Company Advisors

Scientific advisors

Mostafa Ronaghi, PhD

Co-founder, Scientific Advisory Board Chairman
Dr. Ronaghi is Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Illumina, Inc., a leading publicly traded life sciences company. Dr. Ronaghi joined Illumina following the acquisition of Avantome, Inc., his fourth life sciences start-up company. Prior to joining Illumina, Dr. Ronaghi was a principal investigator at Stanford University focusing on the development of novel tools for molecular diagnostics. Dr. Ronaghi co-founded NextBio in 2004, having already founded two life sciences companies previously. In 1997, he co-founded Pyrosequencing AB (renamed to Biotage in 2003), a genomics company that develops and markets pyrosequencing systems and consumables. Pyrosequencing AB had a successful IPO in June 2000 on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Dr. Ronaghi co-founded ParAllele BioScience in November 2001. ParAllele developed and marketed a highly multiplexed technology for genetic testing and was acquired by Affymetrix in May 2005. Dr. Ronaghi earned his PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. He holds more than 20 pending and issued patents and has written more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in journals and books. Dr. Ronaghi also serves on the Board of Directors of Microchip Biotechnologies and Aurora Biofuels.

Russ Biagio Altman, MD, PhD

Dr. Altman is professor of bioengineering, genetics, & medicine (and of computer science, by courtesy) and chairman of the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University. His primary research interests are in the application of computing technology to basic molecular biological problems of relevance to medicine. He is particularly interested in informatics methods for advancing pharmacogenomics, the study of how human genetic variation impacts drug response (e.g. http://www.pharmgkb.org/). Other work focuses on the analysis of functional sites within macromolecules and the application of algorithms for determining the structure, dynamics and function of biological macromolecules (http://feature.stanford.edu/). Dr. Altman holds an M.D. from Stanford Medical School, a Ph.D. in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford, and an A.B. from Harvard College. He has been the recipient of the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. He is a past-president and founding board member of the International Society for Computational Biology, and an organizer of the annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. He leads one of seven NIH-supported National Centers for Biomedical Computation, focusing on physics-based simulation of biological structures (http://simbios.stanford.edu/). He won the Stanford Medical School graduate teaching award in 2000. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

Ronald Davis, PhD

Professor Davis is the Director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center and Professor of Biochemistry and Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Davis is a world-renowned researcher in the area of genomics and high throughput biochemical techniques and has pioneered many of the early techniques developed using recombinant DNA. He also helped conceive of novel methods for genetic linkage analysis. Dr. Davis has received multiple awards for his contributions to the field of biology and sits on the NIH Genome Research Committee. In addition to his work in academia, Professor Davis has been involved in the spin-off of multiple start-up companies in the area of genomics from his laboratory at Stanford.

Leroy Hood, MD, PhD

Dr. Hood is President and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. He has been at the forefront of scientific discovery and technological research for more than 35 years. Dr. Hood has published more than 600 peer-reviewed papers, received 12 patents, co-founded nearly a dozen companies and was awarded the 2002 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for his outstanding contributions to biotechnology and medical technology.

Michael Silber, PhD

Dr. Silber has held senior executive positions in several of the world's leading Pharma/Biotech companies, including most recently as Senior Vice President and Site Head of Preclinical R&D at Roche Pharmaceuticals. He has experience developing innovative new medicines in major diseases and has expertise in root cause analysis of R&D attrition/success. Dr. Silber has published over 120 research articles, book chapters, and abstracts, and is a member of the editorial boards for six journals. He has also held other key positions, including Vice President of R&D at J&J/ALZA; Director of Genomic and Proteomic Sciences at Pfizer Research; Senior Director and Division Head of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Cetus (Novartis); Director and Head of Drug Metabolism at Lederle (Wyeth); and Assistant Professor, University of Washington School of Medicine and Pharmacy. Dr. Silber has a PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Pharmacology from the University of California, San Francisco.

Saeed Tavazoie, PhD

Dr. Tavazoie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. Dr. Tavazoie has done pioneering research in the areas of computational biology and functional genomics. His laboratory develops genomic technologies and computational algorithms for identifying transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulatory elements across the genome and builds predictive models of how these sequences come together to orchestrate gene expression. Professor Tavazoie has broad cross-disciplinary expertise in biophysics, molecular biology, genomics, computational biology and medicine, and his research is aimed at developing new conceptual frameworks for extracting biological understanding from large datasets, including genome sequences, microarray expression data and large-scale genotype/phenotype observations.

Nick Tsinoremas, PhD

Dr. Tsinoremas is currently the founding Director of the Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) at the University of Miami and Research Professor at the Department of Medicine at the Miller School of Medicine. Prior to founding the CCS, Dr. Tsinoremas was a Senior Director of Informatics at Scripps Florida, where he oversaw the development of scientific applications, databases and data analysis systems that are essential in the drug discovery process, ranging from statistical genetics and data mining to chemo-informatics and sequence-based analysis. Before joining Scripps Florida, he served as director of Computational Genomics and Genomic Discovery at Rosetta/Merck. Previously, Dr. Tsinoremas held senior positions in computational genomics and bioinformatics at DoubleTwist, Incyte Genomics and Progenitor. Dr. Tsinoremas' original research includes light-regulated gene expression and circadian rhythms.

Technical advisors

Serafim Batzoglou, PhD

Dr. Batzoglou is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is currently conducting research in the applications of mathematics and computer science to genomic research. His current research focuses on alignment algorithms, comparative genomics, gene regulation, regulatory motif finding and microarray analysis.

Sepandar David Kamvar, PhD

Dr. Kamvar is a successful technology entrepreneur. Until 2008, Dr. Kamvar worked as the technical lead of personalization at Google and a consulting professor in Computational Mathematics at Stanford University. Prior to that, he was the founder and CEO of Kaltix, a personalized search engine that was acquired by Google in October 2003. Dr. Kamvar received his BS in Chemistry from Princeton University, and his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Stanford University. He is on the advisory boards of several companies including Parascale and SimplyHired.

Edward Kiruluta

Mr. Kiruluta is the Vice President of Engineering at DemandTec where he leads the econometrics, optimization research and database teams. Prior to joining DemandTec, Mr. Kiruluta was a Senior Director of Informatics at Merck Research Labs (MRL) where he led the development of the Target Genome Index (TGI), an environment to help researchers gain better insights into biological function and drug response by integrating clinical data with genomics, proteomics and metabolomics technologies. Prior to joining Merck, Mr. Kiruluta was Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, R&D at DoubleTwist (formerly Pangea Systems). At DoubleTwist, Mr. Kiruluta led a team of scientists and engineers to develop Prophecy, the first comprehensive annotation of the human genome, and DoubleTwist.com, the first portal for life science researchers. Mr. Kiruluta has over 15 years of experience in the software industry.