Niranj Chandrasekaran

Postdoctoral Associate, Imaging Platform, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

I am a computational biologist who is passionate about understanding biological systems using computational, physical and mathematical methods. I am currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the Broad Institute's Imaging Platform, where I am leading a collaboration of 12 pharma companies and non-profit organizations, to generate the largest publicly available Cell Painting dataset. To analyze the generated data, I am developing machine learning based analysis pipelines with the goal of accelerating drug discovery. Before joining the Broad, I worked in the fields of Genomics and Biophysics, developing algorithms for identifying DNA structural variations and predicting the conformational dynamics of proteins.

Beth Cimini

Senior Group Leader, Broad Institute

Dr. Beth Cimini is a Senior Group Leader, CZI Imaging Scientist and head of the Cimini Lab in the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA. After doing undergraduate research in visual neuroscience with Dr. William Eldred at Boston University, she obtained a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn at UCSF, studying the difference between splicing variants of the telomere master scaffolding protein TIN2. These projects honed her interests in image analysis, leading her to join Dr. Anne Carpenter's lab at the Broad, where she led a team collaborating with approximately 30 outside scientists per year on their own custom image analysis projects. The Cimini lab focuses on bioimage analysis tool creation (Piximi) and maintenance (CellProfiler), as well as on applying open source tools to novel biological problems. She created and directs the Platform's Postdoctoral Training Program in Bioimage Analysis, and also leads the Broad efforts towards community engagement and driving biological projects for the Center for Open Bioimage Analysis (COBA). 

David Egan

Co-founder and CEO, Core Life Analytics

David Egan is the co-founder and CEO of Core Life Analytics, a Netherlands-based company that helps biologists to analyze their own data. Born in Carrickerry, Ireland, he completed his undergraduate training in Industrial Chemistry at the University of Limerick. He received his Ph.D. in 1997 from Cornell University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in New York, NY. His graduate thesis was carried out in the laboratory of Dr. Kathleen Scotto at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

It was during a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Ron Evans at The Salk Institute in la Jolla, CA that David became interested in the use of high throughput technologies for drug discovery. This led to a position at OSI Pharmaceuticals in 2001 and, after a return to Europe in 2003, subsequent positions establishing and managing academic automation facilities at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, and the University Medical Center Utrecht.

In Utrecht, while managing the Cell Screening Core at the Department of Cell Biology he encountered the challenges of data analytics in high throughput image-based screening. This led to the development of the StratoMineR data analytics platform with Wienand Omta and the subsequent establishment of Core Life Analytics, which was co-founded with Wienand in 2016. Since then StratoMineR has been widely adopted in big pharma, biotech and academic centers as a tool that can help biologists to rapidly mine knowledge from complex data.

Lorna Ewart

Executive Vice President Science, Emulate

Lorna Ewart is the Executive Vice President Science at Emulate. She brings over 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry spanning BioScience and Drug Safety. In her role at Emulate, she provides oversight for the company’s scientific vision and advancement with academic, industry and regulatory partners. Additionally, Lorna provides scientific leadership for the Emulate R&D and services team while also serving as the company’s European leader.

Prior to joining Emulate, Lorna created Veroli Consulting Limited where she served as an independent scientific consultant directing academics, start-up biotechnology companies and pharmaceutical companies working with Organ-Chips and organoids. Within the pharmaceutical industry, Lorna rapidly developed a reputation as a valued partner with multiple stakeholders in the microphysiological systems field and successfully established the microphysiological systems center of excellence at AstraZeneca’s R&D Biopharmaceuticals Unit in Cambridge, UK. Under her leadership, AstraZeneca was positioned at the leading edge of industrial adoption of the organ-on-a-chip technology.

Earlier in her career, Lorna was the therapy area lead toxicologist for Respiratory and Inflammation in AstraZeneca’s Gothenburg R&D site in Sweden. Following her Ph.D., she joined the Respiratory and Inflammation research area within AstraZeneca optimizing efficacy in small molecules before moving into preclinical Drug Safety where she led a Safety Pharmacology team delivering GLP data across multiple therapeutic areas.

Lorna is a classically trained pharmacologist and obtained her honors degree at the University of Aberdeen and her Ph.D. at the William Harvey Research Institute in London. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and British Pharmacological Society.

