We are scientists.
We are engineers.
We are drug hunters. We are insitro.

Ajamete “Aj” Kaykas, Chief eXploration Officer and Head of Neuroscience

As Chief eXploration Officer and Head of Neuroscience, Aj leads insitro’s Advanced Technology exploration (ATX) group which identifies and pilots in vitro technologies (disease modeling, imaging, genomics/functional genomics screening) to be deployed across all indications at insitro. He also leads insitro’s Neuroscience Therapeutic area which is responsible for target discovery/validation and overseeding the Neuroscience portfolio.

Ajamete has spent over 30 years in both industry and academia, working in the areas of proteomics, genomics, and stem cell biology. Before joining insitro, Aj led the early target discovery team at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in the Neuroscience unit. His team efforts have led to the discovery of multiple new disease targets and the development of better predictive preclinical models. He was also a director at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a scientist at Viral Logic System Technology and an associate scientist at Immunex corporation in the early 1990s . He conducted his postdoc with Dr. Randy Moon at the University of Washington/Howard Hughes Medical Institute on Wnt-signaling. While in Randy’s lab, he conducted one of the first ever genome-wide RNAi screens and studied the role of Wnt-signaling in human disease and stem cell biology. He did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Dr. Bill Sugden’s lab where he studied virology, immunology, and oncology.

In his free time, Aj enjoys traveling, hiking, kayaking, sailing, biking, making whiskey, and spending time with his family.

Daphne Koller, Founder & CEO, Board Member

Daphne Koller is the CEO and Founder of insitro.

Daphne was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years. She was the co-founder, co-CEO and President of Coursera for 5 years, and the Chief Computing Officer of Calico, an Alphabet company in the healthcare space. She is the author of over 200 refereed publications appearing in venues such as Science, Cell, and Nature Genetics, and has an h-index of 130. Daphne was one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people and is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the International Society of Computational Biology.

In her spare time, Daphne enjoys spending time with her family, especially while traveling to exotic destinations (62 countries so far and counting), where they enjoy hiking, sailing, scuba diving, and eating fresh local food.

Duane Valz, General Counsel

As General Counsel, Duane is responsible for managing risk and structuring opportunities for insitro.

Duane has led the legal and IP functions at prominent Silicon Valley companies operating at a variety of scales and growth stages. He joins insitro from Zymergen, a company applying laboratory automation and machine learning to engineer microbial strains for industrial fermentation applications and new product development, where he served as the company’s first in-house lawyer and general counsel. Prior to Zymergen, Duane was a senior member of the patent team at Google, where he led strategic IP initiatives bearing on mobile, cloud, web and open source technologies. Before that, he served as associate general counsel in charge of patent development at Yahoo!

Mr. Valz began his career at Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin (now combined with Arnold & Porter LLP). Over his career, Duane has been named multiple times to the IAM Strategy 300, recognizing the world’s leading IP strategists. He holds B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and serves on the boards of directors for the Level Playing Field Institute and the Berkeley Law Alumni Association.

In his free time, Duane enjoys cooking, traveling, live jazz, yoga, the outdoors and quality time with his family.

Jevan Soo Lenox, Chief People Officer

“I am so inspired by insitro’s mission to transform drug discovery through machine learning and biological data at scale, and by the talented insitrocytes united in pursuit. My career has shown me over and over again that the most powerful innovation comes from diverse, multi-disciplinary, collaborative teams, and the possibilities created through insitro’s approach feel unbounded.”

As Chief People Officer, Jevan ensures that insitro attracts the best and brightest, inspires and supports them to do their best work together, and grows and develops them beyond what they thought possible.

Jevan brings to insitro more than 15 years of experience building transformative, high-growth companies and making their talent and culture a strategic advantage. He was most recently the Chief People & Culture Officer at Stitch Fix, an apparel e-commerce company combining data science and human stylists, that he helped grow to 10,000 employees globally and successfully launch multiple new businesses which quickly reached hundreds of $ millions in sales. Prior to Stitch Fix, Jevan was Chief People Officer at Blue Bottle Coffee where he put in place a new retail talent model and service culture to drive global expansion. He also held multiple leadership roles at Square including building their first sales team to move the company upmarket and expand revenue streams ahead of a successful IPO. Jevan began his career at McKinsey & Company in Boston, New York, and Shanghai as a management consultant serving technology and healthcare clients as well as leading McKinsey’s Asia-Pacific recruiting strategy across twelve countries.

Jevan received his MBA from Harvard Business School, his Masters in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, and Bachelors in East Asian Studies from Harvard College. He was named a First Mover Fellow by the Aspen Institute in recognition of his leadership within organizations to align business impact with the long-term health of society and the planet.

In his free time, Jevan can typically be found with his husband chasing after their two young sons and their large Airedale terrier. He enjoys complicated recipes, running and fitness, and binge reading novels and back issues of The New Yorker.

Keith James, SVP of Drug Discovery

As Senior Vice-President of Drug Discovery, Keith is responsible for machine learning-enabled drug discovery programs at insitro. Keith and his team are both establishing new drug design capabilities, exploiting the power of machine learning models, and undertaking drug discovery programs on molecular targets derived via the insitro-human (ISH) target discovery platform.

Keith has over three decades of drug discovery experience, building and leading research enterprises ranging from handfuls to hundreds of scientists, tackling programs across a wide range of therapeutic areas, and employing a panoply of therapeutic modalities. During his career, Keith, and the organizations he has led, have delivered over thirty clinical candidates, across fifteen therapeutic areas, many of which have reached Phase 2, and two of which are in the hands of physicians treating patients today – eletriptan (Relpax®) for migraines and maraviroc (Selzentry®) for HIV infections.

Before joining insitro, Keith was President of the Ferring Research Institute in San Diego, engaged in the discovery of peptide therapeutics. Before joining Ferring, Keith had a long career at Pfizer, leading discovery research at three different sites across the US and UK, heading the company’s R&D strategy team, and running a laboratory as a visiting investigator at The Scripps Research Institute.

Keith completed his academic and postdoctoral studies at Imperial College London, The University of Cambridge (Raphael lab), Stanford University (Johnson lab), and Columbia University (Stork lab).

In his free time, Keith enjoys cycling, jogging, reading, writing and mechanical watches.

Martha Rook, Chief Technical Operations Officer

Martha has more than 20 years of academic and industry experience in molecular biology, diagnostics development, biologics process development and cell and gene therapy manufacturing.

Prior to joining insitro, Martha was Chief Technical Operations Officer at Sigilon Therapeutics where she was responsible for the Analytics, Manufacturing, Supply Chain and Quality organizations. Martha spent 13 years at MilliporeSigma where she held a variety of roles, ultimately serving as VP and Head of the Gene Editing & Novel Modalities Business where she led a team developing and providing tools and services for cell and gene therapies from discovery to manufacturing. Martha received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from MIT and holds a B.S. in chemistry from Texas A&M University. She pursued post-doctoral studies in neuroscience as a Lefler Fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Neurologic Diseases.

In her spare time Martha enjoys kayaking, hiking and coaching her two son’s soccer teams.

Mary Rozenman, CFO / CBO

Dr. Mary Rozenman is insitro’s CFO/CBO and maintains responsibility for a number of strategic and operational functions at insitro including strategic and operational finance and accounting, strategy, business development, investor relations and corporate communications as well as project and portfolio management.

Mary brings to insitro more than 15 years of scientific expertise, company building and transactions leadership in the biotechnology industry.

Prior to joining the insitro team, she served as the senior vice president of corporate development and strategy at Aimmune Therapeutics, leading business development and partnerships with companies such as Regeneron/Sanofi and Nestlé Health Science, and supporting the company’s strategic finance and investor relations efforts. In her time at Aimmune, she raised more than $650 million in capital through a range of private and public transactions including leadership of the company’s 2015 IPO.

Before Aimmune, Mary was a vice president at Longitude Capital, where she focused on biotechnology investments and participated in multiple therapeutics investments and boards of directors, including observing on Aimmune’s board. Mary was also previously a junior partner at McKinsey & Company, focused on pharmaceuticals and corporate finance. Her scientific work has been published in premier scientific journals, and she is a named inventor on several patents.

Mary holds a doctorate in organic chemistry and chemical biology from Harvard University and a bachelor of arts in biochemistry and Russian literature from Columbia University.

In her spare time, Mary likes to cook, enjoys hiking, going to the theater and hanging out with family — including her husband and young son and daughter.

Theofanis Karaletsos, VP, Data Science / Machine Learning

“insitro offers the unique opportunity for computational modelers interested in hard scientific problems of social relevance to combine data generation, analysis, modeling, and decision making under one roof. I am thrilled to have found an incredible amount of intellectual stimulation paired with mission-driven execution here.”

Theofanis Karaletsos is a machine learning scientist by trade seeking to build robust, data-efficient models of complex systems that allow us to understand and control the world around us. Theofanis previously held positions as Staff Scientist at Meta/Facebook working on the interface of probabilistic programming, deep learning, and uncertainty aiming to robustify large scale ML systems, and was a founding member and senior researcher at Uber AI Labs in San Francisco focusing on probabilistic machine learning, deep learning, probabilistic programming (see pyro.ai), and their applications in fields as diverse as simulation, reinforcement learning, healthcare, biology, spatiotemporal modeling, vision, language, and large-scale economics.
In his earlier roles, Theofanis was a researcher at AI-startup Geometric Intelligence (which was acquired by Uber to form Uber AI Labs) and previously at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York, and did his graduate work at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. See more at karaletsos.com.

At insitro, Theofanis is fascinated to work on building computational abstractions spanning the spectrum of internal in vitro and in vivo (i.e. clinical) datasets representing the breadth of the drug discovery process and is excited by the fundamental problem of causal transfer from the lab to the clinic.

Tom Stocky, VP, Product

As VP of Product, Tom is responsible for product strategy, planning, and user experience for our data systems and software tools.

Previously, Tom was a technology fellow at Denali Therapeutics, where he helped expand the use of machine learning techniques to support their discovery work, and helped further develop their digital strategy for engaging with patients.

Tom has built technology products for more than 15 years. As VP of Search at Facebook, he grew the service to more than 2 billion searches per day across the community’s more than 3 trillion posts. He also led teams responsible for profile, entity graph, and language technology. At Google, he helped start the developer products team and was part of the founding team for Google App Engine, which laid the foundation for Google’s Cloud Platform. He later led teams working on Google search, commerce, and travel products. As Head of Learning Platform at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, he oversaw the engineering, product, and design teams for their education technology efforts.

In addition to his work at insitro, Tom serves on the board of directors for the Banner Alzheimer’s Foundation and on the scientific advisory board for Denali Therapeutics. He holds an MEng and BS in Computer Science & Electrical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from MIT Sloan.

In his free time, Tom enjoys puzzle/escape rooms, anything baseball or softball, and going on adventures with his family.