Meet the team
We are scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs building foundation models for biology. Our expertise spans AI, biology, and medicine.
Team
Bioptimus Team
Alexander co-led Laplace Redux, a NeurIPS paper that introduced Laplace, an open-source PyTorch library that makes uncertainty estimation in deep learning practical. He earned his PhD at ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems as a fellow of their joint Center for Learning Systems, after graduating second in computer science at EPFL, and spent a year at Google Research. He also won HackZurich, Europe’s largest hackathon.
Anna co-led Nicheformer, a foundation model published in Nature Methods that was trained on more than 110 million cells and brings tissue-level spatial context to standard single-cell data. At Helmholtz Munich and TUM, she also contributed to squidpy and the open-source scverse ecosystem, built graph neural networks that model how cells communicate, and co-authored widely used best-practice guidance for single-cell analysis across modalities. She holds BSc and MSc degrees in mathematics from TUM and began her career in finance, audit and risk at Allianz and KPMG.
Anna began her career at Google DeepMind in 2013, working across Operations with a focus on People & Culture. She went on to lead People & Culture for the R&D team at Synthesia and now brings that experience to Bioptimus, where she leads People Operations.
An built Practice Works solo, an AI-native company that runs on one founder and a fleet of AI agents and serves more than 2,000 weekly active users preparing for legal and finance qualifications in the UK and US. Earlier roles include COO of Koru Kids, which runs the UK's largest managed childcare network, interim CTO at BIMA and consultant at Boston Consulting Group.
Charlie Saillard is a Principal Research Scientist and Co-Founder at Bioptimus. He brings expertise in machine learning and the development of machine learning models for pathology. Before co-founding Bioptimus, Charlie spent six years at Owkin, where he applied machine learning to computational pathology across various projects, including applied research, diagnostics, and the development of foundation models for pathology.
Charlie earned his Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics from Université Paris Dauphine and a Master’s degree in Machine Learning from Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay.
Christian spent four years at PathAI building computer vision models for cancer pathology and is a co-inventor on a patent for AI that identifies and quantifies tertiary lymphoid structures in tumors. His work has been presented at ASCO, ESMO and SABCS and published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Previously a Senior ML Engineer at BenchSci, he holds a PhD in bioengineering from Northeastern.
Dasha co-authored Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models, the paper that introduced Google's Gemini models. At Google DeepMind, she worked on frontier models and AI safety, after earlier roles at Google on Knowledge Graph and NLP research and at YouTube on content moderation and ML fairness. She studied computer science and machine learning at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
David Cahané is the Cofounder and General Manager at Bioptimus. For over a decade, David has been launching and scaling deep-tech ventures, translating cutting-edge machine learning into real-world impact. David spent over six years at Owkin, as Chief Solutions Officer, where he focused on developing AI engines for biological research to drive discoveries in biomarkers, targets, and optimized trials.
Prior to Owkin, David was instrumental in building the Data Science/Machine Learning teams at Wavestone, a global consultancy firm. David earned his Engineer degree in Computer Science, Statistics, and Mathematics at Institut Polytechnique Paris and studied Machine Learning at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Ediem's research has moved from the 3D structure of the genome to the images of cells. A PhD at Imperial College London, based jointly in the Department of Computing and the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences, developed computational approaches to 3D genome data and other sequencing modalities. A postdoc at MSD followed, working on Cell Painting and image-based profiling. Ediem studied mathematics and systems biology at the University of Cambridge.
Felipe Llinares-López is co-founder and VP of AI at Bioptimus. Felipe’s expertise lies at the core of Bioptimus’ mission, as he has focused on developing novel machine learning methodology and applying it to solve problems in computational biology throughout his career. Before co-founding Bioptimus, Felipe worked in Google DeepMind, where his research revolved around protein and DNA language models for function prediction and sequence alignment.
Prior to that, Felipe got his PhD and held a postdoctoral position in ETH Zürich, where he worked on machine learning for genomics and graph-structured data. His doctoral work earned him the ETH Silver Medal, awarded for outstanding theses.
Hector defined the AI strategy for Bayer's global commercial operations while at Boston Consulting Group. Before that, he designed and delivered machine learning solutions for large technology and health enterprises at Deloitte and Accenture. He joined Bioptimus as an early employee after 10 years working at the intersection of AI and business strategy, and holds an MSc from EPFL and an MBA from INSEAD.
Jakob has won four open competitions in AI and science, including first place in the Biomarkers of Aging Challenge, where his team's model beat state-of-the-art methods at predicting mortality from proteomic and epigenetic data. He also won the Owkin and Servier glioblastoma hackathon and the Merck Innovation Cup. A Gates Cambridge Scholar, he holds a PhD in biotechnology from Cambridge.
Jeanne co-authored a Science study showing that platelets absorb DNA shed by tumors, opening new avenues for liquid biopsy and cancer diagnostics. Her Oxford PhD applied transformer models to the epigenetic landscape of cancer, and her earlier neuroscience research on memory and attention was published in Nature Neuroscience. She has worked on drug and target discovery at Cyclica, now part of Recursion, and PrecisionLife, and once studied memory in howler monkeys in the Mexican jungle.
Jean-Philippe Vert is co-founder and CEO of Bioptimus, a pioneering AI-first biotech company building foundation models to transform our understanding of biology and accelerate biomedical innovation, and professor (on leave) at PSL University.
A leading figure in AI for biology, Jean-Philippe has over 25 years of experience at the frontier of machine learning and life sciences. Prior to his current roles, he was the Chief R&D Officer at Owkin and a Research Lead at Google Brain. Prior to moving to the industry he has held professorships at ENS Paris, the Curie Institute and Mines ParisTech, was a visiting Miller professor at UC Berkeley, and began his research career at Kyoto University.
He holds degrees from École Polytechnique and a PhD in mathematics from Paris University, and is a member of the National Academy of Technologies of France. He has authored over 190 publications and is recognized globally for his contributions to AI, biomedical data modeling, and translational research.
Jordan is the Marketing Director at Bioptimus, with a decade of experience across brand, commerce and video. At TikTok, she helped launch TikTok Shop in the US and led seller marketing, launched TikTok Insights, a global insights tool for marketers, and helped run large-scale industry events including Shoptalk. She also served as Head of Video Strategy at StoryMe, a European scale-up, and trained as a journalist at the University of Missouri, home of the world's first journalism school.
Julia built Provepharm's legal department from scratch across four countries, digitizing more than 2,000 contracts into an AI-powered system along the way. Before that, she spent six years at Innate Pharma, where she was part of the team behind its 2019 Nasdaq IPO, and began her career in M&A at CGR Legal. She is a member of the Paris Bar.
Julien studied applied mathematics at Yale University before earning the joint MSc in data science from École Polytechnique and HEC Paris. He then spent three years as a data scientist at Artefact, the data and AI consultancy, before joining Bioptimus.
Kai contributed extensively to widely used open-source projects at Meta, including PyTorch, AITemplate and FlashAttention-3, after six years in an AI-focused R&D lab at Volkswagen. Over 25 years as a software engineer, 14 of them in AI, he has worked across computer vision, robotics, cybersecurity, NLP, autonomous driving, and team leadership. At Bioptimus, he focuses on hands-on applied AI, from modeling and scaling to GPU kernels and LLMs, and takes on hard software problems wherever they appear.
Ketan brings over two decades of experience driving innovation at the intersection of data, AI, and life sciences. Most recently, Ketan served as VP of Product Strategy at Clarivate, where he shaped solutions for pharmaceutical R&D and evidence-based decision-making. Prior to Clarivate, he held senior product leadership roles at AstraZeneca, Oracle, Pfizer, and Eli Lilly, where he led the development of digital tools and platforms to accelerate drug discovery and development.
Laura is a physicist turned computational biologist. She was a visiting researcher in Jason Buenrostro's lab at Harvard and the Broad Institute, a leading single-cell genomics group, and earned her PhD at the Technical University of Munich and Helmholtz Munich after an MPhil at Cambridge.
Lisa was first author of the integrated Human Lung Cell Atlas, published in Nature Medicine, which brought dozens of single-cell datasets together into one reference for the lung in health and disease. She did her PhD in machine learning for single-cell genomics in Fabian Theis's lab at Helmholtz Munich, after working in Dana Pe'er's lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Lukas was a Senior AI Researcher at Aleph Alpha, the German foundation model company, and before that an Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services. He earned his PhD in machine learning at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of Tübingen, after studying mathematics and scientific computing at Heidelberg University.
Mara has spent more than 15 years in cancer drug discovery, across skin, breast and pancreatic cancers. As a technical lead at BenevolentAI, she built the models, apps and algorithms behind patient selection, assay selection and target prioritization for programs in long COVID, muscular dystrophy and osteoarthritis. She earned her second master's in the evenings while working full time, and speaks five languages.
Marin works on a central problem in medical AI: making deep learning models hold up on images unlike the ones they were trained on. It was the focus of his PhD in applied mathematics and AI at CentraleSupélec, carried out with VitaDX, where he also worked as a computer vision research engineer. He holds the MVA master's in mathematics, vision and learning from ENS Paris-Saclay and an engineering degree from CentraleSupélec.
Mathilda Ström is the Founding Chief Operating Officer at Bioptimus. A serial entrepreneur, Mathilda has a track record in scaling purpose-driven ventures at the intersection of technology and global health. Prior to Bioptimus, she served as Chief Commercial Officer at CarbonPool, the world's first insurance company to settle claims in carbon credits. Before then, she co-founded and was deputy CEO of BIMA, a microinsurance and frontline digital health provider that expanded to 17 countries, delivering healthcare and financial services to over 6 million low- and middle-income individuals across Africa and Asia.
Mathilda has held board positions with organizations such as the Microinsurance Network, Tangelo (a fintech company in Latin America) and Azuri Technologies (a renewable energy firm bringing solar solutions to Africa). Recognized among Sweden's top 10 future women leaders and one of the top 50 female entrepreneurs to watch, she brings a unique blend of operational expertise and visionary leadership to the forefront of AI-driven biomedical innovation.
Philip Conti-Permanne is the Director of Data Acquisition at Bioptimus. With a blend of scientific training and strategic business experience, Philip specializes in bridging the gap between cutting-edge science and commercial execution. Philip spent over three years at Owkin, as Director Corporate Development, where he focused on building strategic partnerships to access new capabilities and data. Prior to Owkin, Philip worked in corporate development at Esco Lifesciences Group where he led two strategic investments and acquisitions.
Philip earned his Masters in Chemistry at the University of Bristol with first class honours focusing on synthetic organic chemistry applied to drug discovery and studied bioprocess engineering at UCL.
Rachel's research on how lung cancers evade the immune system has been published in Science, Cell and Nature. At UCL and the Francis Crick Institute, she developed a computational tool that detects loss of HLA alleles in tumors, an immune escape mechanism found in 40% of non-small-cell lung cancers. She is a co-inventor on two patents and was previously a Principal Scientist at Achilles Therapeutics.
Rami graduated as valedictorian of his machine learning master's at Université Paris Cité. He co-authored research on building quality control into digital pathology workflows, presented at the 2024 European Congress of Pathology, and has worked in machine learning roles at Tribun Health and Diffusely.
Ricardo ran business operations at Block Green, a fintech that was later acquired, after strategy work at Mastercard and product roles at Caixa Geral de Depósitos. He has advised EU health projects on real-world evidence and early-stage diabetes screening and served as European Youth Representative to the International Diabetes Federation.
Rodolphe Jenatton is the Co-founder and CTO at Bioptimus. Rodolphe is a key figure in the development of Bioptimus's technological vision and implementation. Prior to co-founding Bioptimus, Rodolphe was a Senior Research Scientist at Google Brain. Before his time at Google, he spent five years at Amazon working in Machine Learning. He has also held positions with Criteo.
Rodolphe's academic work includes a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Ecole Polytechnique, where he worked on machine learning and convex optimization. He earned his Engineer degree in Computer Science, Statistics, and Mathematics from Télécom Paris, a Master's degree in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Decision Theory from Pierre and Marie Curie University.
Saad builds AI that makes it from research into the clinic. At Ground Truth Labs, he developed deep learning systems for biomarker discovery, quality control and outcome prediction from pathology slides, and led their clinical validation with domain experts. He has published computational pathology research in peer-reviewed medical journals and holds a PhD in computer science from Warwick.
Stefan contributed analysis to landmark cancer genomics consortia, including The Cancer Genome Atlas, during two years at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His work was recognized among the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics' Remarkable Outputs of 2023. He holds a PhD and an MSc in computer science from ETH Zurich and a bachelor's in mathematics from NYU.
Suraj co-founded Attify, an IoT security advisory firm, and served as CTO of an Antler-backed startup. Over 16 years, he has scaled infrastructure, AI platforms and security programs at companies including ING, KPN, Swiss Re's iptiQ, Kaiko.ai and Cloud9 IDE, which was acquired by Amazon.
Thomas developed deep learning models for computational pathology in the Mahmood Lab at Harvard Medical School, one of the field's leading groups, with applications in toxicology and drug safety. He continued that work at EPFL's Signal Processing Laboratory and has built EEG-based models at Logitech. He holds an MSc in robotics from EPFL.
During his PhD at Heidelberg University, the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and EMBL, Tobias built new statistical frameworks for measuring how DNA mutations change gene expression and other molecular traits in individual cells. His research has centered on principled statistical and machine learning methods for genetics and genomics. He holds an MSc in computer science from Saarland University, where he was a fellow of the International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science.
Tokuwa Kanno is the Head of Computational Biology at Bioptimus. Tokuwa is an established leader in the field and has extensive experience in preclinical, translational and clinical research. His work has contributed to multiple IND filings, First-in-Human studies, and drug approvals. Prior to joining Bioptimus, Tokuwa worked in roles of increasing seniority at JnJ, Sanofi and GSK. Most recently he served as the head of Oncology Genomics at GSK, where he led a team overseeing end-to-end genetics and genomics support for the company's oncology preclinical pipeline.
Tokuwa obtained his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from King’s College London.
Zelda is the VP of Research at Bioptimus, as well as a co-founder. She brings a combination of deep theoretical expertise and real-world impact to the company's mission of transforming biomedical research through AI. Her research focuses on applying principled mathematical approaches to unlock insight from noisy, high-dimensional data.
Before co-founding Bioptimus, Zelda earned her PhD in Computer Science at MIT, then worked for several years at Google DeepMind. Her prior research includes theoretical investigations into ensembles of AI models, understanding sources of uncertainty in model predictions, and AI applied to drug discovery.
Scientific Advisory Board
Sarah did her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK and was a Beit Memorial Fellow at University College London. She started her group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2001, where they described conserved pathways of protein complex assembly, and a “periodic table of protein complexes”, using biophysics and data science. After starting work on single cell genomics of T cells, in 2013, she moved to the Wellcome Genome Campus where she was the first and to date only faculty member appointed across both the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute. There, she was a founding member of the Sanger-EBI Single Cell Genomics Centre. In 2016, Sarah was appointed as Head of the Cellular Genetics programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and co-founded the international Human Cell Atlas consortium. This initiative creates reference maps for cells across all human tissues, and has grown to include over three thousand members across the world. She also co-directs the CIFAR MacMillan Multiscale Human research programme.
From April 2024, Sarah has taken up the chair in Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge, Department of Medicine/Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. She now also spends part of her time at GlaxoSmithKline, and the startup company she co-founded, EnsoCell Therapeutics.
While maintaining a molecular and biophysics perspective, Sarah’s laboratory has developed and applied experimental and computational approaches for cell atlas technologies to decipher human cells, tissues and organs. A particular focus of hers is how cellular diversity is generated in the immune system and through development. Notable achievements include the first comprehensive reconstruction of the cell interactions in the human placenta in early pregnancy, and the first 3D map of the developing and mature thymus at cellular resolution and full molecular depth. Her work has been recognised by numerous awards, including the EMBO Gold Medal, Genetics Society Mary Lyons Award, Biochemical Society GlaxoSmithKline Award, the FEBS|EMBO Women in Science Award, Raman Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences among others. She is an EMBO Member, ISCB Fellow, International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and Royal Society.
Andrea Califano is the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and also holds appointments in the Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, Biomedical Informatics, and Medicine. He just stepped down from his positions as Founding Chair of the Department of Systems Biology and Director of the Columbia Genome Center, to take a new role as the President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York.
In 1986, after completing a doctoral thesis in physics at the University of Florence, Italy, Dr. Califano joined the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where, in 1997, he became program director of the IBM Computational Biology Center. In 2000, he co-founded First Genetic Trust Inc. to pursue translational genomics research. Finally, he joined Columbia in 2003.
Dr. Califano is an internationally recognized pioneer in the reverse engineering of gene regulatory networks and in their analysis to systematically and efficiently identify key tumor checkpoint modules, whose aberrant activity is necessary for tumor viability. This has resulted in several clinical trials, including a very innovative N-of-1 study where patients affected by 14 untreatable, lethal cancers are analyzed on an individual basis to prioritize optimal therapeutic strategies, including both single drugs and drug combinations.
Dr. Califano is very active nationally, serving on numerous editorial and scientific advisory boards, including the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute, St. Jude Children’s Hospital, The MIT Koch Cancer Center, Cancer Genetics Inc., and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., among others. He has served as Chair or Co-chair of many international conferences and meetings, including the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR); the RECOMB-ISCB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges; Keystone Conferences; as well as several special conferences of the AACR on genomics and cancer systems biology.
He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a fellow of the AACR, ISCB, AAAS, and IEEE, recipient of the 2015 and 2022 NCI Outstanding Investigator Award (R35), the 2019 Ruth Leff prize in pancreatic cancer research, and the 2023 Alfred G. Knudson prize in Cancer Genetics.
He is also the Co-founder and Chief Scientific Advisor of DarwinHealth Inc.
Caroline Uhler is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directs the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center and is a member of the Scientific Leadership Team. She is also the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT.
Caroline’s research lies at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and genomics, with a particular focus on causal inference, representation learning, and gene regulation. Caroline is recognized as a creative and innovative researcher and teacher at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and biology. She is a SIAM Fellow, a Fellow of the IMS, a Sloan Research Fellow, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. In addition, she has received multiple awards including an NIH New Innovator Award, a Simons Investigator Award, and an NSF Career Award. Caroline holds an M.Sc. in mathematics, a B.Sc. in biology, and an M.Ed., all from the University of Zurich. She obtained her Ph.D. in statistics from UC Berkeley and then spent three years as an assistant professor at IST Austria before joining the faculty at MIT in 2015.
Fabrice André, MD, PhD, received his MD in Paris in 2002, and a PhD in Biotechnology from Paris University in 2005. He is a medical oncologist working at Gustave Roussy and taking care of patients presenting a breast cancer.
He is a past recipient of Career Development Awards from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and Outstanding Investigator in Breast Cancer Award from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). He is currently Head of Research Division, and Professor in the Department of Medical Oncology.
His research work in the field of biomarkers and personalised therapies focuses on biomarker discovery, development of targeted agents and implementation of personalised medicine. His team includes 80 people working on basic sciences, bioinformatics, biotechnologies and clinical research. He is also leading phase I-III trials testing targeted agents in the field of breast cancer and large national trials testing implementation of high throughput technologies in the health care system.
Professor André has published more than 300 peer reviewed papers, including papers in Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Nature Medicine, as main author.
Professor André is the Chair of the National Cancer Precision Medicine Center PRISM and was a member of several scientific committees for international meetings, including SABCS, AACR, ECCO, ESMO, and IMPAKT.
Professor André is currently President of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO). He has been a member of the Annals of Oncology Editorial Board (2010-2013), Associate Editor since 2014 and Editor-in-Chief 2017-2023.
He was the first Chair of the ESMO Young Oncologist Committee, served as Coordinator (2012-2014) and member (since 2015) of the ESMO Breast Cancer Faculty. Professor André was also a member of the ESMO Cancer Research Faculty, 2012- 2014; Chair of the ESMO Translational Research and Precision Medicine Working Group (end 2019), and member since 2020. He is also a member of the ESMO Council. He was the Scientific Co-Chair of the ESMO 2022 Congress and the MAP Congress.
Professor Jakob Kather holds dual appointments in medicine and computer science at the Technical University (TU) Dresden, Germany, serves as a senior physician in medical oncology at the University Hospital Dresden and holds an additional affiliation with the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) in Heidelberg. His research is focused on applying artificial intelligence in precision oncology. Prof. Kather’s research team at TU Dresden is using deep learning techniques to analyze a spectrum of clinical data, including histopathology, radiology images, textual records, and multimodal datasets. Guided by the belief that medical and tech expertise needs to be combined, medical researchers in his team learn computer programming and data analysis, while computer scientists are immersed in cancer biology and oncology. Prof. Kather chairs the “Working group on Artificial Intelligence” at the German Society of Hematology and Oncology (DGHO) and is a member of the pathology task force of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). His work is supported by numerous European and national grants, which enable the team to develop new deep learning methods for medical data analysis techniques and to apply them in precision oncology.
John Connolly, PhD, is the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), where he designs and executes PICI’s overall research strategy in close collaboration with the institute’s leadership team, center directors and scientific steering committee.
As a human immunologist, his research interests focus on immune monitoring and immunometabolism. Dr. Connolly previously served as CSO of Tessa Therapeutics, a clinical stage cell therapy company focused on solid tumor immunotherapy, and one of PICI’s strategic partners. He is an associate professor at National University of Singapore and an adjunct associate professor of Immunology at Baylor University, where he served on the Board of Governors for the Institute of Biomedical Sciences.
He is also a senior principal investigator and director for translational immunology at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IMCB) A*Star. Additionally, Dr. Connolly serves as director for the IMPACT Program, a multi-disciplinary national initiative focused building cell therapy manufacturing, clinical and regulatory capability for Singapore.
