Julie Bryant

Founder and CEO of Rancho BioSciences

Julie Bryant is the founder and CEO of Rancho BioSciences, a fee for service Life Science company that leverages open source platforms and public domain data with their customer’s proprietary information to develop knowledge and value in areas such as patient stratification and response markers. Rancho BioSciences works with Pharma, foundations and academics globally. One of our goals is to bring the life science community together to help build tools and data that will go in to the public domain and be industry standard.

Julie Bryant has over 20 years of experience in the life sciences business. Most recently she helped build GeneGo into a world class player in the systems biology field that was sold to Thomson Reuters in 2010. She was responsible for building the company revenues and had sales, marketing, business development, customer care, application scientists and IT reporting to her. At Thomson Reuters Julie was a VP of Business Development in the life science division and had an international sales team reporting to her. Previously she helped build OminiViz a text mining life science company and spun it out of Battelle. Bryant also worked at Genometrix, a high throughput gene expression and genotyping company out of Texas that also built a disease blood repository. At Biosym/Accelrys she built the Asian operations from scratch through a network of distributors and then came back to the headquarters to work in Southern California and helped with the Pharmacopeia integration.

Bryant also served on the Board at GeneGo and is a board member, shareholder and helped fund FreedomVoice, a telecommunications and VoIP company out of San Diego. Bryant also helps fund startups such aPriori Beauty Company, Simulscribe and Bimini Pet Health. Bryant earned her science degree in England, has edited a Pathway book and is listed on nutritional patents.

Jamie Heywood

Co-Founder and Chairman, PatientsLikeMe

Jamie Heywood is the co-founder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe. An MIT-trained mechanical engineer, Jamie entered the field of translational medicine when his 29-year-old brother Stephen was diagnosed with motor neuron disease (MND)/amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Today, Jamie is the chief scientist and architect for PatientsLikeMe, a patient network that helps improve lives and serves as a real-time research platform to advance medicine. Described by CNNMoney as one of the 15 companies that will change the world, Jamie co-founded PatientsLikeMe to ensure that patient outcomes become the primary driver of the medical care and discovery process.

Jamie is also the founder and past CEO of the ALS Therapy Development Institute (ALS TDI), the world’s first nonprofit biotechnology company. During his tenure at ALS TDI, Jamie helped pioneer an open research model and industrialized therapeutic validation process that made ALS TDI the world’s largest and most comprehensive ALS research program. Jamie and his brother were the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jonathan Weiner’s biography His Brother’s Keeper and the documentary So Much So Fast.

Marina Bessarabova

Director of Computational Biology, Thomson Reuters 

Marina Bessarabova is the Director of Computational Biology at Thomson Reuters (IP & Science), the leading provider of life science informatics and services. Thomson Reuters assembled the world’s most comprehensive curated resource of protein interactions, pathways, disease biomarkers, bioactive compounds and clinical information, structured in semantically rich and consistent databases. Marina’s research interests are focused on approaches for integrating the accumulated knowledge on pathways and interactions with OMICs data and clinical data in application to drug target discovery and patient stratification. Marina is also an expert in designing complex analytical systems and was a key figure in development of MetaCore, Thomson Reuter’ flagship systems biology platform.

Prior to her current role, Marina was a leading scientist at GeneGo, Inc., a systems biology & genomics specialist company acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2010. Marina holds Ph.D. in computational biology and genetics from Russian Academy of Sciences.

Lee Lancashire

Thomson Reuters

Lee Lancashire is a bioinformatician within the computational biology group at Thomson Reuters (IP & Science). His responsibilities are in the identification and development of strategies for the delivery of informative biomarker signatures from big ‘omics’ data through the use of sophisticated statistical algorithms in combination with Thomson Reuters’ knowledgebase of pathways and interaction networks. His work focuses on the discovery of discriminatory biomarker signatures that will facilitate the design of molecularly targeted clinical trials, and ultimately assist in the molecular profiling of disease for improved patient stratification. Lee has over ten years of experience in the application of statistical and machine learning approaches for analysis of complex biological datasets. Lee completed his post-doctoral research in biostatistics and bioinformatics at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research. He has also worked as a bioinformatics team leader in personalized medicine and diagnostics companies CompanDX and Almac Diagnostics. Lee holds a PhD in bioinformatics & machine learning and has published in over 25 key industry journals

Robert McBurney

CEO, Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis

Robert McBurney is CEO of the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis (ACP), a non-profit organization accelerating efforts to cure MS by catalyzing research. Prior to joining ACP, Robert co-founded Optimal Medicine Ltd., a UK company developing systems for optimizing the treatment of mental illness. His former positions include Executive VP of TheraGenetics Ltd.; CSO of BG Medicine, Inc.; CEO of Differential Proteomics, Inc.; and, CEO of Cambridge Neuroscience, Inc. Robert was formerly Assistant Director of the UK Medical Research Council Neuroendocrinology Unit and has held positions at the National Institutes of Health, Cambridge University and the University of New South Wales. He is a director of Optimal Medicine and a Trustee of the F. W. Olin College of Engineering. Robert received BSc and PhD degrees from the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Philip L. De Jager, MD, PhD

Director for Basic and Translational Research, Institute for the Neurosciences at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Philip L. De Jager is the Steven R. and Kathleen P. Haley Distinguished Chair for the Neurosciences at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is an associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. He is the director for basic and translational research at the Institute for the Neurosciences at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He continues to practice clinical neurology, seeing patients within the Partners Multiple Sclerosis Center that is affiliated with the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In 2008, Phil received the prestigious Harry Weaver Neuroscience Scholar Award from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. His work focuses on understanding the genomic, epigenomic, and neuroimmunologic architecture of neurodegenerative diseases such as MS, Alzheimer’s disease, and aging-related cognitive decline.

