AI in Pharma Virtual Summit

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.

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).

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 Vice President, Data Sciences, Genomics, and Bioinformatics (DGB) at Alexion. In his role, Dr. Reynders leads 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.

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 senior director data sciences 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.

Dr. Yugal Sharma, currently the Senior Director for CAS Services, has over 15 years of experience in applying and managing data science approaches to solve complex problems in healthcare. Prior to joining CAS, he spent time at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), focusing on developing early disease detection algorithms. Yugal also helped found a technology startup and a business consulting startup. Most recently, he applied his background as a consultant focusing on analytics strategy for clients in the federal and commercial space. He has published several scientific articles, as well co-authoring a book chapter on the mining of Electronic Health Records to detect disease signals. Yugal received his PhD in Biophysics from University of Cincinnati, where he graduated with honors.

Dr. Abraham Heifets is CEO and Co-Founder of Atomwise, where he and Co-Founder Dr. Izhar Wallach invented the use of deep convolutional neural networks for drug discovery. Dr. Heifets was a Massey Fellow at the University of Toronto—a center for AI innovation—and a Fellow of the Ontario Brain Institute. His doctoral work applied machine learning and classical AI techniques to organic synthesis planning, a long-standing challenge in chemistry. His vision of AI bringing better, safer and more potent drugs to patients was recently featured in the July 2019 Moonshot issue of Newsweek. Dr. Heifets is a thought-leader on the use of AI for drug discovery and is an author on 24 papers, patents and patent applications. Dr. Heifets has presented his work to the U.S. GAO, the National Institutes of Health, the American Chemical Society, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.