S. Roopom Banerjee
Mr. Banerjee is President and CEO of RainDance Technologies, a provider of innovative microdroplet-based solutions for life science research. He joined RainDance from Leerink Swann where he was a Director of Healthcare Investment Banking and led the Life Science Tools and Diagnostics sector. In this role he completed more than 50 transactions for life sciences companies, including private placements, IPOs, follow-on financings, PIPEs and fixed income transactions, as well as mergers and acquisitions. Previously, Mr. Banerjee held positions at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs advising Fortune 500 healthcare companies globally on corporate and growth strategy, product development and launch strategy, international expansion, and mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Banerjee also worked at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the Whitehead Institute/M.I.T. Human Genome Project, and at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. He holds an M.P.P. from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and B.S. degrees in Biology and Economics from M.I.T., where he was elected a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scholar.
David Botstein, Ph.D.
Dr. Botstein is Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University and Director of the Integrated Science Program at Princeton University. He has made fundamental contributions to modern genetics, including the discovery of many yeast and bacterial genes and the establishment of key techniques that are commonly used today. Botstein and colleagues proposed a method for mapping genes that was used in subsequent years to identify several human disease genes including Huntington's and BRCA1. Variations of this method were used in the mapping efforts that predated and enabled the sequencing phase of the Human Genome Project. Dr. Botstein has been Vice President of Science at Genentech, Professor of Genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Chairman of the Department of Genetics at Stanford University. He holds an A.B. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Dr. Botstein has won the Eli Lilly and Company Award in Microbiology (1978), the Genetics Society of America Medal (1988), the Allen Award of the American Society of Human Genetics (1989) and the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2003) and the Albany Medical Center Prize (2010). He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.
George Church, Ph.D.
Dr. Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT. He is a member of the board of directors at Sigma-Aldrich Corporation and has been a founder or advisor of more than 20 life sciences companies. In 1984, Dr. Church, along with Walter Gilbert, developed the first direct genomic sequencing method and helped initiate the Human Genome Project. He invented molecular multiplexing and tags, and key aspects of homologous recombination methods, next generation sequencing, DNA array synthesizers and multiplex automated genome engineering (MAGE). Dr. Church initiated the Personal Genome Project in 2005. He holds a B.A. from Duke University in zoology and chemistry and a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University. Dr. Church is Director of the U.S. Department of Energy Center on Bioenergy at Harvard and MIT, Director of the National Institutes of Health Center of Excellence in Genomic Science at Harvard, MIT and Washington University and Director of the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He is a senior editor for Nature EMBO Molecular Systems Biology.
Frederick Frank
Mr. Frank is Vice Chairman of Peter J. Solomon Company and co-heads the firm’s global pharmaceutical and life sciences practice. Mr. Frank joined the firm from Barclays Capital where he was Vice Chairman. He began his investment banking career at Smith, Barney & Co., where he became Co-Head of Research, Vice President and Director and built the first dedicated global healthcare investment banking franchise. Subsequently he joined Lehman Brothers as a Partner. At Lehman, Mr. Frank provided investment banking services to an extensive number of companies in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, healthcare services, medical device and nutraceutical industries, and was involved in hundreds of financings, strategic alliances and merger and acquisition transactions in the global healthcare industry. Mr. Frank received an M.B.A. from Stanford University and a B.A. from Yale University. He is also a Chartered Financial Analyst. Mr. Frank is Chairman of the Board of Epix Pharmaceuticals and a Director of Landec Corporation and PDL Biosciences. In addition, he is Chairman of the National Genetics Foundation and a member of the advisory boards of the Yale School of Organization and Management, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Biomedical Innovation.
Leroy Hood, Ph.D.
Dr. Hood is President of the Institute for Systems Biology. His research has focused on the study of molecular immunology, biotechnology, and genomics. His professional career began at Caltech where he and his colleagues pioneered four instruments—the DNA gene sequencer and synthesizer, and the protein synthesizer and sequencer—which comprise the technological foundation for contemporary molecular biology. Dr. Hood has published more than 600 peer-reviewed papers, received 14 patents, and co-authored textbooks in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology, and genetics, and is just finishing a text book on systems biology. He played a role in founding more than 14 life sciences companies, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Systemix, Darwin and Rosetta, and has been an advisor to many other life sciences companies. Dr. Hood was founder and Chairman of the cross-disciplinary Department of Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington. He holds an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Hood has received the 2004 Biotechnology Heritage Award, the 2003 Association for Molecular Pathology Award for Excellence in Molecular Diagnostics, and the Heinz Award in Technology, the Economy and Employment. Dr. Hood has been elected to the Inventors Hall of Fame (for the automated DNA sequencer). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering.
James Hudson, Jr.
Mr. Hudson is Co-Chairman of the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. Mr. Hudson was the President of Research Genetics. He founded Research Genetics in 1987 and developed it into one of the premier genomic research reagent companies in the world with more than $25 million in sales before selling the company to Invitrogen in February 2000 for $138 million. Mr. Hudson has served as a founding board member for numerous life sciences companies including Shearwater Polymers (now NekTar) and New Century Pharmaceuticals. He holds an M.S. in Biology from University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Leonid Kruglyak, Ph.D.
Dr. Kruglyak is Professor of Integrative Genomics and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He was formerly Associate Member of the Human Biology Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Associate Professor of Genetics and Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington. After postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at Oxford University, he joined the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research as a research scientist. Dr. Kruglyak holds an A.B. in physics from Princeton University and an MS and PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. He has received a James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in Human Genetics, a MERIT Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Innovation Award in Functional Genomics. Dr. Kruglyak was recently recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher in molecular biology and genetics by ISI Thompson Scientific and was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
John Quackenbush, Ph.D.
Dr. Quackenbush is Professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Professor of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health and Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Harvard University. In 2009, Dr. Quackenbush launched the Center for Cancer Computational Biology, a Dana-Farber Strategic Plan Center focused on providing computational support more broadly to the Dana-Farber research community. He is a former faculty member and Investigator in Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) where his work focused on the use of genomic and computational methods for the study of human disease. Dr. Quackenbush holds a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from UCLA and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in experimental high energy physics. He also holds a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology.