise IT infrastructure with a Masters in Computer Science from Institut national des Sciences appliquées de Toulouse / INSA Toulouse, and a B.S. Computer Science from IUT de Clermont-Ferrand - Université d'Auvergne
John Bashkin is a co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer for S2 Genomics. He has 30 years’ experience leading innovation programs and business development in life sciences. He previously held senior positions at Molecular Dynamics, where he led the development of the MegaBACE 1000 96-capillary sequencing system, Amersham, and SRI International. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Indiana University and an MBA from Santa Clara University.
Meghan Hemond is a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a B.S. in biomedical engineering. While completing her degree she was introduced to the field of microfluidics and completed a capstone project designing microfluidic devices for single-cell isolation. She began her career in sales and customer support at Seahorse Bioscience before transitioning to a technical role. As part of the microfluidics group at Bio-Rad Laboratories' Digital PCR Center, she was involved in the design, modeling, and testing of complex microfluidic chips. She took on a similar role as a microfluidic engineer at Fluid-Screen and has been with Edge Embossing since 2018 helping clients with the design and manufacturing of their own microfluidic-enabled products.
Srikanthi Ramachandrula is Associate Director - NGS Applications at Strand Life Sciences. An alumnus of IIT-Bombay, India with a master’s in biotechnology, and specialization in user experience design. She has over a decade of experience in the design and development of software for biological research. She currently manages the Strand NGS product which streamlines next-generation sequencing data management and analysis. Given her involvement in several collaborative projects with various academic and commercial institutes worldwide, she has a deep understanding of cross-platform and cross-technology multi-omics analyses.
Elly Sinkala is a lead application scientist at cytena where she develops workflows that interface cytena’s single-cell dispensing instruments with downstream applications in cell line development and single cell -omics. Dr. Sinkala is a biomedical engineer by training with a focus in microfluidics and assay development. Prior to cytena, she worked as an associate consultant where she provided technical and regulatory expertise in over 30 projects for clients in the medical device, life sciences, and tech industries. During her postdoctoral appointment at University of California at Berkeley, she led a multisite research project with the Stanford School of Medicine to enable, a first-of-its-kind, single-cell western blotting for the measurement of proteins in rare circulating tumor cells.
Ian has 20+ years of professional experience designing and developing software solutions. For the last 15 years, he has been in technical leadership roles leading small and large teams of business analysts, software developers and QA experts through the full lifecycle of software development As a hands-on technical executive, he is passionate about software development processes that enhance productivity, quality, and maintainability including agile development and automated test-driven development.
Ian is the inventor of GenomOncology’s Precision Oncology Platform. This platform, expressed through an Application Programming Interface (API), is the engine of GenomOncology’s precision medicine user experiences (UIs) and tools used by oncologists, pathologists, and clinical informaticians. GenomOncology’s platform is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that understands various ontologies (i.e. diseases genes, biomarkers, etc.) and supports Clinical Decision Support (CDS) through interpretable rules.
Rachel Agoglia is an application scientist working at Namocell. Rachel completed her PhD in Genetics at Stanford University, where she used stem cell models of brain development to study evolution of the human cerebral cortex. In her thesis work, Rachel focused on gene regulatory changes underlying the divergence in neurodevelopment between humans and non-human primates. Now, Rachel is using her expertise in single cell RNA-sequencing to help scientists optimize their single cell experiments with Namocell's devices for gentle and efficient cell isolation and dispensing.
Dr. Ehrhardt is a biophysicist with a Ph.D. in human physiology. Throughout her career, she focused on driving biomedical research through efficient application of innovative technologies and strategies. She built and led successful teams in industry, including at Merck, where she headed a laboratory providing leading technologies for cell-based research from early discovery through manufacturing; and at BMS where Dr. Ehrhardt led and grew an international clinical assay team to robustly cover large scale registrational and translational clinical analysis generating clinical decision-driving data and mechanistic insights for immuno-oncology, cardiovascular, immunology, metabolic and rare disease studies. Before returning to Merck, Dr. Ehrhardt fulfilled one of her scientific aspirations at CHDI Foundation, designing and implementing successful clinical biomarker discovery and development strategies for Huntington’s disease. Currently, at Merck, Dr. Ehrhardt is providing strategic and technical leadership for the development and implementation of industry-leading and QC-friendly cell-based assays and models for potency determination that reflect the unique mechanisms of biologics products in clinical studies and beyond.