Phil received his BS (summa cum laude) in molecular biophysics, biochemistry and French literature from Yale University, his PhD in neurogenetics from The Rockefeller University, and his MD from Cornell University. He completed a MMSc program in clinical investigation at Harvard/MIT and received postdoctoral training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Iya Khalil

Executive Vice President and Co-Founder, GNS Healthcare

Iya Khalil is the executive vice president and co-founder of GNS Healthcare, a big data analytics company that has developed an industrialized analytics platform to extract cause-and-effect relationships directly, and at scale, from observational data. Her goal is to leverage these capabilities to transform medicine from an expert-driven field – with poor predictive power and large gaps in its fundamental understanding of human biology – into a data-driven predictive science with a more complete understanding of the mechanisms of disease and response to interventions. As the co-founder and co-inventor of the company’s proprietary computational platform, she has played a critical role in both technology development and the application of the technology to challenges in medicine, healthcare, and biomedical discovery.

Prior to GNS Healthcare, Iya worked at Cornell University, the University of Washington, and Abbott Labs. She holds a BS in physics from the University of Washington and a PhD in physics from Cornell University.

Dave King

Founder & CEO, Exaptive

Dave King, Founder and CEO of Exaptive, has over a decade of experience in all aspects of software development, from large-scale database design to user interfaces to the management of software development teams, and has been involved in high-tech entrepreneurialism since entering the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1993. While still an undergraduate, he worked on one of the first voice over IP consumer telephony products, years before Skype. After graduating MIT with a degree in electrical engineering, he joined Active Control Experts, a startup that embedded piezoelectric circuits in sports equipment, leading to the K2 Smart Ski, one of the bestselling skis in the United States. He then joined SynQor and over his 12 years there helped to grow the company from the small electronics startup it was in 1999 to a 200+ person international company with almost $100M in revenue by 2011. At SynQor, Mr. King specialized in extensible systems for ad hoc visualization and analysis of very large-scale manufacturing databases, and developed a manufacturing shop floor platform, which was the first completely paperless component-level tracking system of its kind, receiving numerous accolades from customers like Cisco Systems, Intel, EMC, and Compaq, and deemed best-in-class by Nortel Networks. After running the software development and information technology team at SynQor, Mr. King saw a need in the market for more generalizable and cross-disciplinary data application platforms and founded Exaptive in 2011.

Stephen Larson

Founder and CEO, MetaCell

Stephen Larson, Founder & CEO of MetaCell, is an expert on the intersection between computer technology and biological systems and is interested in how computer systems can help us to understand fundamental principles of life. He currently also serves as the Chief Information Officer of One Mind for Research, a non-profit dedicated to eradicating brain disease by transforming the healthcare research system through public-private partnerships. He has worked as a professional software engineer for a major New York City investment bank, co-developed a patent, presented at more than two dozen forums, published in academic journals such as Frontiers in Neuroscience and Nature, and has had his work featured in the New York Times, Wired, Discover, and MSNBC.com. His diverse educational background includes bachelor of science and master of engineering degrees from MIT in computer science as well as a PhD in neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego.

Hollie Schmidt

M.S., Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis

Hollie Schmidt is the Vice President of Scientific Operations at Accelerated Cure Project (ACP) for Multiple Sclerosis. Her role includes top-level direction of ACP’s Sample and Data Repository, which provides highly-characterized serum, plasma, DNA, RNA, and cells from people with demyelinating diseases and controls to scientists worldwide. She has guided the formation of the ACP Clinical Effectiveness Study Network (CESN) and is working with CESN investigators to design a study aimed at optimizing treatment response and understanding progression in MS. She also oversees the content and community-building elements of the Multiple Sclerosis Discovery Forum (msdiscoveryforum.org), an interactive community and comprehensive information resource for MS researchers. Before joining Accelerated Cure Project, Ms. Schmidt’s endeavors included co-founding the management consulting firm Lifting Mind as well as co-founding two software companies, Midnight Networks and NorthStar Internetworking.

Ms. Schmidt has an MS in management, as well as a BS and MS in Materials Science and Engineering, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Ms. Schmidt is active in MIT alumni efforts and has served as Chair of the Technology Day Committee, global board member of the MIT Enterprise Forum, and judge for the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. She also serves on the Institutional Review Board of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In 2005 she was selected as an honoree of the Mass High Tech “Women to Watch” awards.