Dr. Connolly received his PhD in Immunology from Dartmouth Medical School and studied human dendritic cell biology under Dr. Michael Fanger. During this time he was involved in the development of immunotherapeutic preclinical models and clinical trials for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). He moved to the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research, a fully translational research institute dedicated to rationally designed vaccines against cancer and infectious disease. Dr. Connolly served as the director of Research Initiatives for the Baylor Research Institute, leading a large integrated translational research resource and multi-institutional programs that involved a number of international sites. During his tenure at Baylor, he was the central core facility director of the NIAID Centers for Translational Research on Human Immunology and Biodefense, an NIH-funded consortium of basic, translational research and clinical trials focused on vaccine design. Dr. Connolly is the past president of the Board of Directors of The American Cancer Society in N. Texas and founding director of the Singapore Immunology Network’s Immunomonitoring Platform.
Nikolaus Rajewsky is a globally recognized leader in Systems Biology, renowned for groundbreaking work on the role of RNA in regulating gene expression in health and disease. His research blends cutting-edge experimental biology, biochemistry, and data science, including machine learning. He has pioneered single-cell and spatial biology approaches, applying them to human tissues and advanced model systems to better understand, predict, and intercept disease trajectories.
In 2008 he founded and since then chaired/directs the "Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology" (MDC-BIMSB) as a strategic expansion of the MDC. He chaired the international recruitment of ~30 group leaders at BIMSB. MDC-BIMSB scientists use a combination of innovative experimental and computational approaches to understand and integrate different levels of gene regulation, ranging from DNA 3D conformation to cell-cell communication. Rajewsky and colleagues have built an interdisciplinary environment where these multi-scale insights are frequently translated into new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, often in collaboration with the Charité Hospital.
His work has earned him global recognition, and a h-index of 92 with over 80,000 citations (“Highly cited researcher”, Clarivate). He delivered hundreds of invited lectures, including 19 keynotes in the past five years. He is an elected member of EMBO, the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), and the Berlin–Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He has received the most prestigious German Research award, the “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award”.
Regina Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI & Health in the Department of Computer Science and the AI Faculty Lead at MIT Jameel Clinic. She develops machine learning methods for drug discovery and clinical AI. In the past, she worked on natural language processing. Her research has been recognized with the MacArthur Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, and the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. Regina is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.
Strategic Advisors
Michael Schnall-Levin is the Chief Technology Officer of 10x Genomics. Before joining 10x Genomics, Michael was a NSF postdoctoral fellow with Eric Lander at the Broad Institute, where he worked on developing novel applications of DNA sequencing technologies. Prior to that, Michael worked at Foundation Medicine, where he developed some of the early algorithms to accurately detect mutations in patient tumor samples. Michael earned his Ph.D in Mathematics from MIT with Bonnie Berger, where he was both a Hertz fellow and NDSEG fellow, and his B.A. in Physics from Harvard College.
Thomas Clozel is a visionary entrepreneur and oncologist, co-founder of Owkin, a pioneering scientific AGI startup that leverages machine learning to enhance medical research. His work focuses on bridging the gap between advanced technology and healthcare to revolutionize the way we understand and treat diseases.
Thomas Wolf is the co-founder of Hugging Face and Chief Science Officer. An expert programmer, he previously worked programming open-source software that make complex research accessible, creating the Transformers and Datasets libraries.
Beyond his technical achievements, Thomas Wolf is a passionate advocate for a more open, collaborative, and ethical approach to AI development. He actively promotes the principles of open science, encouraging the sharing of models, data, and research to accelerate progress for everyone. His vision has been central to establishing Hugging Face not just as a company, but as a central hub for the machine learning community, shaping a future where advanced AI is accessible, transparent, and built by a global collective of contributors
Board of directors
Scientific Advisory Board
Bioptimus Team
Andrea Califano is the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and also holds appointments in the Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, Biomedical Informatics, and Medicine. He just stepped down from his positions as Founding Chair of the Department of Systems Biology and Director of the Columbia Genome Center, to take a new role as the President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York.
In 1986, after completing a doctoral thesis in physics at the University of Florence, Italy, Dr. Califano joined the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where, in 1997, he became program director of the IBM Computational Biology Center. In 2000, he co-founded First Genetic Trust Inc. to pursue translational genomics research. Finally, he joined Columbia in 2003.
Dr. Califano is an internationally recognized pioneer in the reverse engineering of gene regulatory networks and in their analysis to systematically and efficiently identify key tumor checkpoint modules, whose aberrant activity is necessary for tumor viability. This has resulted in several clinical trials, including a very innovative N-of-1 study where patients affected by 14 untreatable, lethal cancers are analyzed on an individual basis to prioritize optimal therapeutic strategies, including both single drugs and drug combinations.
Dr. Califano is very active nationally, serving on numerous editorial and scientific advisory boards, including the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute, St. Jude Children’s Hospital, The MIT Koch Cancer Center, Cancer Genetics Inc., and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., among others. He has served as Chair or Co-chair of many international conferences and meetings, including the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR); the RECOMB-ISCB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges; Keystone Conferences; as well as several special conferences of the AACR on genomics and cancer systems biology.
He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a fellow of the AACR, ISCB, AAAS, and IEEE, recipient of the 2015 and 2022 NCI Outstanding Investigator Award (R35), the 2019 Ruth Leff prize in pancreatic cancer research, and the 2023 Alfred G. Knudson prize in Cancer Genetics.
He is also the Co-founder and Chief Scientific Advisor of DarwinHealth Inc.
Caroline Uhler is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directs the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center and is a member of the Scientific Leadership Team. She is also the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT.
Caroline’s research lies at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and genomics, with a particular focus on causal inference, representation learning, and gene regulation. Caroline is recognized as a creative and innovative researcher and teacher at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and biology. She is a SIAM Fellow, a Fellow of the IMS, a Sloan Research Fellow, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. In addition, she has received multiple awards including an NIH New Innovator Award, a Simons Investigator Award, and an NSF Career Award. Caroline holds an M.Sc. in mathematics, a B.Sc. in biology, and an M.Ed., all from the University of Zurich. She obtained her Ph.D. in statistics from UC Berkeley and then spent three years as an assistant professor at IST Austria before joining the faculty at MIT in 2015.
Fabrice André, MD, PhD, received his MD in Paris in 2002, and a PhD in Biotechnology from Paris University in 2005. He is a medical oncologist working at Gustave Roussy and taking care of patients presenting a breast cancer.
He is a past recipient of Career Development Awards from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and Outstanding Investigator in Breast Cancer Award from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). He is currently Head of Research Division, and Professor in the Department of Medical Oncology.
His research work in the field of biomarkers and personalised therapies focuses on biomarker discovery, development of targeted agents and implementation of personalised medicine. His team includes 80 people working on basic sciences, bioinformatics, biotechnologies and clinical research. He is also leading phase I-III trials testing targeted agents in the field of breast cancer and large national trials testing implementation of high throughput technologies in the health care system.
Professor André has published more than 300 peer reviewed papers, including papers in Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Nature Medicine, as main author.
Professor André is the Chair of the National Cancer Precision Medicine Center PRISM and was a member of several scientific committees for international meetings, including SABCS, AACR, ECCO, ESMO, and IMPAKT.
Professor André is currently President of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO). He has been a member of the Annals of Oncology Editorial Board (2010-2013), Associate Editor since 2014 and Editor-in-Chief 2017-2023.
He was the first Chair of the ESMO Young Oncologist Committee, served as Coordinator (2012-2014) and member (since 2015) of the ESMO Breast Cancer Faculty. Professor André was also a member of the ESMO Cancer Research Faculty, 2012- 2014; Chair of the ESMO Translational Research and Precision Medicine Working Group (end 2019), and member since 2020. He is also a member of the ESMO Council. He was the Scientific Co-Chair of the ESMO 2022 Congress and the MAP Congress.
Professor Jakob Kather holds dual appointments in medicine and computer science at the Technical University (TU) Dresden, Germany, serves as a senior physician in medical oncology at the University Hospital Dresden and holds an additional affiliation with the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) in Heidelberg. His research is focused on applying artificial intelligence in precision oncology. Prof. Kather’s research team at TU Dresden is using deep learning techniques to analyze a spectrum of clinical data, including histopathology, radiology images, textual records, and multimodal datasets. Guided by the belief that medical and tech expertise needs to be combined, medical researchers in his team learn computer programming and data analysis, while computer scientists are immersed in cancer biology and oncology. Prof. Kather chairs the “Working group on Artificial Intelligence” at the German Society of Hematology and Oncology (DGHO) and is a member of the pathology task force of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). His work is supported by numerous European and national grants, which enable the team to develop new deep learning methods for medical data analysis techniques and to apply them in precision oncology.
John Connolly, PhD, is the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), where he designs and executes PICI’s overall research strategy in close collaboration with the institute’s leadership team, center directors and scientific steering committee.
As a human immunologist, his research interests focus on immune monitoring and immunometabolism. Dr. Connolly previously served as CSO of Tessa Therapeutics, a clinical stage cell therapy company focused on solid tumor immunotherapy, and one of PICI’s strategic partners. He is an associate professor at National University of Singapore and an adjunct associate professor of Immunology at Baylor University, where he served on the Board of Governors for the Institute of Biomedical Sciences.
He is also a senior principal investigator and director for translational immunology at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IMCB) A*Star. Additionally, Dr. Connolly serves as director for the IMPACT Program, a multi-disciplinary national initiative focused building cell therapy manufacturing, clinical and regulatory capability for Singapore.
Dr. Connolly received his PhD in Immunology from Dartmouth Medical School and studied human dendritic cell biology under Dr. Michael Fanger. During this time he was involved in the development of immunotherapeutic preclinical models and clinical trials for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). He moved to the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research, a fully translational research institute dedicated to rationally designed vaccines against cancer and infectious disease. Dr. Connolly served as the director of Research Initiatives for the Baylor Research Institute, leading a large integrated translational research resource and multi-institutional programs that involved a number of international sites. During his tenure at Baylor, he was the central core facility director of the NIAID Centers for Translational Research on Human Immunology and Biodefense, an NIH-funded consortium of basic, translational research and clinical trials focused on vaccine design. Dr. Connolly is the past president of the Board of Directors of The American Cancer Society in N. Texas and founding director of the Singapore Immunology Network’s Immunomonitoring Platform.
Nikolaus Rajewsky is a globally recognized leader in Systems Biology, renowned for groundbreaking work on the role of RNA in regulating gene expression in health and disease. His research blends cutting-edge experimental biology, biochemistry, and data science, including machine learning. He has pioneered single-cell and spatial biology approaches, applying them to human tissues and advanced model systems to better understand, predict, and intercept disease trajectories.
In 2008 he founded and since then chaired/directs the "Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology" (MDC-BIMSB) as a strategic expansion of the MDC. He chaired the international recruitment of ~30 group leaders at BIMSB. MDC-BIMSB scientists use a combination of innovative experimental and computational approaches to understand and integrate different levels of gene regulation, ranging from DNA 3D conformation to cell-cell communication. Rajewsky and colleagues have built an interdisciplinary environment where these multi-scale insights are frequently translated into new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, often in collaboration with the Charité Hospital.
His work has earned him global recognition, and a h-index of 92 with over 80,000 citations (“Highly cited researcher”, Clarivate). He delivered hundreds of invited lectures, including 19 keynotes in the past five years. He is an elected member of EMBO, the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), and the Berlin–Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He has received the most prestigious German Research award, the “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award”.
Regina Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI & Health in the Department of Computer Science and the AI Faculty Lead at MIT Jameel Clinic. She develops machine learning methods for drug discovery and clinical AI. In the past, she worked on natural language processing. Her research has been recognized with the MacArthur Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, and the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. Regina is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.
Sarah did her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK and was a Beit Memorial Fellow at University College London. She started her group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2001, where they described conserved pathways of protein complex assembly, and a “periodic table of protein complexes”, using biophysics and data science. After starting work on single cell genomics of T cells, in 2013, she moved to the Wellcome Genome Campus where she was the first and to date only faculty member appointed across both the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute. There, she was a founding member of the Sanger-EBI Single Cell Genomics Centre. In 2016, Sarah was appointed as Head of the Cellular Genetics programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and co-founded the international Human Cell Atlas consortium. This initiative creates reference maps for cells across all human tissues, and has grown to include over three thousand members across the world. She also co-directs the CIFAR MacMillan Multiscale Human research programme.
From April 2024, Sarah has taken up the chair in Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge, Department of Medicine/Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. She now also spends part of her time at GlaxoSmithKline, and the startup company she co-founded, EnsoCell Therapeutics.
While maintaining a molecular and biophysics perspective, Sarah’s laboratory has developed and applied experimental and computational approaches for cell atlas technologies to decipher human cells, tissues and organs. A particular focus of hers is how cellular diversity is generated in the immune system and through development. Notable achievements include the first comprehensive reconstruction of the cell interactions in the human placenta in early pregnancy, and the first 3D map of the developing and mature thymus at cellular resolution and full molecular depth. Her work has been recognised by numerous awards, including the EMBO Gold Medal, Genetics Society Mary Lyons Award, Biochemical Society GlaxoSmithKline Award, the FEBS|EMBO Women in Science Award, Raman Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences among others. She is an EMBO Member, ISCB Fellow, International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and Royal Society.
Scientific Advisory Board
Sarah did her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK and was a Beit Memorial Fellow at University College London. She started her group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2001, where they described conserved pathways of protein complex assembly, and a “periodic table of protein complexes”, using biophysics and data science. After starting work on single cell genomics of T cells, in 2013, she moved to the Wellcome Genome Campus where she was the first and to date only faculty member appointed across both the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute. There, she was a founding member of the Sanger-EBI Single Cell Genomics Centre. In 2016, Sarah was appointed as Head of the Cellular Genetics programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and co-founded the international Human Cell Atlas consortium. This initiative creates reference maps for cells across all human tissues, and has grown to include over three thousand members across the world. She also co-directs the CIFAR MacMillan Multiscale Human research programme.
From April 2024, Sarah has taken up the chair in Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge, Department of Medicine/Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. She now also spends part of her time at GlaxoSmithKline, and the startup company she co-founded, EnsoCell Therapeutics.
While maintaining a molecular and biophysics perspective, Sarah’s laboratory has developed and applied experimental and computational approaches for cell atlas technologies to decipher human cells, tissues and organs. A particular focus of hers is how cellular diversity is generated in the immune system and through development. Notable achievements include the first comprehensive reconstruction of the cell interactions in the human placenta in early pregnancy, and the first 3D map of the developing and mature thymus at cellular resolution and full molecular depth. Her work has been recognised by numerous awards, including the EMBO Gold Medal, Genetics Society Mary Lyons Award, Biochemical Society GlaxoSmithKline Award, the FEBS|EMBO Women in Science Award, Raman Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences among others. She is an EMBO Member, ISCB Fellow, International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and Royal Society.
