Peter Sorger

Peter Sorger, PhD is the Otto Krayer Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, founding head of the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Sciences (HiTS), director of its Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology (LSP), and a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Sorger received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge University U.K., under the supervision of Hugh Pelham and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco with Harold Varmus and Andrew Murray. Prior to working at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Sorger served as a professor of biology and Biological Engineering at MIT.

Dr. Sorger’s research focuses on the systems biology of signal transduction networks controlling cell proliferation and death, the dysregulation of these networks in cancer and inflammatory diseases and the fundamental mechanisms of action of therapeutic drugs targeting signaling proteins. His translational research combines experimental and computational approaches to identify factors responsible for adaptive and acquired drug resistance in cell lines, mouse models, and human specimens. The Sorger group has recently developed new approaches for highly multiplexed imaging of single cells in tissues and tumors and is using these data to generate spatial profiles of tumor-intrinsic and tumor-immune states predictive of disease progression and therapeutic response; the group aims to implement some of these profiles as clinical tests in the immediate future.

As head of HiTS, Dr. Sorger leads a university-wide effort to advance the basic and translational science used to develop new medicines, including new approaches to measure and model precision clinical trials. He also directs the LSP, the primary research program in HiTS, which joins together faculty members from eight institutions in a multidisciplinary effort to develop and apply new concepts in drug discovery. Dr. Sorger was cofounder of Merrimack Pharmaceuticals and Glencoe Software and is an advisor to multiple public and private companies and research institutes in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Raymond J. Deshaies 

Dr. Deshaies directed basic and applied research programs for over 30 years, as a professor and Howard Hughes Investigator at Caltech, and as the head of global research at Amgen. While at Caltech he co-conceived/developed proof-of-prinicple (with Craig Crews, Yale) for targeted protein degradation with PROTACs and co-founded two companies, one of which developed Kyprolis carfilzomib. His fundamental research at Caltech was recognized by election to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2016 and his applied research with Dr. Crews has been honored by the Gabbay Award in 2023 and Passano Award in 2025. While leading global research at Amgen, his team advanced nearly 5 dozen clinical candidates, including Lumakras sotorasib, olpasiran, MariTide, xaluritamig, and AMG193.

Carolyn Bertozzi 

Carolyn Bertozzi is the Baker Family Director of Sarafan Stanford ChEM-H and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University. She is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research focuses on profiling changes in cell surface glycosylation associated with cancer, inflammation and infection, and exploiting this information for development of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, most recently in the area of immuno-oncology. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Most recently she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Wolf Prize in Chemistry, and Welch Prize in Chemistry. She was also awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Chemistry for the Future Solvay Prize, among many others.

Katherine High 

Dr. Katherine High’s career has spanned over 35 years in internal medicine, hematology, molecular genetics, and gene therapy. Her pioneering bench-to-bedside studies of gene therapy for hemophilia led to a series of basic and clinical investigations that characterized the human immune response to AAV gene delivery vectors. A long-time member of the faculty of the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, she was also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Dr. High served a 5-year term on the U.S. FDA Advisory Committee on Cell, Tissue and Gene Therapies and is a past president of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy. In 2013, she co-founded Spark Therapeutics where she served as President, CSO, and member of the Board of Directors. At Spark, Dr. High led the team that achieved the first FDA approval of a gene therapy for genetic disease, Luxturna, for a rare form of inherited blindness, and also led the successful Phase 1/2 studies for a gene therapy for hemophilia B, now an approved product (Beqvez) following a Pfizer-sponsored Phase 3 study. In Dec 2019, Spark was acquired by Roche. Subsequently Dr. High left the organization, and in January 2021 joined AskBio, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bayer as President of Therapeutics and member of the Board of Directors. In December 2022, she left AskBio to become a Visiting Professor at Rockefeller University. Dr. High received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Harvard University, an MD from the University Of North Carolina School Of Medicine, a business certification from the University of North Carolina Business School’s Management Institute for Hospital Administrators and a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians (London), and the National Academy of Sciences. Currently Dr. High is a member of the Board of Directors of CRISPR Therapeutics and Incyte Pharmaceuticals, and an Advisor to GV, formerly Google Ventures.

Bryan Roth 

Dr. Roth is a Professor of Pharmacology at UNC School of Medicine. Dr. Roth has published more than 500 papers and given more than 300 invited talks.  He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  His work is focused on chemical and synthetic biology.

Rommie E. Amaro  

Rommie E. Amaro holds the Distinguished Professorship in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at the University of California, San Diego. She grew up on the south side of Chicago and received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering (1999) and her Ph.D. in Chemistry (2005) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rommie was a NIH postdoctoral fellow with Prof. J. Andrew McCammon at UC San Diego from 2005-2009, and started her independent lab at the University of California, Irvine in 2009. In 2011 she moved to UC San Diego. She is the recipient of an NIH New Innovator Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the ACS COMP OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, the ACS Kavli Foundation Emerging Leader in Chemistry, the Corwin Hansch Award, and the 2020 ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for COVID19. Rommie’s scientific interests lie at the intersection of computer-aided drug discovery and biophysical simulation. Her scientific vision revolves around expanding the range and complexity of molecular constituents represented in atomic-level molecular dynamics simulations, the development of novel multiscale methods for elucidating their time dependent dynamics, and the discovery of novel chemical matter controlling biological function.

