management

management | scientific advisors | technical advisors

Saeid Akhtari

Co-founder, President and CEO
Mr. Akhtari leads NextBio with more than 20 years of experience developing and commercializing software products for the analysis and management of life sciences data. As CEO of Silicon Genetics, Mr. Akhtari led the team that developed GeneSpring and Varia, the most popular and widely used software packages for the visualization and analysis of genomics and genotyping data. These products are used by thousands of researchers in more than 600 leading pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions and major research organizations around the world. Silicon Genetics was recognized as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America with inclusion on the Deloitte Technology FAST 500. Silicon Genetics was acquired by Agilent Technologies in 2004. Mr. Akhtari has held executive management positions at several other life sciences software companies whose products include WinNonlin, GeneWorld, MacVector and PCGene.

Ilya Kupershmidt

Co-founder, VP of Product Management
Mr. Kupershmidt leads NextBio's product development, scientific computing and content teams. His team includes PhDs and MDs from leading academic institutions with extensive experience in bioinformatics, statistics, molecular biology, chemistry, and clinical research. Mr. Kupershmidt has a decade of experience in the design, implementation and integration of software solutions for organizations involved in basic and clinical research and drug discovery. Prior to NextBio, Mr. Kupershmidt was the Director of Professional Services at Silicon Genetics. There he helped develop and customize software solutions for the analysis and management of high throughput data generated by genomic, proteomic and genotyping technologies. Mr. Kupershmidt joined Silicon Genetics as an early stage startup and successfully worked with hundreds of academic institutions and commercial enterprises. Previously, Mr. Kupershmidt carried out research as a geneticist at the UCSD Howard Hughes Medical Institute where he studied transcriptional mechanisms of gene expression regulation during pituitary development.

Satnam Alag, PhD

VP of Engineering
Dr. Alag leads the company's engineering team and is responsible for software development, quality assurance and network operations. Dr. Alag is a seasoned software professional with over fifteen years of experience in machine learning and over a decade of experience in commercial software development and management. His areas of expertise include building large-scale distributed SaaS applications, search, applying intelligence and personalization to Web 2.0 applications and delivering high quality software. Prior to joining NextBio, Dr. Alag worked as a consultant with Johnson & Johnson's BabyCenter where he helped develop their personalization engine. Prior to that he was the Chief Software Architect and Director of Application Engineering at Rearden Commerce. Dr. Alag began his career at GE R&D and has held senior positions at Computing Technologies International and Black Pearl. Dr. Alag earned his PhD in engineering from UC Berkeley and has published a number of peer-reviewed articles. He is the author of the book Collective Intelligence in Action published by Manning in 2008.

Shahram Seyedin-Noor

CFO & VP of Corporate Development
Mr. Seyedin-Noor leads the company's financing and acquisition strategy, as well as key business development, marketing and operational efforts. Mr. Seyedin-Noor has spent a decade working as a strategic advisor to leading technology and life sciences companies, including Amgen, DivX, Ariba, OpenWave, InterMune, Inktomi and Cadence, among many others, as well as dozens of startups and private equity firms. Prior to joining NextBio, Mr. Seyedin-Noor was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs & Co. and a Vice President at Bank of America, where he advised on corporate finance and M&A matters. Mr. Seyedin-Noor started his career at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Cooley Godward Kronish working with startups and VCs on business transactions. He earned his JD from the Harvard Law School and his BA in economics from Pomona College, with honors. In addition, Mr. Seyedin-Noor has served as the elected Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard International Law Journal.top

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.

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. top

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.