Jennifer Hawks Bland

Jennifer Hawks Bland is the Chief Executive Officer of NewYorkBIO. Prior to joining NewYorkBIO, Ms. Bland was an Executive Director in the State Government Affairs & Policy group at Merck. She has also held government affairs positions at GlaxoSmithKline and the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA), the 136-year old trade association representing manufacturers of over-the- counter medicines. Ms. Bland previously was an associate with the Jackson, MS law firm of Butler, Snow, O’Mara, Stevens, & Cannada, PLLC where she principally practiced in the area of products liability litigation. Before entering the practice of law, she worked for six years for U.S. Senator Thad Cochran (RMiss.). Ms. Bland is a member of both the District of Columbia and Mississippi Bar Associations. She also has extensive volunteer experience and is currently the PTA co-president of her child’s school and sits on the Board of the Pelham Art Center. Ms. Bland currently resides in Pelham, New York with her husband, R. Trabue Bland and their two sons.

Patricia Bradley

Patricia Bradley has had a successful career in the BioPharma industry. Patricia has held senior leadership positions as VP of Sales and previously VP of Marketing at Novo Nordisk and has deep commercial experience in market access. She is recognized for building a successful clinical education business unit from the ground up with over 300+ employees. Her team was recognized as best in class within the industry and held national recognition through NCQA for Program Design. She has deep commercial experience having held multiple leadership roles in Sales leadership, Marketing and Market Access and sat on the Executive Marketing Leadership Team for several years which had oversight to the entire Novo Nordisk US commercial budget.
From a sales perspective, she has led major field expansions, built new teams, and evaluated/negotiated contracts. Patricia has deep expertise in outcomes focused healthcare, and through her creativity and leadership, her team won 2 consecutive NCQA certifications, the first and only pharmaceutical company to receive this honor in Program Design. Patricia has led organizational-wide efforts to transform the Pharma and she developed patient-centric initiatives that delivered statistically significant improvements in patient outcomes.
Patricia's experience is in many areas; sales, marketing strategy, portfolio strategy, field leadership, field execution, business analytics, incentive planning, change management, and employee engagement. At Novo Nordisk, Patricia was a member of the Marketing Leadership Team (MLT) which governed the company’s entire commercial budget. She pioneered and piloted patient-level data mining to reverse engineer effective field deployment and HCP targeting. She is known for having minimal "unwanted" turnover and high employee engagement and has led field sales pilots for value-based contracting.
With more than 25 years of diverse experience ranging from industrial engineering to start-ups, Patricia has held previous positions at United Parcel Service, and Neuromedical Systems. She received her BS with a dual major in Business Economics and Political Science from The State University of New York at Oneonta, and completed her MBA at Wagner College in New York.
Patricia has been happily married to her husband Joe for over 25 years. They have a busy athletic son Ryan, 17 who is involved in several travel sports. Her hobbies include spinning, boating, fishing and spending time with family at the beach

Vicky Demas

Before joining Tesseract as CEO, Dr. Demas led the development of new products at the cancer screening company GRAIL, where she also managed the scientific and technology portfolio and led a cross functional competitive intelligence program. She supported the development of the core platform technology which formed the basis of the company’s first multi cancer early detection test (Galleri), and she led GRAIL’s post-diagnostic efforts. Prior to joining GRAIL, she was a founding member of the Google Life Sciences (GLS) team within Google [x], which was later spun out to form Verily. At Verily, she led several teams and projects, including in diagnostics, medical devices, and translational laboratory science, and helped build its multidisciplinary science and engineering programs. Before Verily, Dr. Demas held multiple positions of responsibility at T2 Biosystems. She currently holds over 20 patents and has authored and co-authored numerous publications across multiple disciplines. She holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley and Livermore National Labs.

Guy Rosenthal

Charles Hugh-Jones

Charles is an experienced biotech leader and a board-certified physician. Prior to joining Volastra, Charles served as the global chief medical officer at Allergan PLC, where he led complex interdisciplinary teams and supported the launch of novel medicines in multiple therapeutic areas. Before Allergan, Charles worked for Pfizer Oncology as their chief medical officer and had medical oversight of all late-stage drug development and commercialization activities. He began his career at Schering AG, Enzon Pharmaceuticals and Sanofi, where he held various positions of increasing responsibility. Charles received his bachelor’s in neuroanatomy and M.D. from the University of London. He went on to complete higher specialist training in diagnostic radiology.

Sree Kant

Sree Kant is an experienced biotech executive, and company builder. Over a 20-year career in life sciences and healthcare, Sree has worked across investing, operational, advisory, and entrepreneurial roles and functions. He is passionate about translating cutting edge science into therapies that significantly change health outcomes for patients.

Before founding BAKX, Sree headed the Investments and Partnerships function at Life Biosciences, where he built platform focused companies in the areas of age-related diseases. He also took on operational roles in the portfolio companies driving the corporate development agenda. Prior to Life bio, Sree led early partnering strategy for Pfizer, driving strategic partnerships across different therapeutic areas/technologies and geographies. He also built Pfizer’s early target partnering vehicle and drove academic partnerships and spinouts to advance novel target platforms.

