AI in Pharma Virtual Summit

Dr. Calum MacRae is a cardiologist, geneticist and developmental biologist who graduated from Edinburgh and London before coming to Boston in 1991. After postdoctoral fellowships in human genetics with Drs. Christine and Jon Seidman and developmental biology with Dr. Mark Fishman, as well as additional clinical training in internal medicine and cardiology, he joined the Division of Cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2001. His research is focused on understanding the genetic contribution to common cardiovascular disease using human studies and complementary high-throughput biology in the zebrafish.

Dr. MacRae is also theVice Chair for Scientific Innovation, Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His clinical interests include the management of inherited heart disease and cardiac involvement in systemic diseases.

In addition, Dr. MacRae is a leading investigator at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Genomics Center, a principal faculty member at the Cardiovascular Research Center and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and an associated member at the Broad Institute.

Reza is an experienced data scientist and systems and control theorist with over 25 years of experience working on machine learning and its applications in life sciences, technology, and finance. He specializes in deep learning, natural language process (NLP), and image processing with broad applications in drug design, discovery, and development.

Reza received his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT and conducted his postdoctoral research at Caltech under the supervision of Richard Murray. He had a successful academic career as a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College before transitioning into the industry to pursue his entrepreneurial passions. He joined AbbVie R&D in 2014 to initiate in silico design of therapeutic antibodies for Oncology and Immunology. This provided him with an invaluable opportunity to work with some of the world’s leading scientists in drug design, protein engineering, bioinformatics, chemistry, biochemistry, computational biology, oncology, and immunology. He also served as the managing director and Chief AI Scientist of EY-Advanced Technology Lab with offices in Cambridge, MA and London, UK managing all scientific aspects of AI solutions for the financial industry and partnership with academic institutions.

He is currently the global head of AI and Deep Analytics (AIDA) at Sanofi R&D. He manages a diverse team of data scientists with a strong core in life sciences industry in the US, France, Germany, and China (starting 2021). The key research areas in AIDA involve in silico drug design, multiomics and single-cell seq. analysis, precision medicine, digital pathology and bioimaging, and digital health in immuno-oncology immunology, and rare and blood disorders.

Reza is the recipient of the prestigious PECASE award from President Obama at the White House in 2010 for his pioneering contributions to distributed information fusion and collective behavior of networks of agents (hundreds to millions of interacting entities). Today, these inventions form the foundations of federated learning, privacy-preserving computing, and autonomous transportation. Reza has a life-time citation of over 35,000.

Lihua joined H3 in 2011 and serves as President and Chief Data Science Officer, leading H3’s data science-focused precision medicine efforts and the company’s overall strategic business direction. An accomplished leader in the biopharmaceutical industry, Lihua has spent more than 20 years in computational biology and bioinformatics and has deep experience in cancer genomics and predictive biomarkers. This expertise allows her to integrate the bioinformatics discipline into H3’s drug discovery and patient selection focused translational science platforms. Prior to H3, Lihua spent 12 years with AstraZeneca’s research and development unit, helping to build and deliver the multinational pharmaceutical company’s oncology bioinformatics capabilities.

Lihua earned a Ph.D. from Boston University and a M.E. from Tsinghua University in Beijing, both in biomedical engineering. She received her B.E. in biomedical engineering and automation from Tsinghua University.

Healthcare Data Expert, Public Speaker, Mentor, Author and Innovator with experience in both the research and business aspects of healthcare – from drug discovery to clinical development and new product and services commercialization. Entrepreneurial and passionate about finding solutions to improve healthcare for all stakeholders – patients, practitioners and industry.

Presently working on the leadership team of Novartis’ Data42 Program.

Formerly serving as the Founder and Managing Director of Oak Health Partners – a boutique healthcare technology consulting firm. Primary areas of engagement were on matters of commercial and product strategy for healthtech-oriented businesses including real world data, digital health and precision medicine.

Also recently served as Chair of the Data Workstream at Harvard Business School’s Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator. Developed and launched the Under the Datascope Podcast and developed numerous real world data & analytics landscapes.

Formerly, served as the VP of Product Strategy at GNS Healthcare and as the General Manager and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at PatientsLikeMe among other positions.

Ryan Copping, a data scientist, is the Global Head of Personalized Healthcare Analytics at Genentech, which is part of Hoffmann-La Roche.

