AI in Pharma Virtual Summit

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.

José is Global Head of Computer Aided Drug Discovery (CADD), part of

Global Discovery Chemistry at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical

Research (NIBR).

José joined Novartis in 2010. Previously he had been with the Schering-

Plough Research Institute and Merck Research Laboratories in Kenilworth, NJ, USA for 10 years where he had increasing responsibilities in the CADD

group. His scientific fields of expertise within computational chemistry

comprise molecular thinking, novel mode of actions, modeling, ab

initio calculations, molecular recognition, QM-MM methods, solvation and structure-based drug design. José is passionate about drug discovery.

He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the National University of

Córdoba, Argentina. He joined Prof. Tony Hopfinger’s group in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a Postdoctoral

Fellow.

Dr. Partovi obtained his M.D. from McGill University, and completed neuroradiology training at Barrow Neurological Institute. After a decade of clinical practice, he transitioned to serve as Chief Digital Officer for Dignity Health. Dr. Partovi joined AWS in 2018 as the Worldwide Lead for Healthcare, Life Sciences and Genomics.

Brian joined AbbVie in October of 2018 as the head of the newly formed RAIDERS team within Research & Development’s Information Research division, focused on accelerating, scaling, and amplifying the work of AbbVie’s R&D community using AI technologies like machine learning, deep learning, and cognitive computing.  Brian came to AbbVie after spending five years in technology consulting across many industries, and over a decade of additional experience before that working in trading and financial markets technology.  While his primary focus is AI technologies, his interests are much broader, and he has presented at multiple conferences on topics including optical networking, quantum computing, blockchain, cognitive architecture, and other emerging technology concepts that are all part of digital transformation.

Brian holds a B.S. degree in Computer and Cognitive Science from Alma College and a M.S in Computer Science from the University of Chicago.

Ryan Copping, a data scientist, is the global head of real world data science analytics at Genentech, which is part of Hoffmann-La Roche.

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.

Leonardo Rodrigues, Ph.D., is the VP of AI & ML at BERG, where he leads the development of analytics platforms and the analysis of projects in drug development, biomarker discovery and Health IT. He is a regular speaker in Pharma Analytics meetings, conducted workshops on best practices in data analysis, and is a reference in applying Bayesian AI and Advanced Analytics in the analysis of RWD and molecular data.

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.

Melissa is Vice President, Chief Strategist at Cyclica, where she aligns the company’s brand, business model, and scientific innovation strategy. Previously Melissa held several key senior management positions and has assumed various roles spanning academia, pharma, and tech, including most recently as Director of Applications Science at Schrödinger. Melissa received her PhD in structural bioinformatics from Boston University. The recipient of an NIH Kirschstein fellowship, Melissa completed her post-doctoral training in X-ray crystallography and enzymology with Drs. Greg Petsko and Dagmar Ringe at Brandeis University. Over her career she has authored many publications in top-tier journals. Currently, Melissa also serves as the president of the Boston Area Group for Informatics and Modeling (BAGIM).

In his 10+ years of industry experience, Kausheek has held a variety of technical and management roles in consulting, telecom and pharma space. After completing his Bachelors in Electronics & Telecommunication Engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology- India, Kausheek was in various consulting roles with major global telecom companies for 5 years. Then he pursued MBA at Hult International Business School, Boston and joined Boehringer Ingelheim in 2012 where he has gained both depth and breadth of experience in pharma space.

Currently, Kausheek leads the Central Data Science, Americas team and RPA Community of Practice for Boehringer Ingelheim based in Ridgefield, CT, USA. His team focusses on data science use cases from all business areas in Human Pharma and Animal health. Prior to this role, he has led global projects in marketing and managed global Legal-IT team, improving company’s defensibility through robust workflows & smart technology adoption exploring AI Use Cases in Legal eDiscovery space.

Kausheek’s mantra is learn, unlearn and relearn with a passion for new and evolving technology, always looking to take smart risks.  He’s been a speaker in major Technology events, volunteered as Judge in Connecticut Invention Convention, promotes STEM education in schools and associated with youth mentorship programs.