Andrea Califano is the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and also holds appointments in the Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, Biomedical Informatics, and Medicine. He just stepped down from his positions as Founding Chair of the Department of Systems Biology and Director of the Columbia Genome Center, to take a new role as the President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York.
In 1986, after completing a doctoral thesis in physics at the University of Florence, Italy, Dr. Califano joined the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where, in 1997, he became program director of the IBM Computational Biology Center. In 2000, he co-founded First Genetic Trust Inc. to pursue translational genomics research. Finally, he joined Columbia in 2003.
Dr. Califano is an internationally recognized pioneer in the reverse engineering of gene regulatory networks and in their analysis to systematically and efficiently identify key tumor checkpoint modules, whose aberrant activity is necessary for tumor viability. This has resulted in several clinical trials, including a very innovative N-of-1 study where patients affected by 14 untreatable, lethal cancers are analyzed on an individual basis to prioritize optimal therapeutic strategies, including both single drugs and drug combinations.
Dr. Califano is very active nationally, serving on numerous editorial and scientific advisory boards, including the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute, St. Jude Children’s Hospital, The MIT Koch Cancer Center, Cancer Genetics Inc., and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., among others. He has served as Chair or Co-chair of many international conferences and meetings, including the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR); the RECOMB-ISCB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges; Keystone Conferences; as well as several special conferences of the AACR on genomics and cancer systems biology.
He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a fellow of the AACR, ISCB, AAAS, and IEEE, recipient of the 2015 and 2022 NCI Outstanding Investigator Award (R35), the 2019 Ruth Leff prize in pancreatic cancer research, and the 2023 Alfred G. Knudson prize in Cancer Genetics.
He is also the Co-founder and Chief Scientific Advisor of DarwinHealth Inc.
Caroline Uhler is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directs the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center and is a member of the Scientific Leadership Team. She is also the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT.
Caroline’s research lies at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and genomics, with a particular focus on causal inference, representation learning, and gene regulation. Caroline is recognized as a creative and innovative researcher and teacher at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and biology. She is a SIAM Fellow, a Fellow of the IMS, a Sloan Research Fellow, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. In addition, she has received multiple awards including an NIH New Innovator Award, a Simons Investigator Award, and an NSF Career Award. Caroline holds an M.Sc. in mathematics, a B.Sc. in biology, and an M.Ed., all from the University of Zurich. She obtained her Ph.D. in statistics from UC Berkeley and then spent three years as an assistant professor at IST Austria before joining the faculty at MIT in 2015.
Fabrice André, MD, PhD, received his MD in Paris in 2002, and a PhD in Biotechnology from Paris University in 2005. He is a medical oncologist working at Gustave Roussy and taking care of patients presenting a breast cancer.
He is a past recipient of Career Development Awards from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and Outstanding Investigator in Breast Cancer Award from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). He is currently Head of Research Division, and Professor in the Department of Medical Oncology.
His research work in the field of biomarkers and personalised therapies focuses on biomarker discovery, development of targeted agents and implementation of personalised medicine. His team includes 80 people working on basic sciences, bioinformatics, biotechnologies and clinical research. He is also leading phase I-III trials testing targeted agents in the field of breast cancer and large national trials testing implementation of high throughput technologies in the health care system.
Professor André has published more than 300 peer reviewed papers, including papers in Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Nature Medicine, as main author.
Professor André is the Chair of the National Cancer Precision Medicine Center PRISM and was a member of several scientific committees for international meetings, including SABCS, AACR, ECCO, ESMO, and IMPAKT.
Professor André is currently President of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO). He has been a member of the Annals of Oncology Editorial Board (2010-2013), Associate Editor since 2014 and Editor-in-Chief 2017-2023.
He was the first Chair of the ESMO Young Oncologist Committee, served as Coordinator (2012-2014) and member (since 2015) of the ESMO Breast Cancer Faculty. Professor André was also a member of the ESMO Cancer Research Faculty, 2012- 2014; Chair of the ESMO Translational Research and Precision Medicine Working Group (end 2019), and member since 2020. He is also a member of the ESMO Council. He was the Scientific Co-Chair of the ESMO 2022 Congress and the MAP Congress.
Professor Jakob Kather holds dual appointments in medicine and computer science at the Technical University (TU) Dresden, Germany, serves as a senior physician in medical oncology at the University Hospital Dresden and holds an additional affiliation with the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) in Heidelberg. His research is focused on applying artificial intelligence in precision oncology. Prof. Kather’s research team at TU Dresden is using deep learning techniques to analyze a spectrum of clinical data, including histopathology, radiology images, textual records, and multimodal datasets. Guided by the belief that medical and tech expertise needs to be combined, medical researchers in his team learn computer programming and data analysis, while computer scientists are immersed in cancer biology and oncology. Prof. Kather chairs the “Working group on Artificial Intelligence” at the German Society of Hematology and Oncology (DGHO) and is a member of the pathology task force of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). His work is supported by numerous European and national grants, which enable the team to develop new deep learning methods for medical data analysis techniques and to apply them in precision oncology.
John Connolly, PhD, is the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), where he designs and executes PICI’s overall research strategy in close collaboration with the institute’s leadership team, center directors and scientific steering committee.
As a human immunologist, his research interests focus on immune monitoring and immunometabolism. Dr. Connolly previously served as CSO of Tessa Therapeutics, a clinical stage cell therapy company focused on solid tumor immunotherapy, and one of PICI’s strategic partners. He is an associate professor at National University of Singapore and an adjunct associate professor of Immunology at Baylor University, where he served on the Board of Governors for the Institute of Biomedical Sciences.
He is also a senior principal investigator and director for translational immunology at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IMCB) A*Star. Additionally, Dr. Connolly serves as director for the IMPACT Program, a multi-disciplinary national initiative focused building cell therapy manufacturing, clinical and regulatory capability for Singapore.
Dr. Connolly received his PhD in Immunology from Dartmouth Medical School and studied human dendritic cell biology under Dr. Michael Fanger. During this time he was involved in the development of immunotherapeutic preclinical models and clinical trials for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). He moved to the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research, a fully translational research institute dedicated to rationally designed vaccines against cancer and infectious disease. Dr. Connolly served as the director of Research Initiatives for the Baylor Research Institute, leading a large integrated translational research resource and multi-institutional programs that involved a number of international sites. During his tenure at Baylor, he was the central core facility director of the NIAID Centers for Translational Research on Human Immunology and Biodefense, an NIH-funded consortium of basic, translational research and clinical trials focused on vaccine design. Dr. Connolly is the past president of the Board of Directors of The American Cancer Society in N. Texas and founding director of the Singapore Immunology Network’s Immunomonitoring Platform.
Nikolaus Rajewsky is a globally recognized leader in Systems Biology, renowned for groundbreaking work on the role of RNA in regulating gene expression in health and disease. His research blends cutting-edge experimental biology, biochemistry, and data science, including machine learning. He has pioneered single-cell and spatial biology approaches, applying them to human tissues and advanced model systems to better understand, predict, and intercept disease trajectories.
In 2008 he founded and since then chaired/directs the "Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology" (MDC-BIMSB) as a strategic expansion of the MDC. He chaired the international recruitment of ~30 group leaders at BIMSB. MDC-BIMSB scientists use a combination of innovative experimental and computational approaches to understand and integrate different levels of gene regulation, ranging from DNA 3D conformation to cell-cell communication. Rajewsky and colleagues have built an interdisciplinary environment where these multi-scale insights are frequently translated into new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, often in collaboration with the Charité Hospital.
His work has earned him global recognition, and a h-index of 92 with over 80,000 citations (“Highly cited researcher”, Clarivate). He delivered hundreds of invited lectures, including 19 keynotes in the past five years. He is an elected member of EMBO, the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), and the Berlin–Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He has received the most prestigious German Research award, the “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award”.
Regina Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI & Health in the Department of Computer Science and the AI Faculty Lead at MIT Jameel Clinic. She develops machine learning methods for drug discovery and clinical AI. In the past, she worked on natural language processing. Her research has been recognized with the MacArthur Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, and the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. Regina is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.
Strategic Advisors
Michael Schnall-Levin is the Chief Technology Officer of 10x Genomics. Before joining 10x Genomics, Michael was a NSF postdoctoral fellow with Eric Lander at the Broad Institute, where he worked on developing novel applications of DNA sequencing technologies. Prior to that, Michael worked at Foundation Medicine, where he developed some of the early algorithms to accurately detect mutations in patient tumor samples. Michael earned his Ph.D in Mathematics from MIT with Bonnie Berger, where he was both a Hertz fellow and NDSEG fellow, and his B.A. in Physics from Harvard College.
Thomas Clozel is a visionary entrepreneur and oncologist, co-founder of Owkin, a pioneering scientific AGI startup that leverages machine learning to enhance medical research. His work focuses on bridging the gap between advanced technology and healthcare to revolutionize the way we understand and treat diseases.
Thomas Wolf is the co-founder of Hugging Face and Chief Science Officer. An expert programmer, he previously worked programming open-source software that make complex research accessible, creating the Transformers and Datasets libraries.
Beyond his technical achievements, Thomas Wolf is a passionate advocate for a more open, collaborative, and ethical approach to AI development. He actively promotes the principles of open science, encouraging the sharing of models, data, and research to accelerate progress for everyone. His vision has been central to establishing Hugging Face not just as a company, but as a central hub for the machine learning community, shaping a future where advanced AI is accessible, transparent, and built by a global collective of contributors
Board of directors
Strategic Advisors
Bioptimus Team
Michael Schnall-Levin is the Chief Technology Officer of 10x Genomics. Before joining 10x Genomics, Michael was a NSF postdoctoral fellow with Eric Lander at the Broad Institute, where he worked on developing novel applications of DNA sequencing technologies. Prior to that, Michael worked at Foundation Medicine, where he developed some of the early algorithms to accurately detect mutations in patient tumor samples. Michael earned his Ph.D in Mathematics from MIT with Bonnie Berger, where he was both a Hertz fellow and NDSEG fellow, and his B.A. in Physics from Harvard College.
Thomas Clozel is a visionary entrepreneur and oncologist, co-founder of Owkin, a pioneering scientific AGI startup that leverages machine learning to enhance medical research. His work focuses on bridging the gap between advanced technology and healthcare to revolutionize the way we understand and treat diseases.
Thomas Wolf is the co-founder of Hugging Face and Chief Science Officer. An expert programmer, he previously worked programming open-source software that make complex research accessible, creating the Transformers and Datasets libraries.
Beyond his technical achievements, Thomas Wolf is a passionate advocate for a more open, collaborative, and ethical approach to AI development. He actively promotes the principles of open science, encouraging the sharing of models, data, and research to accelerate progress for everyone. His vision has been central to establishing Hugging Face not just as a company, but as a central hub for the machine learning community, shaping a future where advanced AI is accessible, transparent, and built by a global collective of contributors
Scientific Advisory Board
Sarah did her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK and was a Beit Memorial Fellow at University College London. She started her group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2001, where they described conserved pathways of protein complex assembly, and a “periodic table of protein complexes”, using biophysics and data science. After starting work on single cell genomics of T cells, in 2013, she moved to the Wellcome Genome Campus where she was the first and to date only faculty member appointed across both the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute. There, she was a founding member of the Sanger-EBI Single Cell Genomics Centre. In 2016, Sarah was appointed as Head of the Cellular Genetics programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and co-founded the international Human Cell Atlas consortium. This initiative creates reference maps for cells across all human tissues, and has grown to include over three thousand members across the world. She also co-directs the CIFAR MacMillan Multiscale Human research programme.
From April 2024, Sarah has taken up the chair in Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge, Department of Medicine/Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. She now also spends part of her time at GlaxoSmithKline, and the startup company she co-founded, EnsoCell Therapeutics.
While maintaining a molecular and biophysics perspective, Sarah’s laboratory has developed and applied experimental and computational approaches for cell atlas technologies to decipher human cells, tissues and organs. A particular focus of hers is how cellular diversity is generated in the immune system and through development. Notable achievements include the first comprehensive reconstruction of the cell interactions in the human placenta in early pregnancy, and the first 3D map of the developing and mature thymus at cellular resolution and full molecular depth. Her work has been recognised by numerous awards, including the EMBO Gold Medal, Genetics Society Mary Lyons Award, Biochemical Society GlaxoSmithKline Award, the FEBS|EMBO Women in Science Award, Raman Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences among others. She is an EMBO Member, ISCB Fellow, International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and Royal Society.
Andrea Califano is the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and also holds appointments in the Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, Biomedical Informatics, and Medicine. He just stepped down from his positions as Founding Chair of the Department of Systems Biology and Director of the Columbia Genome Center, to take a new role as the President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York.
In 1986, after completing a doctoral thesis in physics at the University of Florence, Italy, Dr. Califano joined the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where, in 1997, he became program director of the IBM Computational Biology Center. In 2000, he co-founded First Genetic Trust Inc. to pursue translational genomics research. Finally, he joined Columbia in 2003.
Dr. Califano is an internationally recognized pioneer in the reverse engineering of gene regulatory networks and in their analysis to systematically and efficiently identify key tumor checkpoint modules, whose aberrant activity is necessary for tumor viability. This has resulted in several clinical trials, including a very innovative N-of-1 study where patients affected by 14 untreatable, lethal cancers are analyzed on an individual basis to prioritize optimal therapeutic strategies, including both single drugs and drug combinations.
Dr. Califano is very active nationally, serving on numerous editorial and scientific advisory boards, including the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute, St. Jude Children’s Hospital, The MIT Koch Cancer Center, Cancer Genetics Inc., and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., among others. He has served as Chair or Co-chair of many international conferences and meetings, including the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR); the RECOMB-ISCB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges; Keystone Conferences; as well as several special conferences of the AACR on genomics and cancer systems biology.
He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a fellow of the AACR, ISCB, AAAS, and IEEE, recipient of the 2015 and 2022 NCI Outstanding Investigator Award (R35), the 2019 Ruth Leff prize in pancreatic cancer research, and the 2023 Alfred G. Knudson prize in Cancer Genetics.
He is also the Co-founder and Chief Scientific Advisor of DarwinHealth Inc.
Caroline Uhler is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directs the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center and is a member of the Scientific Leadership Team. She is also the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT.
