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

Dana Pe’er, Ph.D.

Dana Pe’er, Ph.D., is Chair of the Computational and Systems Biology Program, Alan and Sandra Gerry endowed chair and Scientific Director of the Alan and Sandra Gerry Metastasis and Tumor Ecosystems Center at the Sloan Kettering Institute and has been selected as an HHMI investigator.

Dr. Pe’er’s lab develops novel computational techniques to characterize gene regulation at the single-cell level, in the context of complex tissues such as the tumor microenvironment. Recent work has focused upon the characterization of cell types, their organization along developmental trajectories, and the delineation of regulatory circuits that control cellular identity and behavior. Research questions include how diverse cell types evolve or act in a coordinated fashion within a tissue, particularly in the context of tumor immune ecosystems. The Pe’er lab is also developing analytical tools for new imaging-based technologies that combine high-resolution molecular profiling with spatial information.

Dr. Pe’er received her Bachelor’s degree in mathematics, and her PhD in computer science with Dr. Nir Friedman, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At Harvard University, she trained as a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of genetics in the lab of Dr. George Church. Dr. Pe’er has received numerous honors, including a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award, an NSF CAREER award, an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, the ISCB Overton Prize and MD Anderson’s Ernst W. Bertner Memorial Award . She currently serves on the editorial board of the journal Cell, leads a Center within the NCI Human Tumor Atlas Network, and sits on the organizing committee of the Human Cell Atlas project, heading the computational analysis for this project.

Daniel MacArthur, Ph.D.

Daniel MacArthur, Ph.D. is the Director of the Center for Population Genomics, established to solve the critical scientific, regulatory, and technical problems currently limiting the development of genomic medicine in Australia, and execute large-scale projects that will establish Australia’s leadership in this field.

He previously served as Co-Director of the Medical and Population Genetics Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and headed up a team jointly based at the Broad Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. He co-directed the Broad Institute’s Center for Mendelian Genomics, which has sequenced and analyzed genomic data from over 10,000 individuals from rare disease families and contributed to the discovery of more than 100 new rare disease genes.

He also led the development of the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD), the largest and most widely-used data set of human exome and genome sequence data, which has collated data from over 140,000 sequenced individuals.

David R. Liu, Ph.D.

David R. Liu, Ph.D., is the Richard Merkin Professor and director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, vice chair of the faculty at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator.

Dr. Liu’s research integrates chemistry and evolution to illuminate biology and enable next-generation therapeutics. His major research interests include the engineering, evolution, and in vivo delivery of genome editing proteins such as base editors to study and treat genetic
diseases; the evolution of proteins with novel therapeutic potential using phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE); and the discovery of bioactive synthetic small molecules and synthetic polymers using DNA-templated organic synthesis and DNA-encoded libraries. Base editing—the first general method to perform precision gene editing without double-stranded breaks, and a Science 2017 Breakthrough of the Year finalist—as well as prime editing, PACE, and DNA-templated synthesis are four examples of technologies pioneered in his laboratory. These technologies are used by thousands of laboratories around the world and have enabled the study and potential treatment of many genetic diseases.

Dr. Liu graduated first in his class at Harvard College in 1994. During his doctoral research at UC Berkeley, Dr. Liu initiated the first general effort to expand the genetic code in living cells. He earned his PhD in 1999 and became assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University in the same year. He was promoted to associate professor in 2003 and to full professor in 2005. Dr. Liu became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2005 and joined the JASONs, academic science advisors to the U.S. government, in 2009. In 2016 he became a Core Institute Member and Vice-Chair of the Faculty at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Director of the Chemical Biology and Therapeutics Science Program.

Dr. Liu has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has earned several University-wide distinctions for teaching at Harvard, including the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, the Roslyn Abramson Award, and a Harvard College Professorship. Liu has published more than 200 papers and is the inventor on more than 75 issued U.S. patents. His research accomplishments have earned distinctions including the Ronald Breslow Award for Biomimetic Chemistry, the American Chemical Society David Perlman Award, ACS Chemical Biology Award, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, the Arthur Cope Young Scholar Award, the NIH Marshall Nirenberg Lecturer, and awards from the Sloan Foundation, Beckman Foundation, NSF CAREER Program, and Searle Scholars Program. In 2016 and 2020 he was named one of the Top 20 Translational Researchers in the world by
Nature Biotechnology, and was named one of Nature’s 10 researchers in the world and to the Foreign Policy Leading Global Thinkers in 2017. He is the founder or co-founder of several biotechnology and therapeutics companies, including Beam Therapeutics, Prime Medicine, Editas Medicine, Pairwise Plants, Exo Therapeutics, and Chroma Medicine.

Gene Yeo, Ph.D., MBA

Gene Yeo, Ph.D., MBA, is a Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), a founding member of the Institute for Genomic Medicine and member of the UCSD Stem Cell Program and Moores Cancer Center. Dr. Yeo has a BSc in Chemical Engineering and a BA in Economics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from the UCSD Rady School of Management. Dr. Yeo serves as Co-Director of the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Graduate Program and Associate Director of a Genetics T32 training program at UCSD.

Dr. Yeo is a computational and experimental scientist who has contributed to RNA biology and therapeutics. His primary research interest is in understanding the importance of RNA processing and the roles that RNA binding proteins (RBPs) play in development and disease. Since inception, Dr. Yeo’s lab has focused on uncovering molecular principles by which RBPs affect gene expression, how RBP-mediated post-transcriptional gene networks contribute to cellular homeostasis in stem cells and the brain, and how mutations in RBPs lead to human developmental and neurodegenerative disease. His lab pioneered computational algorithms and experimental methods in human disease-relevant systems to conduct systematic and large-scale studies. These multidisciplinary methods combine machine learning, biochemistry, molecular biology, genomics, chemistry and materials research. His lab develops methods that are systematic, robust and adoptable, such as enhanced CLIP for the purposes of large-scale mapping of protein-RNA interactions. Dr. Yeo’s lab is a major contributor of resources to study RBPs that enable hundreds of labs across many areas of bioscience, such as the world’s largest resource of RBP-specific antibodies that facilitated generation and interpretation of the most comprehensive maps of RBP-binding sites to date for hundreds of RBPs. His lab has also systematically uncovered RBPs that condense into RNA granules during stress and demonstrated strategies to leverage these for therapeutic use in neurodegeneration. His lab also demonstrated in vivo RNA targeting with CRISPR/Cas proteins with proof of concept in repeat expansion disorders. Recently his lab has developed the STAMP technology which is the first transcriptome-wide method to identify RNA binding protein sites and translation measurements at single-cell resolution. Work from the Yeo lab has been highlighted in Nature Methods and Nature Reviews Genetics as “Method to Watch” and featured as a top story in Discover magazine. These efforts have led to clinical programs to develop medicines for RNA-related diseases.

Dr. Yeo has authored more than 180 peer-reviewed publications including invited book chapters and review articles in the areas of neurodegeneration, RNA processing, computational biology and stem cell models; and served as Editor on two books on the biology of RNA binding proteins. Dr. Yeo is on the Editorial Boards of the journals Cell Reports, Cell Research and eLife, and on the Advisory Board of Review commons. Dr. Yeo joined UCSD as an Assistant Professor in 2008, was promoted with tenure to Associate Professor in 2014 and to Professor in 2016. Dr. Yeo was the first Crick-Jacobs Fellow at the Salk Institute (2005-2008). Other awards include the Alfred P Sloan Fellowship in recognition of his work in computational molecular biology (2011), Alpha Chi Sigma-Zeta Chapter Krug Lecturer (2016), Singapore National Research Foundation Visiting Investigatorship Award (2017), the inaugural Early Career Award from the International RNA Society (2017), the Blavatnik National Award Finalist (2018 & 2019), San Diego Xconomy Awardee for ‘Big Idea’ (2019) and Highly Cited Researcher in Cross-Field category (2019 and 2020), recognizing the world’s most influential researchers of the past decade. Dr. Yeo is also a Paul Allen Distinguished Investigator (2020) and received the 2021 Elisa Izaurralde Award for Innovation in Research, Teaching and Service from the RNA Society. Dr. Yeo is a co-founder of biotech companies including Locanabio, Eclipse Bioinnovations, Enzerna, Proteona, Trotana and Circ Bio.