Sree was also Principal at the Boston Consulting Group advising large pharma, biotech, and medical device companies in areas of Corporate development, R&D strategy, M&A, etc. Sree started his career with Ranbaxy labs in New Delhi and London, and also was a founding member of India’s first preventative, managed health company.

Sree has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, and an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health.

David Carmel

Mr. Carmel is the senior vice president of public affairs and communications of eGenesis and is responsible for external outreach efforts to investors, advocacy organizations, professional societies, and policy makers. Prior to joining eGenesis, Mr. Carmel served as vice president in medical affairs and strategic alliances at Atara Biotherapeutics, where he helped to advance tab-cel® (tabelecleucel), which is in Phase 3 development for post-transplant lymphoproliferative disease (PTLD), an aggressive cancer that affects patients who have received a solid organ or bone marrow transplant. Earlier, he was co-founder and principal of Carmel Asset Management, an investment partnership where he was responsible for life science investments. Previously, he held positions in public affairs and business development for StemCyte, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson. Mr. Carmel served as the White House Fellow for the Secretary of the Treasury from 2002 to 2003.
Mr. Carmel was appointed by Governor Andrew Cuomo to the New York Life Science Advisory Board. He is a founding board member of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, a former member of the New York State Spinal Cord Injury Research Board, and a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. He worked on the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, which provided $3 billion to fund stem cell research. He earned a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard College and an MBA with a certificate in health care from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Jon Laurent

Jon Laurent received his PhD in Molecular Biology from UT Austin and did his postdoctoral studies at NYU Langone Health, helping lead development of high-throughput technologies for genetic and genomic engineering and analysis. In the face of the pandemic through 2020, he helped lead the pivot of one of those platforms to perform 10s of thousands of COVID tests per day, eventually co-founding the Pandemic Response Lab as part of Opentrons to become NYC’s primary testing provider. He now leads the R&D group at PRL, tasked with developing new disruptive diagnostic assays and platforms, as well as advising on scientific direction for Opentrons as a whole.

James Peyer

James Peyer is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Cambrian Biopharma. He also serves as the Chairman of the Board of Sensei Biotherapeutics and holds multiple board and executive roles across Cambrian’s pipeline. He has spent his entire life dedicated to the mission of finding ways of preventing people from getting diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s instead of waiting for people to get sick. James was previously Founder and Managing Partner at Apollo Ventures, the first global longevity-focused venture capital firm, investing across the US and Europe. Prior to Apollo, James was a biotech R&D specialist at the New York office of McKinsey & Company, serving major pharmaceutical clients. He earned his PhD in stem cell biology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center as a National Science Foundation Fellow and received his B.A. with special honors from the University of Chicago.

Luis Voloch

Luis F Voloch is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder at Immunai, where he is helping bring transformational change to immunology, cancer, science, and beyond. Immunai has a team of over 100 experts in machine learning, software, immunology, and genomics technologies and are focused on mapping and reprogramming the immune system, which has allowed his team to build the largest database for immunological data in the world. Previously, Voloch was the Head of Data Science and Machine Learning at Israel Tech Challenge and worked on a variety of Genomics and AI efforts industry (including Palantir) and at MIT.He won the Best Thesis award among all PhD-track students in MIT’s Computer Science department and was previously listed in this year’s Forbes 30-Under-30, Israel.

Sean Coady

Sean leads the overall strategic plan and vision for the region and serves on the Woodruff Sawyer Board of Directors. Sean currently handles a multitude of pre-IPO and public clients spanning multiple industries, including high tech, life science, health care, retail, and manufacturing. He is an expert in executive liability and risk management—specifically D&O liability and M&A insurance. He has authored several articles on D&O liability and M&A-related products and has structured financial risk solutions for hundreds of companies.

Sean’s success representing clients as an insurance broker is the result of his ability to maximize his relationships and utilize his problem solving skills established during his many years practicing as an attorney, most recently at Testa Hurwitz in Boston, where he practiced as both a litigation and corporate attorney working with private and public companies through various stages of their development.

Sean graduated magna cum laude from Providence College and earned his juris doctorate with honors from the University of Connecticut.

Yaron Werber

Dr. Yaron Werber is a Managing Director and senior research analyst on Cowen’s biotechnology team. In this role, Dr. Werber is responsible for providing analysis on large-, mid-, and small-cap biotechnology stocks. Dr. Werber has 20+ years of experience as a research analyst in the financial services industry and has served as an executive in a public biotechnology company.

Prior to rejoining Cowen, Dr. Werber was a founding team member, chief business and financial officer, treasurer and secretary of Ovid Therapeutics, a biotechnology company focused on developing transformative drugs for orphan disorders of the brain. In this role, Dr. Werber established and was responsible for all financial planning and reporting, business development, strategy, operations/IT and investor and public relations and human resources functionality. Dr. Werber also led negotiations to secure several pipeline compounds including an innovative partnership with Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, a deal that expanded Ovid’s pipeline and pioneered a novel approach for partnering the focused expertise of small biotech with big pharma.

This deal was chosen by Scrip as a finalist for the 2017 Best Partnership Alliance Award. In addition, Dr. Werber oversaw all financing activities and led a $75 million Series B round in 2015 and Ovid’s $75 million IPO in 2017. In that capacity, Dr. Werber was selected as an “Emerging Pharma Leader” by Pharmaceutical Executive magazine in 2017.

Prior to joining Ovid, Dr. Werber worked at Citi from 2004 to 2015, where he most recently served as a managing director and head of U.S. healthcare and biotech equity research. During his tenure at Citi, Dr. Werber led a team that conducted in-depth analyses of life science companies at all stages of development, ranging from successful, profitable companies to recently public and privately held companies. Previously, Dr. Werber was a senior biotech analyst and vice president at SG Cowen Securities Corporation from 2001-‘04.

Dr. Werber has been awarded several accolades for performance and stock picking, he has been highly ranked by Institutional Investor magazine, has received awards from Starmine and was voted among the top five analysts in biotech in the Wall Street Journal’s “Best on the Street” Greenwich survey. He has frequently been featured as a guest on CNBC, Fox News, Bloomberg News and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg thestreet.com and BioCentury.

Dr. Werber earned his B.S. in Biology from Tufts University, cum laude, and a combined M.D./MBA degree from Tufts University School of Medicine where he was a Terner Scholar

David Berry

David Berry is the Founder and CEO of Valo and since 2005, has served as General Partner at Flagship Pioneering, having founded over 25 companies including Indigo Agriculture, Seres Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MCRB), Eleven Biotherapeutics (NASDAQ: EBIO), T2 Biosystems (NASDAQ: TTOO), Evelo Biosciences (NASDAQ: EVLO), Axcella Health (NASDAQ: AXLA), and Joule Unlimited. David played an instrumental role in the conception and implementation of Flagship Labs, which is the foundation of all of its companies.

David has been broadly recognized as a world-leading innovator: elected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, named as Innovator of the Year by Technology Review from amongst its Annual TR35 list, and selected as one of 12 Innovators Reshaping Reality by the U.S. State Department, alongside pioneers such as Tim Berners-Lee. He holds over 200 patents and patent applications. David and his companies have been awarded with over 150 additional awards and honors.

David currently serves on the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (UN SDSN), where he was a Founding Leadership Council Member. David received his MD from Harvard Medical School and his PhD from MIT in Biological Engineering.

Melanie Goldey

Melanie has nearly 20 years of experience in leading strategy, finance, people, and corporate operations in technology-enabled, high growth companies. She has deep expertise in building the infrastructure required for companies to scale, including fundraising, M&A, and navigating the transition from start-up through IPO.

Before joining TMRW, Melanie was CFO at Refinery29, where she was instrumental to the company’s global expansion and ultimate merger with Vice Media Group, creating the largest digital media company in the world, valued at over $4 billion.

Prior to Refinery29, Melanie was an executive at Everyday Health, a multi-platform digital healthcare company using data and technology to service patients, professionals, payers, and providers. She joined Everyday Health when it was an early-stage start-up, helped grow the company’s capabilities through multiple acquisitions and financings, a $100 million IPO, and ultimately to a nearly half billion dollar acquisition by J2 Global. Melanie began her career as a technology and media investment banker at J.P. Morgan in San Francisco and New York. Melanie is a member of the Fast Company Impact Council, was named one of the Top 25 Women Leaders in Biotechnology 2021 by the Healthcare Technology Report, and honored as a Rising Star by the Healthcare Businesswomen's Association.

At TMRW, Melanie’s role combines a number of her long-held passions: using technology to disrupt the way people live their lives, consumer-focused healthcare, and taking companies to the next level so that their innovative solutions can quickly benefit as many people as possible. She oversees all operations, including product, technology, marketing, people operations, finance, legal, and quality and regulatory affairs. As both a woman and a parent, TMRW's mission is one that resonates with her aspirations to do work that truly makes a difference in the world.

Jennifer Hawks Bland

Jennifer Hawks Bland is the Chief Executive Officer of NewYorkBIO. Prior to joining NewYorkBIO, Ms. Bland was an Executive Director in the State Government Affairs & Policy group at Merck. She has also held government affairs positions at GlaxoSmithKline and the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA), the 136-year old trade association representing manufacturers of over-the- counter medicines. Ms. Bland previously was an associate with the Jackson, MS law firm of Butler, Snow, O’Mara, Stevens, & Cannada, PLLC where she principally practiced in the area of products liability litigation. Before entering the practice of law, she worked for six years for U.S. Senator Thad Cochran (RMiss.). Ms. Bland is a member of both the District of Columbia and Mississippi Bar Associations. She also has extensive volunteer experience and is currently the PTA co-president of her child’s school and sits on the Board of the Pelham Art Center. Ms. Bland currently resides in Pelham, New York with her husband, R. Trabue Bland and their two sons.