Caroline’s research lies at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and genomics, with a particular focus on causal inference, representation learning, and gene regulation. Caroline is recognized as a creative and innovative researcher and teacher at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and biology. She is a SIAM Fellow, a Fellow of the IMS, a Sloan Research Fellow, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. In addition, she has received multiple awards including an NIH New Innovator Award, a Simons Investigator Award, and an NSF Career Award. Caroline holds an M.Sc. in mathematics, a B.Sc. in biology, and an M.Ed., all from the University of Zurich. She obtained her Ph.D. in statistics from UC Berkeley and then spent three years as an assistant professor at IST Austria before joining the faculty at MIT in 2015.
Fabrice André, MD, PhD, received his MD in Paris in 2002, and a PhD in Biotechnology from Paris University in 2005. He is a medical oncologist working at Gustave Roussy and taking care of patients presenting a breast cancer.
He is a past recipient of Career Development Awards from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and Outstanding Investigator in Breast Cancer Award from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). He is currently Head of Research Division, and Professor in the Department of Medical Oncology.
His research work in the field of biomarkers and personalised therapies focuses on biomarker discovery, development of targeted agents and implementation of personalised medicine. His team includes 80 people working on basic sciences, bioinformatics, biotechnologies and clinical research. He is also leading phase I-III trials testing targeted agents in the field of breast cancer and large national trials testing implementation of high throughput technologies in the health care system.
Professor André has published more than 300 peer reviewed papers, including papers in Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Nature Medicine, as main author.
Professor André is the Chair of the National Cancer Precision Medicine Center PRISM and was a member of several scientific committees for international meetings, including SABCS, AACR, ECCO, ESMO, and IMPAKT.
Professor André is currently President of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO). He has been a member of the Annals of Oncology Editorial Board (2010-2013), Associate Editor since 2014 and Editor-in-Chief 2017-2023.
He was the first Chair of the ESMO Young Oncologist Committee, served as Coordinator (2012-2014) and member (since 2015) of the ESMO Breast Cancer Faculty. Professor André was also a member of the ESMO Cancer Research Faculty, 2012- 2014; Chair of the ESMO Translational Research and Precision Medicine Working Group (end 2019), and member since 2020. He is also a member of the ESMO Council. He was the Scientific Co-Chair of the ESMO 2022 Congress and the MAP Congress.
Professor Jakob Kather holds dual appointments in medicine and computer science at the Technical University (TU) Dresden, Germany, serves as a senior physician in medical oncology at the University Hospital Dresden and holds an additional affiliation with the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) in Heidelberg. His research is focused on applying artificial intelligence in precision oncology. Prof. Kather’s research team at TU Dresden is using deep learning techniques to analyze a spectrum of clinical data, including histopathology, radiology images, textual records, and multimodal datasets. Guided by the belief that medical and tech expertise needs to be combined, medical researchers in his team learn computer programming and data analysis, while computer scientists are immersed in cancer biology and oncology. Prof. Kather chairs the “Working group on Artificial Intelligence” at the German Society of Hematology and Oncology (DGHO) and is a member of the pathology task force of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). His work is supported by numerous European and national grants, which enable the team to develop new deep learning methods for medical data analysis techniques and to apply them in precision oncology.
John Connolly, PhD, is the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), where he designs and executes PICI’s overall research strategy in close collaboration with the institute’s leadership team, center directors and scientific steering committee.
As a human immunologist, his research interests focus on immune monitoring and immunometabolism. Dr. Connolly previously served as CSO of Tessa Therapeutics, a clinical stage cell therapy company focused on solid tumor immunotherapy, and one of PICI’s strategic partners. He is an associate professor at National University of Singapore and an adjunct associate professor of Immunology at Baylor University, where he served on the Board of Governors for the Institute of Biomedical Sciences.
He is also a senior principal investigator and director for translational immunology at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IMCB) A*Star. Additionally, Dr. Connolly serves as director for the IMPACT Program, a multi-disciplinary national initiative focused building cell therapy manufacturing, clinical and regulatory capability for Singapore.
Dr. Connolly received his PhD in Immunology from Dartmouth Medical School and studied human dendritic cell biology under Dr. Michael Fanger. During this time he was involved in the development of immunotherapeutic preclinical models and clinical trials for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). He moved to the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research, a fully translational research institute dedicated to rationally designed vaccines against cancer and infectious disease. Dr. Connolly served as the director of Research Initiatives for the Baylor Research Institute, leading a large integrated translational research resource and multi-institutional programs that involved a number of international sites. During his tenure at Baylor, he was the central core facility director of the NIAID Centers for Translational Research on Human Immunology and Biodefense, an NIH-funded consortium of basic, translational research and clinical trials focused on vaccine design. Dr. Connolly is the past president of the Board of Directors of The American Cancer Society in N. Texas and founding director of the Singapore Immunology Network’s Immunomonitoring Platform.
Nikolaus Rajewsky is a globally recognized leader in Systems Biology, renowned for groundbreaking work on the role of RNA in regulating gene expression in health and disease. His research blends cutting-edge experimental biology, biochemistry, and data science, including machine learning. He has pioneered single-cell and spatial biology approaches, applying them to human tissues and advanced model systems to better understand, predict, and intercept disease trajectories.
In 2008 he founded and since then chaired/directs the "Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology" (MDC-BIMSB) as a strategic expansion of the MDC. He chaired the international recruitment of ~30 group leaders at BIMSB. MDC-BIMSB scientists use a combination of innovative experimental and computational approaches to understand and integrate different levels of gene regulation, ranging from DNA 3D conformation to cell-cell communication. Rajewsky and colleagues have built an interdisciplinary environment where these multi-scale insights are frequently translated into new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, often in collaboration with the Charité Hospital.
His work has earned him global recognition, and a h-index of 92 with over 80,000 citations (“Highly cited researcher”, Clarivate). He delivered hundreds of invited lectures, including 19 keynotes in the past five years. He is an elected member of EMBO, the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), and the Berlin–Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He has received the most prestigious German Research award, the “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award”.
Regina Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI & Health in the Department of Computer Science and the AI Faculty Lead at MIT Jameel Clinic. She develops machine learning methods for drug discovery and clinical AI. In the past, she worked on natural language processing. Her research has been recognized with the MacArthur Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, and the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. Regina is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.
Strategic Advisors
Michael Schnall-Levin is the Chief Technology Officer of 10x Genomics. Before joining 10x Genomics, Michael was a NSF postdoctoral fellow with Eric Lander at the Broad Institute, where he worked on developing novel applications of DNA sequencing technologies. Prior to that, Michael worked at Foundation Medicine, where he developed some of the early algorithms to accurately detect mutations in patient tumor samples. Michael earned his Ph.D in Mathematics from MIT with Bonnie Berger, where he was both a Hertz fellow and NDSEG fellow, and his B.A. in Physics from Harvard College.
Thomas Clozel is a visionary entrepreneur and oncologist, co-founder of Owkin, a pioneering scientific AGI startup that leverages machine learning to enhance medical research. His work focuses on bridging the gap between advanced technology and healthcare to revolutionize the way we understand and treat diseases.
Thomas Wolf is the co-founder of Hugging Face and Chief Science Officer. An expert programmer, he previously worked programming open-source software that make complex research accessible, creating the Transformers and Datasets libraries.
Beyond his technical achievements, Thomas Wolf is a passionate advocate for a more open, collaborative, and ethical approach to AI development. He actively promotes the principles of open science, encouraging the sharing of models, data, and research to accelerate progress for everyone. His vision has been central to establishing Hugging Face not just as a company, but as a central hub for the machine learning community, shaping a future where advanced AI is accessible, transparent, and built by a global collective of contributors
Board of directors