Marc Ferrer

Acting Director, Early Translation Branch, NCATS

Marc Ferrer, Ph.D., is the acting director of the Early Translation Branch (ETB) within NCATS’ Division of Preclinical Innovation (DPI). He also is the director of the center’s intramural 3-D Tissue Bioprinting Laboratory, a cross-discipline group in DPI. This laboratory produces working 3-D tissues from basic biological materials (e.g., cells) — a process called biofabrication — and tests and uses the tissues for disease modeling and drug discovery. The laboratory is a core resource for working with the scientific community to produce human tissues in multi–well plate format (tissues-in-a-well) — using relevant human primary or induced pluripotent stem cell–derived cells — to support disease modeling and predict how toxic or effective compounds might be. The laboratory provides biofabrication and drug screening expertise, and outside researchers bring disease-relevant and 3-D modeling expertise.

Previously, Ferrer was a biology team lead at the NCATS Chemical Genomics Center (now the ETB). In that role, he worked with academic researchers to start high-throughput screening and medicinal chemistry programs to discover small-molecule probes. From 1999 to 2010, Ferrer worked at Merck Research Laboratories, where he became the director of assay development and high-throughput screening in the Department of Automated Biotechnology.

Ferrer earned his bachelor’s degree in organic chemistry from the University of Barcelona, Spain, and received his Ph.D. in biological chemistry from the University of Minnesota. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, where he used structure-based chemical approaches to develop anti-HIV small molecules.

Steven Haney

Executive Director and Head of Oncology Research at Valo Health

Steven has worked in assay development and validation in oncology, diabetes, inflammation and neurodegeneration at Wyeth, Pfizer and Eli Lilly, as well as his new role at Valo Health, where he is working to integrate drug discovery into a comprehensive platform that connects AI methodology to all aspects of the drug discovery process, including target biology, chemistry, cellular mechanisms and patient genetics in clinical trials. His contributions to quantitative imaging sciences includes several primary publications, three chapters in the Assay Guidance Manual (both published and in development), and editing/contributing to two books on HCS. In addition, he was a co-founder of the Society of Biomolecular Imaging and Informatics (SBI2). His work has leveraged imaging methods to design quantitative methods for RNAi screening, primary cell cultures (including primary human tumor samples), validated assay development for HTS and phenotypic assays to characterize diverse cellular treatments utilizing machine learning approaches for multi-parametric analyses. 

Madhu Lal Nag

Director, Translational Research, Day One Biopharmaceuticals

Jan Lichtenberg

Co-Founder and CEO, InSphero Inc.

Jan Lichtenberg, Ph.D., is Co-Founder and CEO of Swiss- and US-based InSphero Inc., the largest biotech specialized in 3D cell-culture technologies for discovery and safety. InSphero’s patented assay-ready 3D microtissues mimic the structure and functionality of organ tissue, e.g. liver, pancreas, or tumors including disease states like diabetes or NASH. The 3D microtissues allow for more predictive and reliable compound profiling for discovery and safety testing in a highly robust, rapid and cost-efficient way.

Jan co-founded InSphero in 2009 and grew the company to 65 employees in Switzerland and the US while expanding the business to encompass all top 15 global pharmaceutical companies. Prior to InSphero, Jan had VP R&D and Product Management positions at Hocoma AG (medical robotics) and Uwatec (microelectronics). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Neuchâtel and managed a research group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich. Since 2021 he is a Board Member of the Society of Laboratory Science and Screening (SLAS).

Sarine Markossian

Editor-in-Chief, Assay Guidance Manual; Lead, Translational Science Resources Program, NCATS

Dr. Sarine Markossian is the lead of the Assay Guidance Manual (AGM) translational science resources program at National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the AGM. Prior to this role, she was a specialist in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco in the laboratory of Dr. Michelle Arkin. At UCSF, she co-led the Drug-Induced Liver Injury (DILI) team at the Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM) consortium. She completed her postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health and received her Ph.D. in molecular genetics from The Ohio State University.

Terry Riss

Scientific Ambassador, Cell Health Promega Corporation

Dr. Riss received a PhD from the University of Illinois in 1978 in the field of mammary gland biology. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Texas Medical School purifying growth factors involved with breast cancer and developing serum-free media formulations to implement bioassays. He moved to the Biotechnology division of Schering Plough in 1988 to develop interleukin/cytokine bioassays to support IND filings. Dr. Riss started the Cell Biology program at Promega Corporation in 1990 and has held several R&D and Project Management positions. He managed development of cell viability, cytotoxicity, apoptosis, and protease assay systems and lead efforts to identify and promote multiplexing assays to determine the mechanism of cell death. Dr. Riss now serves as Scientific Ambassador, Cell Health involved in outreach educational training activities. Dr. Riss is co-editor of the in vitro cell based assays section of the Assay Guidance Manual hosted by NIH and is an active member of AACR, SIVB, SLAS, SOT, ESTIV & ASCCT.

Jonny Sexton

University of Michigan Medical School

Jonny did his graduate work at the University of California San Diego in chemistry and trained as a postdoctoral fellow in structural biology in Nobel Laureate Roger Kornberg’s lab at Stanford University. He then moved to North Carolina to help start the BRITE institute - a drug discovery institute situated between Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill and became the director of drug discovery there. Jonny started two biotech startups and then moved to the University of Michigan Medical School in 2018 in the department of Internal Medicine in Gastroenterology and Hepatology. Jonny’s research program is focused on drug discovery and drug repurposing for GI diseases like NAFLD/NASH, Type-II diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease. The technology focus of the lab is in high content imaging and machine vision to interrogate physiologically relevant cell and tissue models as the platform for drug discovery.

Kaylene Simpson

Victorian Centre for Functional Genomics, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

A/Prof Kaylene Simpson established the Victorian Centre for Functional Genomics at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre 13 years ago, following her return from the Department of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School where she had pioneered high throughput RNAi screening and quantitative imaging. The VCFG is a team of 8 that enables researchers Australia-wide to perform unbiased target discovery using high throughput approaches including CRISPR, RNAi and compound screening in both 2D and 3D, underpinned by sophisticated cell phenotyping using high content imaging. The lab houses genome-scale human and mouse CRISPR (viral and synthetic strategies), RNAi, shRNA, micro RNA, long non-coding RNA libraries and enables compound screening through Compounds Australia as our national compound repository. Operating a 'researcher driven - staff assisted model' the VCFG embeds researchers into the lab to deliver an end-end service from assay development to analysis and generation of a hit list. The lab is underpinned by quantitative plate reader outputs together with quantitative high content imaging strategies and our customised, sophisticated analytical pipelines for data analysis. We have developed automated 3D screening pipelines using cell lines, PDX and patient derived materials, successfully screening compound libraries and performing 2- and 3-way drug synergy studies. We have developed machine learning strategies to analyse patient-derived organoids across many individuals and can quantify organoids on whole well population outcomes as well as single structures to begin to dissect tumour heterogeneity and drug response. 

BanuPriya Sridharan

Scientific Investigator, GSK

Banu Sridharan is a Scientific Investigator at GlaxoSmithKline in the Complex In Vitro Models group. Her current focus is leading the space in implementing organotypic models for screening at scale targeting tumor microenvironment. She also develops deeply complex models in the liver disease area for answering specific mechanism and target validation questions. She has over 8+ years of hands-on experience developing human lab-derived complex in vitro models for applications ranging from regenerative medicine to disease modeling. She received her postdoctoral training from The Scripps Research Institute on high throughput screening of iPSC derived neurons and pancreatic organoids with a specific focus on high content imaging. Banu received her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Kansas and completed her undergraduate degree in India.

Joe Trask

Product Line Leader & Senior Application Scientist, Cellular Imaging and Analysis, Americas PerkinElmer

Joe Trask is a Product Line Leader and Senior Field Application Scientist in the Cellular Imaging and Analysis group at PerkinElmer. He is instrumental in strategic customer support through teaching, training, and collaborations. He brings over 20 years of experience in high content screening technology from academia (Duke University and The Ohio State University), pharmaceutical industry (Abbott Laboratories and Sphinx Laboratories, Division of Eli Lilly & Company), and biotechnology (The Hamner Institute for Health Sciences and ScitoVation LLC). Joe has extensive experience in cell based technologies from flow cytometry, confocal microscopy and computer-assisted automated microscopy studying cancer, immunology, neurodegeneration, and toxicology. Joe has published several research articles and book chapters in High Content Imaging field, and is an author and co-editor to the NIH/NCATS Assay Guidance Manual. Joe was a co-founder and first President of Society for Biomolecular Imaging and Informatics (SBI2) and co-editor of a recent book “High Content Screening: A Powerful Approach to Systems Cell Biology and Drug Discovery”.