Dr Williamson holds a DVM in animal dermatology and a PhD in human molecular and cellular dermato-pathology of autoimmune skin diseases from the University of Bern in Switzerland. She initiated her career at Novartis Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland where she had the opportunity to create and lead the Animal Dermatology Research group at Novartis Animal Health. Lina was later transferred to Boston in an international assignment to the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) as part of a cross-divisional business development team. She later joined NIBR’s Strategic Alliances team where she was responsible for leading the global outreach and scouting for innovation efforts from academic institutions, including academic incubators and startup companies. During that time, she developed interest on cutting edge technologies in the biomedical engineering field. That interest led her to join a startup company – Emulate Inc., derived from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, focused on the development of Organs-on-Chips – and be part of the initial company creation team. Dr. Williamson joined the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2015, initially supporting the Brigham Research Institute as Innovation Strategists. Her entrepreneurial and strategic thinking & execution style, combined with more than twelve years of experience in the Pharma/Biotech industry, led her to take the challenge of create and establish the BWH Translational Accelerator, an initiative to support and speed up the transition of BWH’s innovation with commercial potential from bench to bed. Dr. Williamson currently serves as Founder, President & Chief Innovation Officer of the Translational Medicine Accelerator (TMA), a private biomedical development company formed to accelerate medical innovation that serves patients with unmet needs. Lina is also part of the NIH National Networks of Mentors in Entrepreneurship, a mentor for the post-doc program at Boston Children’s Hospital and supports entrepreneurship education programs from the Harvard Catalyst (Harvard Medical School).

Puneet Batra is a machine learning scientist, software engineer, and physicist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Batra co-leads the Machine Learning For Health group at the Broad, which creates new machine learning tools to drive biological discovery and clinical impact.

After a successful academic career as a theoretical particle physicist, Batra decided to move to Silicon Valley to work on the emerging data problem of our time: how do we derive meaning from the vast amounts of data captured by the internet? Working across multiple domains, including healthcare and spatial analyses, Batra became a pioneering entrepreneur and data scientist known for building world-class teams and scalable data infrastructures. Batra joined the Broad in 2019 to tackle the next great data problem of our time: how do we apply machine learning on the vast rams of clinical and genomic data to drive breakthroughs in how we prevent, diagnose, and treat disease?

Batra completed his B.A. in physics at Harvard University and has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford University.

Christian Baber, is a chemist by training and holds undergraduate and PhD degrees in computational chemistry with a focus on AI techniques to assess the synthetic accessibility of de novo design compounds. 

Christian continued this work with a post-doctoral fellowship on the automated design of targeted combinatorial libraries at the Department of Knowledge Engineering, Osaka University, Japan before moving into industry initially as a computational chemist and cheminformatician. 

Christian has a wide breadth of experience across companies ranging from startups to large pharma and diverse therapeutic areas with a focus on informatics and predictive modeling but has also managed lab groups and automation teams including compound management and high-throughput purification. Prior to J&J, Christian was at Shire initially as Head of Scientific Computing & Informatics before moving on to lead R&D IT from 2017. Christian remained with Takeda following its acquisition of Shire in 2019 as Global Head of Scientific Informatics, managing technology and decision support across all of the scientific R&D functions from Research to Non-Clinical Development and Pharmaceutical Sciences. In addition, Christian sits on of the board of the Pharmaceutical R&D Information Systems Management Executive (PRISME) forum and the Scientific Advisory Board of New Equilibrium Biosciences.

John Reynders, Ph.D. MBA, is the former Vice President, Data Sciences, Genomics, and Bioinformatics (DGB) at Alexion. In his role, Dr. Reynders led the DGB organization in the design, building, and deployment of data-sciences solutions spanning R&D, Commercial, Strategy, and Business Development. These solutions include a graph-database of the entire rare-disease landscape annotated with prevalence, severity, clinical trial options, and genetic signature; a genomics-based rare-disease patient prevalence platform to inform licensing/acquisition opportunities; and AI-based phenotype- and genome-driven rare-disease diagnosis decision-support systems.

In parallel to his DGB responsibilities at Alexion, Dr. Reynders also led the R&D strategy, portfolio and project management department, leading efforts across R&D capability strategy, pipeline project management, portfolio optimization, governance, and R&D operating models. Prior to joining Alexion, Dr. Reynders served as CIO of Moderna Therapeutics, where he created a fully cloud-based biotech across all enterprise functions and developed informatics solutions to enable the design of messenger RNA therapeutics. Previously, John served as Vice President of R&D Information at AstraZeneca R&D leading teams in the US, UK, Sweden, Russia, Japan, and China to enable informatics and technology solutions across discovery, translational, clinical, pharmaceutical development, and regulatory functions. Before this, John served in leadership roles at Johnson & Johnson including VP Integrative Neuroscience and Biomarkers, Head of Informatics, and VP R&D Information Technology. Previously, John served as Information Officer with Lilly Research Laboratories, VP of Informatics at Celera Genomics, and held roles as Director and Program Manager at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Dr. Reynders received a Bachelors, Summa Cum Laude, in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a PhD in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Princeton University, and a Masters of Business Administration from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management.