Tera Bowers is the Associate Director of Portfolio Management at the Genomics Platform of the Broad Institute. In this role, she supports the Broad’s Medical and Populations Genetics (MPG) group, a germline research community, aligning projects to the latest technology or processes the platform runs. This role also allows the platform to roll out new products and improve existing products with a focus on the specific features required to serve the scientific questions our communities want to address. In addition to her portfolio role, Tera is responsible for managing GP’s Technology Partnerships with key strategic technology partners /suppliers. Prior to Broad, Tera brings over 15 years’ experience in business development and strategic alliances (more recently focusing on NGS products.)
Richa is a cross-disciplinary trained scientist with extensive experience in translational cancer research, and her latest research is based on using stem cells and organoids for cancer modeling and drug discovery. Currently, she is spearheading the Starr Foundation Cerebral Organoid Translational Core at Weill Cornell Medicine, New York which integrates organoid and automation technologies to create personalized solutions for brain cancer patients. Richa received a master’s in biotechnology and PhD in Molecular Biology from University of Queensland, Australia, and postdoctoral training from academic institutions in the UK (University of Nottingham) and USA (UT Southwestern Medical Center and Weill Cornell Medicine). Richa is passionate about bringing precision medicine to the masses and making preclinical research successful to ultimately improve the lives of people affected by cancer.
Ryan Kelly is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Brigham Young University (BYU). He received his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry in 2005 from BYU and spent the next 13 years at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory where he began as a postdoc and ultimately served as Chief Technologist for EMSL, a national scientific user facility, before returning to academia in 2018. In 2020, he founded MicrOmics Technologies LLC, a startup focused on developing and disseminating ultrasensitive mass spectrometry solutions.
A central theme of Dr. Kelly’s research has been the development of new technological solutions for improved biochemical analyses, including mass spectrometry-based omics. Dr. Kelly has authored or coauthored more than 100 publications and is a named inventor on 14 issued and pending patents, several of which have been licensed and commercialized. His work has been recognized with several awards including two R&D 100 awards, a Federal Laboratory Consortium Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer and the Georges Guiochon HPLC Faculty Fellowship.
Dr. Amit Sinha, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Basepair, a cutting-edge NGS analysis platform used by labs around the world. Prior to starting Basepair, Dr. Sinha was an Instructor at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where he developed new computational methods for analysis of NGS data to discover new drug targets in pediatric leukemia. In collaboration with other research labs, he has used NGS data for understanding oncogenesis, stem cells, hematopoiesis, somatic cells reprogramming, etc. His work has been published in Cancer Cell, Science, Nature and other journals.
Anushka Brownley is part of the Product Marketing team at 10x Genomics and focuses on education and enablement around 10x data analysis. With a background in Computer Science and Bioinformatics, Anushka has experience implementing analysis tools and workflows to analyze NGS data, working as an informatics consultant to Pharma and managing software products at Biotech companies.
Dr Catherine Alix-Panabières received her PhD degree in 1998 at the Institute of Virology in Strasbourg-France. Dr Catherine Alix-Panabières & Prof Pantel coined for the first time the term ‘Liquid Biopsy’in 2010 (Trends Mol Med).
As an associate professor, she became the new director of the Laboratory of Rare Human Circulating Cells (LCCRH) at the UMC of Montpellier. In this unique platform, they isolate, detect and characterize CTCs using different technologies. She has authored >100 scientific publications in this field during the last years and 10 book chapters; she is the inventor of three patents in the liquid biopsy field and she is part of EU and national projects. 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 and, the 2017 AACR Awardfor the most cited scientific article in 2015 (Cayrefourcq et al. Cancer Res).
Neeraj Salathia has broad experience in developing and utilizing cutting edge genomics technologies in disease research. He has conducted extensive research and technology development, in fields such as single cell genomics to elucidate the complex architecture of the human brain, and liquid biopsies for non-invasive cancer and metabolic disease detection. Neeraj holds a PhD from the University of London, UK and received his postdoctoral training at Harvard University and Novartis. Following this, Neeraj worked on genomics technology development at Illumina and Molecular Stethoscope in San Diego, prior to joining Bristol Myers Squibb, where he works on the identification and development of genomics technologies to help drive diverse drug discovery programs.
Nagarjun is a Scientist in Technical Operations at Sana Biotechnology (Cambridge, MA). He completed his PhD in Medical Sciences at Texas A&M University (Texas), where he worked on development of a universal lentiviral vector platform for different gene therapy applications. After his graduate school, he joined Lonza (Houston), as a research intern and worked on developing cell lines for high titer productivity of different viral vectors. Nagarjun currently works on analytical method development to develop fit for purpose assays to characterize viral vectors across Sana gene therapy platforms.
