Genesis Therapeutics

Evan Feinberg, Ph.D.

CEO, Co-founder

Evan received a degree in physics from Yale and a biophysics Ph.D. from Stanford working in Vijay Pande's lab. During his time at Stanford, he invented PotentialNet and consulted on deep learning for big pharma. Evan was also an early software engineer on the MoleculeNet and DeepChem open source projects.

Ben Sklaroff

CTO, Co-founder

Ben received a degree in EECS from UC Berkeley, then joined Markforged when it was still in a garage. He led the software team there as Markforged became the 10th fastest growing company in North America.

Will McCarthy, MBA

COO

Most recently Will was CBO at Generation Bio, where he helped drive corporate strategy initiatives including the company's ~$1B IPO. Previously he was CBO at Ignyta, where he was responsible for all aspects of commercial launch planning for the company's lead clinical asset, and was a key participant in the acquisition by Roche for ~$2B. Earlier in his career he led business development and marketing functions at Foundation Medicine, Halozyme and Neurocrine. He has an MBA from London Business School and a BA in Economics.

Peppi Prasit, Ph.D.

Acting CSO

Peppi co-founded Inception Sciences as well as Amira Pharmaceuticals. Previously, as a medicinal chemist at Merck he played a key role in the discovery and development of FDA-approved drugs Vioxx®, Arcoxia®, and Singulair®.

Stephen Dann, Ph.D.

VP Biology

Stephen completed his biology Ph.D. at the University of Victoria and then a postdoc on mTOR/S6K signaling with George Thomas at the University of Cincinnati. He then spent over a decade at Pfizer developing small molecule oncology drugs. Most recently, he was the Research Project Leader for the next generation CDK2/4/6 and CDK2-selective inhibitors currently undergoing Phase I clinical testing in hormone receptor positive breast cancer.

Wang Xu, CPA

Senior Director, Controller

Prior to joining Genesis, Wang was Controller of NovaBay Pharmaceuticals, where she was responsible for all accounting matters including SEC reporting, general accounting, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Wang also served as Controller at AltheaDx, and as Assistant Controller at Oldcastle Materials. Wang started her career at Ernst & Young in Atlanta, serving audit clients in a variety of industries. Wang received a Masters of Accounting from UNC Chapel Hill.

Adi Nagle, Ph.D.

Sen. Dir. Medicinal Chemistry

Adi received his chemistry degree from UDCT in Mumbai, and his Ph.D. from University of South Florida. Afterwards, Adi completed his postdoctoral studies at TSRI, and then spent the next quīndecim at GNF working on infectious, demyelinating, and anti-fibrotic diseases. His more impactful contributions include discovery of KAF156 for uncomplicated malaria, currently in phase IIb, and LXE408 for visceral leishmaniasis, now in phase I.

Chris Burke, Ph.D.

Director Medicinal Chemistry

Chris completed his chemistry Ph.D. at Colorado State University with Professor Yian Shi followed by post-doctoral studies with Professor Dale L. Boger at Scripps Research. He then spent the next eleven years at GNF (Novartis) making contributions to drug discovery projects in diverse areas including two programs currently in clinical trials in regenerative medicine. Over the years, he has worked on developing new therapeutic agents for Gram-positive pathogens, multiple sclerosis, and various cancers.

Brett Busch, Ph.D.

Sen. Dir. Medicinal Chemistry

Brett received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from UT Austin, and his Ph.D. from UC Irvine while working with Prof Kenneth Shea. He started his career at Exelixis San Diego working on small molecule modulators of nuclear hormone receptors where he had major contributions in the invention of LXR agonist clinical candidate BMS-927. He then spent a decade at Vertex Pharmaceuticals working on numerous projects including Huntington’s Disease, pain, and correctors for CFTR. He has published over 13 peer-reviewed journal articles and 15 US patents covering preclinical and clinical-phase drugs.

Julie Laterreur

Senior Director of DMPK

Julie completed her B.S. degree in Chemistry from University of Sherbrooke and her M.S. degree in Biochemistry from Concordia University. She then spent the next 16 years at Vertex Pharmaceutical working as DMPK lead on numerous projects including modulator of CFTR, IBD, kidney diseases, and HCV. She has been involved in more than 10 regulatory submissions (CTA, IND, NDA) including NDA submission for FDA approved drug, Trikafta®.

Maruan Al-Shedivat, Ph.D.

Director of ML Research

Maruan received a degree in physics from Moscow State University in Russia and a Ph.D. in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon. While at CMU, he spent over a year working on research at OpenAI and Google. His work on data-efficient machine learning and explainable AI were recognized with multiple awards, including a best paper award at ICLR, a CMLH Fellowship in Digital Health, and a Google Fellowship in Machine Learning.

Yongkai Li, Ph.D.

Assoc. Dir. Medicinal Chemistry

Yongkai received his B.S. degree from Nanjing University in China and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Dartmouth College with Professor Peter A. Jacobi. After postdoctoral training with Professor Dale L. Boger at Scripps Research, he started his career at Ligand Pharmaceuticals before spending over a decade at Novartis San Diego (GNF) where he worked on immune modulators and led the discovery of clinical compounds LHC165 (cancer immunotherapy) and LHD153 (vaccine adjuvant). Most recently he worked at Calibr at Scripps Research and Zentalis Pharmaceuticals on a variety of oncology targets.

Anders Papitto

ML Research Engineer

Anders received a degree in EECS from UC Berkeley. Since then, he has worked on relational database internals at MemSQL, and later on the PyTorch team at Facebook.

James Pruegsanusak

ML Research Engineer

James received a B.S. and M.Eng. in EECS from MIT. During his previous internships, he worked on computer vision at Cambridge Mobile Telematics and trading system internals at Jane Street. He also won a gold medal in the International Physics Olympiad in 2014.

Alex Izvorski

Research Fellow

Alex received a degree in math and biochemistry from Dartmouth. Since then, he's worked at hard tech startups in both software and therapeutics. Alex was a founding team member of Vubiquity (acquired by Amdocs), CiiNOW (acquired by Google), and Vium (acquired by Recursion Pharma). His core interests are in merging deep learning and biophysical simulation.

Zach Kagin

Software Engineer

Zach received his degree in Physics and Economics from Yale. Prior to joining Genesis, he spent six years at Dropbox working in software engineering, product management, and leading the data science and product analytics teams. He has also helped improve restaurant food supply chains in Colombia, and assisted school transitions to remote learning during the pandemic.

Nikhil Murthy

Principal ML Research Engineer

Nikhil received a B.S. and M.Eng. in EECS from MIT, where he led the ML club and researched 3D implicit scene representations. He has worked on active learning research at NVIDIA and taught a deep learning course on Coursera to 20k+ people.

Drake Diedrich, Ph.D.

Lead Infrastructure Engineer

Drake developed mass spectral pattern recognition software at Michigan State and received a Ph.D. in quantum Monte Carlo from Penn State. He then developed clusters and rendering code for computational biology, and headed the IT and Communications group at the John Curtin School of Medical Research. At Google, Facebook, and Doordash he worked on operating systems, storage and database systems, and general production engineering.

Lisa Nguyen

Scientist

Lisa received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Biology from UC San Diego. Before joining Genesis, she worked as a scientist with a focus on in vitro cellular pharmacology for small molecule oncology drug discovery at Pfizer. Her contributions have resulted in a number of the drugs now undergoing clinical trials.

Marissa Smith

Scientist

Marissa received her B.S. in Biochemistry from St. Michael's College and her M.S. in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology from SUNY Upstate Medical University. Prior to joining Genesis, she spent three years at Pfizer developing biochemical and biophysical assays for small molecule screening in oncology R&D.

Wojtek Swiderski

ML Research Engineer

Wojtek received a degree in Software Engineering from the University of Waterloo. Previously, he built financial forecasting and simulation tools at Affirm. During his undergrad, he did internships at Uber, Quora and Jane Street.

John Chionis

Scientist

John received his B.S. in Biology from UC Davis in 2002 and has since worked at various biotechnology companies, most recently at Pfizer where he spent the last 13 years working on target identification and translational programs developing small molecule inhibitors for oncology. While at Pfizer he was a Research Project Lead identifying synthetic lethal opportunities for the CDK cell cycle programs and the lead biologist for the cell panel screening program.

Joe Nagamizo

Scientist

Joe received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemistry from UC San Diego. Prior to joining Genesis, he was part of the medicinal chemistry team at Inception Sciences for six years working on a variety of different targets. He has contributed to multiple patents, which include a dual EP2/4 antagonist currently undergoing Phase I clinical trials.

Sung-Wook Yi, Ph.D.

Senior Scientist

Woogie received his B.S. from GWNU in South Korea and Ph.D. from University of South Florida, then completed a postdoctoral training at UCLA. After a brief stint at Sumo Biosciences, he rejoined UCLA as a staff scientist. Over the years, he has worked on developing new therapeutic agents for Gram-positive pathogens, multiple sclerosis, and various cancers.

Jamin Chen

ML Research Engineer

Jamin received a degree in CS from USC and a M.S. in machine learning from CMU. During his time in school he interned at a variety of companies including Google and Tesla, but liked it so much here at Genesis that he decided to come back full-time!

Alexis van Venrooy, Ph.D.

Senior Scientist

Alexis received her Ph.D. in chemistry from Rice University and her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr College. During graduate school, she synthesized and studied artificial molecular machines.

Matt Pan

Product Manager

Prior to Genesis, Matt was at Roche/Genentech via an acquired startup Bina Technologies, where he led digital health product teams in clinical genomics, infectious diseases/global health, and digital therapeutics in neuroscience. He also spent time at Dropbox leading PM teams working on workplace collaboration products. Matt received his degree in Computer Science and Finance/Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Matt lives with his wife and daughter in San Francisco, and loves both the outdoors and being a homebody.

Brandon Reinus

Senior Scientist

Brandon received his bachelor's degree in biochemistry from USC, and his Ph.D. from UT Austin while working with Prof Sean Kerwin. He started his career at Vertex in San Diego working on a small molecule pain project.

Dean Latney

System Engineer

Dean brings 7 years of experience working as a systems engineer and with cloud based solutions. He’s achieved technical certificated from PagerDuty and AWS, and received a degree in Information Technology from Arizona State University.

Brianna Fabian

Research Associate

Brianna received her B.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis in 2021. Prior to joining Genesis, she spent a year at Carmot Therapeutics optimizing automated biochemical and cellular assays for drug discovery in metabolic diseases.

Ken Leidal

ML Research Engineer

Ken received a B.S. in computer science and an M.Eng. in ML/AI at MIT. Since graduating in 2018, he co-founded a chatbot startup, Posh, and spent three years at PathAI, working on computer vision for histopathology images.

Ryan Vong

Research Associate

Ryan received his B.S. in Biochemistry from San Diego State University. For his undergraduate research, he studied the morphology of hydroxyapatite and other nanoparticles under Dr. Holland.

Kendrick Shen

ML Research Engineer

Kendrick received a B.S. and M.S. in computer science and a B.A. in piano performance from Stanford. He has previously conducted research on machine learning with distribution shifts at the Stanford AI Lab with Tengyu Ma and Percy Liang, and his work has been published with oral presentations at leading machine learning venues such as ICLR and ICML. He has also worked on improving ETA predictions as an intern at Uber.

Kelly Rubin

Research Associate

Kelly received her B.S in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at UC Santa Cruz. During her undergrad she interned in the Laboratory of Precision Nanomedicine at Tel Aviv University where she developed techniques to utilize Stable Nucleic Acid Lipid Particles (SNALPS) containing siRNA to mediate inner-cell protein expression. After graduating, Kelly worked in the diagnostics industry at Hologic where she supported the development of several assays, including the COVID-19 assay. Kelly then worked at Thermofisher in the cell services department where she helped engineer stable cell lines expressing gene knockouts, over-expression, and mutation.

Bing Han

Senior Accountant

Bing received her bachelor’s degree from University of California, San Diego and her master’s degree from University of Florida. She started her career as a Staff Accountant. Prior to joining Genesis, Bing was an assurance associate at RSM US LLP.

Parvin Parineh

Executive Assistant

Parvin has spent the last decade in Silicon Valley supporting startups. She was on the founding team at MOCAP Analytics (sold to Sportradar) and Tapulous (sold to Disney). Prior to that she worked in finance and received a degree in Communications and Psychology from UC Davis.

Donna Tran

Finance Advisor

Donna received a degree in accounting at San Diego State University and completed her CPA license in California. Donna then spent 26+ years in startup to mid-size biotechnology companies. Prior to joining Genesis, Donna was CFO and a founding team member at Inception Sciences. Other companies include Amira Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb), X-Ceptor Therapeutics (acquired by Exelixis, Inc.), Genos Biosciences, and Sequana Therapeutics (acquired by Arris Pharmaceuticals).

Leonard Bell, M.D.

Chair of the Board of Directors

Dr. Bell was principal founder and CEO of Alexion Pharmaceuticals for 23 years, discovering and developing life-transforming therapies, and delivering them to patients in over 50 countries. In 2008, he accepted on behalf of Alexion the Prix Galien USA Award for Best Biotechnology Product, the industry's highest accolade for pharmaceutical R&D — equivalent to the Nobel Prize.

Transforming Every Stage of Drug Discovery to Solve Critical Patient Needs