Gayle M. Wittenberg, Ph.D. is Director of Integrated Solutions and Informatics, Janssen Neuroscience and Head of Translational Research & Precision Medicine, Research IT. She has lead Janssen’s mood informatics initiatives, bringing together the best available datasets with state of the art analytics to identify and profile different biological and phenotypic subtypes of Major Depression as candidates for targeted therapies. Her work analyzing immunology and oncology trials for improvements in depressive symptoms led in part to running a proof of concept study of an immunology compound in depressed patients. In her Research IT role, she is working to bring about a new era of analytics that is more inclusive of data and less siloed to drive us to answer our most important questions using ‘all the data in the world’.

Dr. Wittenberg graduated summa cum laude with degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering Physics at Oregon State University, and received her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Neuroscience at Princeton University where she studied computational neuroscience and learning in complex networks. She was a Princeton Council on Science and Technology Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow where she designed a new introductory biology course for physics and engineering students. She came to Janssen from Siemens Corporate Research where she headed the Personalized Healthcare group. While there, through mining genetic databases, she and her team designed PCR primers for the H1N1 flu within 3 days of the US outbreak, which outperformed those in use at the time. Previously she has worked at Trojan Nuclear Plant, installed the first computers used for electronic trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange working with Renaissance Technologies, spent a summer at Bell Labs recording birds singing in helium, and worked the salmon run in Naknek, Alaska.

Dr. Lili Peng is currently the Associate Director, Data Sciences in Biogen’s R&D External Innovation Unit, where she is applying analytics and AI/ML towards expanding Biogen’s neuroscience pipeline. Formerly a technology consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, she worked on data management and software implementation on clinical trials at the U. S. Food and Drug Administration.  Prior to that, she was a data scientist at AstraZeneca’s research and development, medical affairs, and medical evidence and observational research.

Dr. Peng completed her postdoctoral training in computational chemistry and machine learning for drug discovery, at the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University. For her Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, where she established and managed an academia-industry collaboration of 35 people for five years resulting in high-impact publications on computational polymer modeling.  She holds a B.S. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was the Vice President of the Biomedical Engineering Society and Vice President of Society of Women Engineers.

Shemra Rizzo is a senior data scientist in Genentech’s Personalized Healthcare group. Shemra’s role includes leading research on COVID-19 using electronic health records, and the development of data-driven approaches to evaluate clinical trial eligibility criteria. Shemra obtained her PhD in Biostatistics from UCLA. Before joining Genentech, Shemra was an assistant professor of statistics at UC Riverside, where her research covered topics in mental health, health disparities, and nutrition. In her free time, Shemra enjoys spending time with her family and running.

Martin-Immanuel Bittner MD DPhil FRSA is the Chief Executive Officer of Arctoris, a platform company that he co-founded in 2016. He graduated as a medical doctor from the University of Freiburg in Germany, followed by his DPhil in Oncology as a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford. Martin has extensive research experience covering both clinical trials and preclinical drug discovery and is an active member of several leading cancer research organisations, including EACR, AACR, and ESTRO. In recognition of his research achievements, he was elected a member of the Young Academy of the German National Academy of Sciences in 2018.

PhD in Biophysics from the University of Cincinnati and over 15-years’ experience applying data science and machine learning approaches in healthcare from the NIH, to start-ups, and consulting firms. Today, he is the Sr. Director for CAS Custom Solutions creating tailored approaches for your unique scientific information challenges.

Dr. Mohak Shah is a technology executive with an established history of leading high-impact initiatives in AI, IoT, digital transformation, & building data-driven businesses & strategies. Before joining H1, he was the Vice President of AI & ML at LG Electronics, & prior to that was the Head of Data Science at Bosch. He is deeply passionate about responsible development, introduction, adoption, & integration of AI capabilities in industry & society at large. Dr. Shah’s experience in leading technology initiatives spans a broad range of verticals, leading diverse teams from research, software, & businesses.