George Davey Smith, MD, DSc, FRS

George Davey Smith, MD, DSc, FRS is Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Bristol, Honorary Professor of Public Health at the University of Glasgow, and Visiting Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

He is a clinical epidemiologist who has concentrated on improving causal inference in observational research, through developing methods such as use of what are now called ‘negative controls’, the use of cross-context comparisons, sensitivity analyses, unobtrusive data collection methods and randomized trials in thought-to-be difficult situations. He pioneered the approach of using germline genetic variants to investigate modifiable causes of disease (‘Mendelian randomization’), and has developed several extensions of the basic method, and contributed to its application in many settings. He is an advocate of the pre-specified application of a range of methods, with different structures of potential biases, to the same question (‘triangulation’), as the key approach to strengthening causal inference. Throughout his career he has promoted increasing the accessibility of data, and implemented this in studies he has led, including the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and their Children (ALSPAC).

He is a fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences, United Kingdom. In 2019 Dr. Davey Smith became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Davey Smith attended Stockton Heath Primary School and Lymm Grammar School in Warrington in North West England. He received a BA from Queen’s College, Oxford in 1981, an MB BChir from Jesus College, Cambridge in 1984, an MSc from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1988, an MD from Jesus College, Cambridge in 1991, and a DSc from Queen’s College, Oxford in 2000.

Giovanna Mallucci, MD, PhD

Giovanna Mallucci, MD, PhD, is Principal Investigator at Altos Labs Cambridge Institute of Science (UK). She was previously van Geest Professor of Clinical Neurosciences and Center Director of the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Dr. Mallucci’s research has focused on dysregulated homeostatic pathways, pioneering the role of the Unfolded Response and its manipulation for therapy and discovering the role of cold shock proteins in neuroprotection. She has published original research in, inter alia, Nature, Science, Neuron, EMBO Journal, Brain and Science Translational Medicine.

Her undergraduate degrees were in Physiological Sciences and Medicine from the University of Oxford, UK, with clinical training at University College, London. She obtained her PhD from London University, UK for which she generated the first adult-onset mouse model of prion protein knockout that paved the way to her discoveries about reversibility of early neurodegeneration and underlying mechanisms.

Dr. Mallucci has received numerous national and international awards for her work. These include a SciAm50 award for Leadership in Research as one of the top 50 scientific innovators worldwide and the 2021 Potamkin Prize for Research in Pick’s, Alzheimer’s and Related Diseases. She has given many plenary and keynote talks at international conferences. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Oliver Stegle, Ph.D.

Oliver Stegle, Ph.D., is full professor at Heidelberg University and heads the Division Computational Genomics and Systems Genetics Division at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany. He is also a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and associate faculty at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. Oliver is a director of the health program of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and heads the Heidelberg ELLIS unit, which is dedicated to AI in the life sciences. He is coordinator and speaker of the German Human Genome-Phenome Archive (GHGA), a national research infrastructure dedicated to human omics data.

Dr. Stegle and his team use statistics and machine learning to decipher molecular variation across individuals, space and time. Single-cell multi-omics sequencing combined with population-scale genetic cohorts enable him to draw causal conclusions about the dependencies in cellular networks and their phenotypic consequences.

Roger Perlmutter, M.D., Ph.D., Independent Board Director

Roger Perlmutter, M.D., Ph.D., is President, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman of Eikon Therapeutics, Inc., a private biotechnology company that employs advanced imaging technologies to identify novel therapeutic candidates by virtue of their effects on protein dynamics in living cells. A highly accomplished industry as well as academic leader with over 35 years of experience, Dr. Perlmutter was previously Executive Vice President, Merck & Co., and President of Merck Research Laboratories where he supervised the discovery and development of numerous lifesaving medicines including KEYTRUDA™ , Merck’s foundational immuno-oncology therapeutic, which continues to transform cancer care throughout the world. Before this, Dr. Perlmutter spent 12 years as Executive Vice President and head of R&D at Amgen, Inc., where he is credited with having revolutionized the development of important biopharmaceuticals for the treatment of osteoporosis and cancer-related bone disease, and for the reduction of hypercholesterolemia-related cardiovascular risk.

Prior to assuming leadership roles in industry, Dr. Perlmutter was a professor in the Departments of Immunology, Biochemistry and Medicine at the University of Washington, Seattle, and also served as Chairman of its Department of Immunology, where he was at the same time an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research focused on understanding the signaling pathways that control lymphocyte activation. Prior to his role at the University of Washington, he was a lecturer in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

Dr. Perlmutter is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and both a Distinguished Fellow and past president of the American Association of Immunologists.

Scott L. Friedman, M.D.

Scott L. Friedman, M.D., is the Dean for Therapeutic Discovery and Chief of the Division of Liver Diseases, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He has performed pioneering research into the underlying causes of scarring, or fibrosis associated with chronic liver disease. Dr. Friedman was among the first to isolate and characterize the hepatic stellate cell, the key cell type responsible for scar production in the liver. His work has spawned an entire field that is now realizing its translational and therapeutic potential, with new anti-fibrotic therapies for liver disease reaching clinical trials.

A 1979 graduate of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, he was a Medical Resident at the Beth Israel Hospital, Harvard Medical School, followed by a Gastroenterology Fellowship at UCSF before assuming a faculty position there which he held for ten years. In 1995-1996 he was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.

Dr. Friedman has given invited honorary lectures throughout the world and has been a named lecturer or Visiting Professor at over 30 institutions worldwide. In 2003, Dr. Friedman was honored with the International Hans Popper Award by the Falk Foundation in Freiburg, Germany, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the understanding of liver disease and its treatment. He has mentored over 85 postdoctoral fellows and students, most of whom remain in academic training programs or faculty. In 2012 he was awarded the European Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (EASL) International Recognition Award in Barcelona, Spain, and in 2013 he was awarded the Shanghai Magnolia Gold Award by the Mayor of Shanghai and the China Friendship Award from the Premier of China in 2014 in recognition of his efforts to improve the health of the residents of Shanghai and China through his research achievements. In 2016 he was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Awards from both the AASLD and the American Liver Foundation. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Gastroenterological Association in 2008, the Am. College of Physicians in 2013, the AASLD in 2014 and the American Association for the Advancement for Science in 2015.

He is widely respected as a key opinion leader working closely with the biotech and pharmaceutical industry in developing new therapies for liver disease.

Sir John Bell GBE, FRS

Sir John Bell GBE, FRS, is Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University. He served as President of the Academy of Medical Sciences from 2006 to 2011 and chaired the Office for the Strategic Coordination of Health Research until 2017. As a Rhodes Scholar (1975-78), Sir John undertook his medical training in the UK and then went on to Stanford University, returning to the UK in 1987.

His research interests are in the area of autoimmune disease and immunology where he has contributed to the understanding of immune activation in a range of autoimmune diseases.

In 1993, he founded the Wellcome Trust Center for Human Genetics, one of the world’s leading centers for complex trait common disease genetics. In 2001, he was appointed non-executive director of Roche Holding AG and in 2008 he joined the Gates Foundation Global Health Advisory Board which he has chaired since 2012. He is Chair of the Rhodes Trust. In December 2011, Sir John was appointed one of two UK Life Sciences Champions by the Prime Minister. He sits on the board of Genomics England Limited and chairs its Science Advisory Committee. He was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) in the 2015 New Year Honors for services to medicine, medical research and the life science industry. In August 2017, the UK Life Sciences Industrial Strategy, written by Sir John, was published and he has co developed a similar follow up report in 2021 called the Life Sciences Vision. The reports, written in collaboration with industry, academia, charity, and research organizations, provide recommendations to HM Government on the long-term success of the life sciences sector. Out of these initiatives he has also taken responsibility for Our Future Health, the UK’s largest cohort initiative where he Chairs the Board. Sir John has held prominent roles during the Covid epidemic,enabling the development of the testing platforms for LFTs and helping to initiate the PCR program nationally as well as helping to manage the relationship with AstraZeneca that produced the Oxford AZ vaccine.

Tommi S. Jaakkola, Ph.D.

Tommi S. Jaakkola, Ph.D., is the Thomas Siebel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS), as well as an investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

He works on machine learning, statistical inference, and methods for designing principled, interpretable solutions to large scale estimation problems involving incomplete data sources. His applied research focuses on recommendation, retrieval, and inferential tasks, the design and optimization of molecules and reactions for drug development, and causal modeling in the context of strategic interactions.

He is a AAAI Fellow with many awards for his publications.