Gavin Newsom, Governor of California Gavin Newsom is the Governor of California, formerly Lieutenant Governor of California and Mayor of San Francisco. Governor Newsom is married to Jennifer Siebel Newsom. They have four children: Montana, Hunter, Brooklynn, and Dutch. Newsom is widely recognized for his bold willingness to lead – repeatedly [...]
Shahram Seyedin-Noor, Founder and General Partner of Civilization Ventures Shahram is the Founder and General Partner of Civilization Ventures, a fund focused on supporting cutting-edge innovations in synthetic biology and health tech, including genomics, diagnostics, AI and regenerative medicine. Founded in 2017, Civilization VC has already been recognized by SVB as [...]
Renee Wegrzyn, Program Manager in the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Dr. Renee Wegrzyn is a Program Manager in the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where she is pioneering disruptive approaches to leverage the tools of synthetic [...]
Cary Lai, Associate Professor at University of San Francisco As a graduate student, Professor Lai performed a biochemical and structural analysis of the enzyme telomerase. Following graduate school, he worked in early-stage research at Genentech where he investigated the Hedgehog signing pathway and its role in tumorigenesis. Most recently, Prof. Lai [...]
Stephanie Michelsen, Writer and Editor at SynBioBeta Stephanie Michelsen is pursuing her M.Sc. in Biotechnology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She recently got accepted as an International Innovation Program (2ip) fellow, a program designed to connect Danish life science students with the biotech start-up industry in the Bay Area. She [...]
Jonathan Vroom, Principal Scientist at Codexis Jonathan Vroom is currently a principal scientist at Codexis focusing on directed enzyme evolution. He previously did postdoctoral work at the Joint BioEnergy Institute and received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Stanford.
David Maurer, Director of Internal Engineering at Distributed Bio David is currently a Director of Internal Engineering at Distributed Bio. Previously, he was senior microbiologist at Silliker (now BioMerieux), focusing on Salmonella and Listeria serology. David received his bachelor in science from Ohio State with a double major in microbiology/ecology and received [...]
Rishi Bedi, Co-Founder of Y-Trap Rishi Bedi leads engineering and product development at Y-Trap, a biotechnology company focused on the development of revolutionary technologies for cancer immunotherapy. He's applied machine learning for predicting the structure of protein-protein complexes (at Stanford with Ron Dror), antibody engineering (in collaboration with Distributed Bio), assessment [...]
Claire Laporte, Head of Intellectual Property at Ginkgo Bioworks. Claire Laporte is Head of Intellectual Property at Ginkgo Bioworks. She has designed its IP strategy and provides strategic oversight of Ginkgo's patent portfolio, trade secrets, and other knowledge assets. Before joining Ginkgo, Claire served the life science industry in private practice [...]
Ian Watson, Assistant Director for Biotechnology and Biosecurity at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) Mr. Watson is the Assistant Director for Biotechnology and Biosecurity at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President [...]