Sebastien Lefebvre is the senior director of data sciences at Alexion. Over the last 2 years he focused on building data-sciences solutions spanning R&D, Commercial, Strategy, Business Development and Healthcare collaborations.  These solutions include 2 engines and a blueprint; the Alexion Insights engine with at its core the Rare Disease Master (RDM) an entire rare-disease landscape annotated with prevalence, severity, clinical trials, KOL, biomarkers, phenotypic and genetic signatures – the Gene-to-Treatment engine (GTRxTM) built around the RDM and enriched with additional curated clinical cases (intervention evidence) feeding into a medical review process for rare conditions with existing treatment options – thedata-driven diagnostic architecture blueprint facilitates diagnoses of pediatric patients with rare genetic disorders.

Todd Wills is a Managing Director in the CAS Services group. He is responsible for shaping the vision and setting the strategic direction for the Custom Services business. Prior to joining CAS, he worked at Emerson Electric where he served in a variety of corporate and operating roles, most recently running their global, data-driven battery monitoring and diagnostics business. Todd holds an MBA from The Ohio State University and a BSBA in Finance from John Carroll University.

Henry van den Bedem is a principal scientist at Atomwise, where he’s advancing methods to exploit the role of conformational dynamics in molecular recognition at scale. Henry concurrently is an associate adjunct professor of therapeutic sciences and bioengineering at the University of California at San Francisco, and a 2018-20 Mercator Fellow with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Before joining Atomwise, Henry led a research group in computational structural protein dynamics at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Energy. Henry holds a Ph.D. from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an M.S. from the Delft University of Technology, both in mathematics. He is the author of over 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications and numerous open source scientific software packages. Henry’s also a 2019 All-American athlete (triathlon), and an Ironman GOLD All World Athlete.

Kathy Gibson is the head of Innovation for the Pistoia Alliance where she is responsible for the organization’s Innovation Seed Fund and accelerator as well as building pre-competitive alliances across the healthcare continuum.  With more than 25 years of experience, including 5 years as CAS’s Chief Innovation Officer and 13 years in research leadership at Pfizer, Kathy has deep expertise in the pharmaceutical and digital information services industries. She is an active supporter and mentor for Women In STEM.

Pat Walters is the head of the Computation & Informatics group at Relay Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA. His group focuses on novel applications of computational methods that integrate computer simulations and experimental data to provide insights that drive drug discovery programs.  Pat is co-author of the book “Deep Learning for the Life Sciences”, published by O’Reilly and Associates.  He also blogs at http://practicalcheminformatics.blogspot.com.  His work in AI began with expert systems in the late 1980s, moved to machine learning in the 1990s, and has continued through 25 years in the pharmaceutical industry.  Prior to joining Relay, Pat spent more than 20 years at Vertex Pharmaceuticals where he was Global Head of Modeling & Informatics.   He is a member of the editorial advisory board for the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and has been a guest editor for multiple scientific journals.  Pat received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Arizona where he studied the application of artificial intelligence in conformational analysis. Prior to obtaining his Ph.D., he worked at Varian Instruments as both a chemist and a software developer. Pat received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Govinda Bhisetti, Ph.D. is a Principal Investigator and Head of Computational Chemistry at Biogen since 2014. Previously, he worked at Vertex Pharmaceuticals for 22+ years where he led drug design efforts on several drug discovery projects. His research at Vertex led to the discovery of three FDA approved drugs: Agenerase, Lexiva and Incivek. He is a co-inventor of these drugs and named inventor on 26 patents. He has also published 74 research papers including review articles and book chapters. His current activities include application of state of the art computational methods in the discovery of novel drugs for CNS diseases.

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.

Dr. Iya Khalil is a technology entrepreneur and physicist with a vision of transforming medicine into a discipline that is quantitative, predictive, and patient-centric via big data analytic approaches. She co-founded two big data companies, Via Science and GNS Healthcare, and is the co-inventor of the proprietary computational engine that underpins both entities.

Dr. Khalil’s expertise spans from applications in drug discovery to drug development to treatment algorithms that can be applied at the point of care. She is a frequent speaker at industry events and conferences and was recognized by President Obama at a White House dinner as a leading entrepreneur in genomic medicine. She was named to the PharmaVOICE 100 list of the most inspiring people in the life sciences industry and was recognized for her ability to build bridges across the life science and healthcare industries, bringing people together to harness the power of predictive modeling to change the lives of patients.

Dr. Khalil serves on the board of the Accelerated Cure Project and the Scientific Advisory Board of Biocentury Innovations. Recently, she was appointed to the Massachusetts Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA) Oversight Council by Governor Baker.

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.

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.

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.

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.