Michelle Arkin  

Michelle Arkin is a chemical biologist, Professor and Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, and Executive Director of the Small Molecule Discovery Center (SMDC) at UCSF.  She is a member of the Assay Guidance Manual Editorial Board and several chemical biology journals. Michelle’s research focuses on developing methods and molecules that target currently ‘undruggable proteins,’ including protein-protein interactions and dynamic or intrinsically disordered proteins. She is a cofounder and Director of Ambagon Therapeutics, cofounder of Elgia Therapeutics, and advisor to several biotechs.  Prior to UCSF, Michelle was Associate Director of Cell Biology at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, where she helped discover inhibitors of protein-protein interactions for IL-2/IL-2R and LFA1/ICAM (lifitegrast, marketed by Novartis).  She earned her PhD in Chemistry at Caltech with Jackie Barton and held a Damon Runyon postdoctoral fellowship at Genentech in the lab of Jim Wells.  Michelle was named a 2024 Cope Scholar by the American Chemical Society.

Derek Lowe  

Derek Lowe received his PhD from Duke in 1988, and then did a Humboldt fellowship in Germany. Since 1989 he has worked at several different biopharma companies in a variety of therapeutic areas (CNS, metabolics, anti-infectives, oncology and more). In the last 10-15 years his research work has shifted more to chemical biology approaches to better assess target selection and other fundamental problems of drug discovery. He is the author, since 2002, of the blog "In the Pipeline", covering a variety of chemistry and biology subjects in what is now likely the longest-running site of its kind.

Christopher P. Austin 

Christopher Austin is a CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering in Cambridge, MA, and CEO of one of Flagship’s franchise companies, Vesalius Therapeutics, which is commercializing a novel platform to systematically develop treatments for common diseases.  Before joining Flagship in 2021, Dr. Austin served for almost a decade as the founding director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the NIH, where he formulated the strategic vision and scientific directions of the new center, and led its efforts in developing, demonstrating, and disseminating scientific and operational advances across the spectrum of translational science, from target validation to preclinical therapeutic development to clinical trials to community health implementation.  Before NCATS, Austin founded and directed scientific and technology initiatives at the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH to derive biological insights and therapeutic potential from the human genome.  Austin came to NIH from Merck, where his work focused on genome-based discovery of novel targets and drugs, with a particular focus on common neuropsychiatric diseases. He received his A.B. in biology from Princeton and M.D. from Harvard Medical School, did clinical training in internal medicine and neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and completed a research fellowship in genetics at Harvard.

Jay Bradner

James (Jay) E. Bradner, M.D. is an American Physician-Scientist.

Recently, he served as President of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), from January, 2015, through November, 2022. He led global internal and external Research and Early Development covering eight disease areas (hematology, oncology, immunology, neuroscience, cardiovascular disease, ophthalmology, neglected tropical diseases and musculoskeletal diseases), and five therapeutic modalities (chemistry & chemical biology, biotherapeutics, gene therapy, stem-progenitor therapy and radioligand therapy). In his seven years of leadership, NIBR innovated more than 80 development candidates, filed 75 INDs and reported out 90 positive proof-of-concept studies in human clinical investigation. Scientifically, he led a research initiative focused on molecular glues for intractable protein targets. 

Prior to leading NIBR, Dr. Bradner served on the research faculty of Harvard Medical School and as an attending physician in stem cell transplantation within the Department of Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The research focus of the Bradner laboratory has been the study of BET bromodomain proteins and their function in gene control, innovating chemical probes and investigational drugs to study and treat cancer. Further, the Bradner laboratory pioneered a first all-chemical strategy for targeted protein degradation, which has served as a discovery platform for many academic investigators and biopharmaceutical companies. Dr. Bradner is a co-founder of five biotechnology companies and has co-authored more than 250 scientific publications and over 50 United States patent applications. 

Dr. Bradner is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Chicago Medical School. He completed residency in Medicine at Brigham & Women's Hospital, fellowship in Medical Oncology and Hematology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and postdoctoral training in chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University (Prof. Stuart Schreiber). 

David Hackos

David Hackos is currently a Senior Principal Scientist at Genentech, where he heads pain research.  He obtained his B.A. in Physics from Johns Hopkins University, his PhD from the University of California, San Francisco, and did his postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health where he worked with Kenton Swartz on the mechanism of gating in voltage-gated ion channels.  He entered the world of pain research in 2001 when he joined Renovis, a small biotech company in San Francisco.  At Renovis, his group developed a series of TRPV1 antagonists, one of which entered early clinical trials as a potential neuropathic pain drug.  In 2006, he left Renovis to join Roche in Palo Alto, where he worked on pain and inflammation targets such as P2X3, TRPA1, and Kv1.3.  At Genentech, his research focuses on the development of novel pain drugs, in particular by selectively targeting the Nav1.7 sodium channel.  Two such selective Nav1.7 inhibitors developed by his group have been tested in early clinical trials.  In addition to pain research, his lab studies the genetics and biology of peripheral neuropathies such as diabetic neuropathy and chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy.