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

Ahmed Sandakli

Alicia Lee

Amela Alijagic

Amela is an Associate Scientist in the Disease Modeling team and she is working on developing iPSC-derived models for various liver diseases to generate data sets for insitro’s machine learning platform.

Prior to joining insitro, Amela worked on establishing iPSC-derived models for neurodegenerative diseases and testing small-molecule modulators of the autophagy-lysosomal pathways for therapeutic potential. Amela obtained her A.S. in Biotechnology from San Francisco City College, and her B.S in Cell and Molecular Biology from California State University East Bay.

In her spare time, Amela likes long distance running and exploring hiking trails in the Bay Area. When at home she enjoys crafting projects, playing board games, and spending time with friends and family.

Babacar Ndoye

Babacar Cedric Ndoye is a cell biologist with experience in the generation and applications of induced pluripotent stem cells. As an Associate Scientist in the Process Engineering team at Insitro, Babacar is combining his experience in cellular dynamics with automation processes for the development of multi-functional platforms.

Prior to joining Insitro Babacar received his BS in Biology from Stanford University, after which he spent several years at the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute working in iPSC research from patient consent to cardiomyocyte differentiation. He later joined Khloris Biosciences and helped set up and maintain a biobank, as well as develop novel therapeutics and assays for drug discovery.

When not in the lab, Babacar enjoys reading, cooking, and photography, as well as staying active by weight lifting, playing tennis, biking, and swimming.

Chris Baker

Chris has spent nearly two decades in research, mostly focused on infectious diseases, such as HIV. He began his career at the California Department of Public Health, looking at T cell responses to HIV in US and Ugandan patients. His PhD work was using SIV to model the consequences of HIV exposure on the development of the immune system, and later did postdoctoral work on the contributions of the immune system to preterm labor.

Prior to joining insitro, as Associate Director, Core Lab Operations, Chris worked as an immunologist and production cytometry lead at Verily Life Sciences, supporting the Immune Profiler Baseline, and various internal platforms across the company. Before that, Chris was the Technical Director for the Core Immunology Lab, developing, implementing, and executing immunology assays to support the research community at UCSF and various companies around the Bay Area. He also co-founded and taught the UCSF Flow Cytometry Training Program.

When he is not working, he loves spending time with his wife and kids, hiking, playing sports, and building in his woodworking shop.

Ellen Berg, Vice President, Biomarker Sciences

Ellen Berg is Vice President of Biomarker Sciences at insitro. She and her team are developing tools and assays to support target validation and the progression of drug discovery programs.

Ellen is a scientific leader in translational human biology for drug discovery, consumer product and chemical safety applications. She has a background in biopharmaceutical drug discovery and experience in the development and commercialization of new technologies to support translational research and product development. She has collaborated with and consulted for research groups in the pharmaceutical industry, consumer products, academia and government working to understand mechanisms of drug efficacy and chemical safety.

Before joining insitro, Ellen was Chief Scientific Officer of Translational Biology for Eurofins Discovery, developing new scientific directions for the company’s in vitro pharmacology and phenotypic profiling data and analysis services. During her career, she worked in the biopharmaceutical industry and co-founded BioSeek, where she led the development of the BioMAP® human primary cell-based assay platform.

Ellen holds a PhD from Northwestern University and completed postdoctoral work at Stanford University in the Department of Pathology (Butcher lab). Her research interests include drug and toxicity mechanisms of action, phenotypic drug discovery, and predictive methods for product safety and efficacy testing.

Outside the company, Ellen is involved with organizations and industry consortia that promote the use of human-based alternatives to animals in drug discovery and product development.

In her free time, Ellen enjoys activities with her family and friends, spending time her dog, and indulging her love of art and design through data viz.

Eugeni Vaisberg, VP, Disease Model Systems & Arrayed Screening

Eugeni Vaisberg, Ph.D., is Vice President, Disease Model Systems and Arrayed Screening at insitro.

Eugeni is a drug discovery scientist and inventor with 30 years of experience working in academia and industry. Before joining Insitro, Eugeni was a Staff Scientist at Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) where he led groups responsible for the development of cutting- edge cell biological technologies, drug delivery platforms, and the development of an extracellular vesicles-based diagnostic platform. In addition, Eugeni and his team collaborated with ML experts from Google to develop cutting-edge data driven platforms for stem stem cell differentiation and for high throughput image based screening.

Prior to joining Google[x] he worked as Principal Scientist, Therapeutic Innovation Unit at Amgen where he played a leading role in defining the approach and implementing key applications of stem cell biology for drug discovery.

Prior to Amgen Eugeni served as Director of Lead Discovery at iPierian where he was responsible for building one of the world’s first “disease in a dish” drug discovery platforms based on cellular reprogramming technology, advanced high throughput screens, and data analysis.

Before joining iPierian Eugeni worked at Cytokinetics where he was one of the founding scientists and held multiple positions of increasing responsibility. He established biochemistry and informatics departments and led development of a state of the art system for quantitative cell biological assays – Cytometrix™. This work transformed all stages of drug discovery at Cytokinetics and made the company one of the leaders in high content assays and screening.

Dr. Vaisberg is an inventor with over 25 patent applications and multiple scientific publications. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Institute of Protein Research, USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow, USSR.

In his free time he enjoys traveling, SCUBA diving, exploring microbrews, and photography.

Kelly Haston

Lin Gan

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.

Philip Tagari, Chief Scientific Officer

Philip Tagari is currently Chief Scientific Officer of insitro, leading a team of multidisciplinary scientists and engineers who are redefining disease biology and implementing novel approaches to dramatically speed the delivery of meaningful therapeutics to patients with grievous disease. Prior to insitro, Philip spent a decade as Vice President of Research (Therapeutic Discovery) at Amgen Inc. During that time, his global teams advanced over 30 innovative molecules into clinical development and commercialization including Lumukras® (first-in-class KRASG12C inhibitor); Tarlatamab (DLL3 BiTE®); AMG133 (anti-obesity bispecific) and Efavaleukin alfa (AMG 592) a novel IL-2 mutein Fc fusion. He is a Director of CQDM (Consortium Quebecois sur la Decouverte du Medicament; Quebec Consortium for Drug Discovery) and SAB member for BenchSci (biology machine learning) and NutcrackeRx (mRNA therapeutics).

Prior to joining Amgen in 1998, Philip was a Research Fellow at Merck Frosst (Canada) Inc, where he contributed to the discovery of Singulair® and Vioxx®. Philip is a graduate of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University (UK), and performed neurobiology research using pioneering quantitative image analysis at McGill and Oxford Universities.

Pooja Prasad

Prateek Chandra

Tanaya Walimbe