Alita is an expert in antibacterial discovery and development with over 20 years of experience in the field.  Prior to joining ArrePath, she was Senior Vice President of Biology at Entasis Therapeutics, a company dedicated to the discovery and development of novel antibacterial agents to treat serious infections by resistant Gram-negative bacteria.  At Entasis, Alita oversaw both preclinical biology and developmental microbiology research and played a key role in the development of Xacduro, which was FDA-approved in 2023.  Prior to Entasis, Alita was first at Pfizer where she led both large and small molecule antibacterial discovery projects and then at AstraZeneca, where she was Head of Microbial Genetics and Genomics.  She has served on numerous NIAID review panels and Scientific Advisory Boards related to the field.

Alita obtained a BA in chemistry from Kalamazoo College and worked as a chemist at both Merck and Eli Lilly before obtaining a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Chicago.  Her postdoctoral training was in the DiRita lab at the University of Michigan characterizing the molecular drivers of pathogenesis in Streptococcus pyogenes.

Kurt is a leader in the field of imaging and data sciences and , prior to joining ArrePath, was Senior Director Data Science at Zymergen, where he oversaw the building of a wide variety of data science tools, including statistical models for analysis of high throughput screening and fermentation data, recommendation algorithms for protein sequences catalyzing desired enzymatic functions and prediction of beneficial genetic edits for strain engineering, and chemical machine learning for predicting molecular properties from chemical structures.

Prior to Zymergen, Kurt spent 11 years at UCSF as an adjunct professor and director of the Nikon Imaging Center at UCSF/QB3, a highly successful light microscopy core facility, with 300 annual users and 40 papers published per year. He also ran an NIH-funded research lab that focused development of an integrated microscopy and microfluidic platform to enable highly multiplexed biochemical assays.

Kurt earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Princeton University and a PhD in biophysics from UCSF, where he studied kinesin motility using single molecule imaging. Following UCSF, he was a fellow at the Bauer Center for Genomic Research at Harvard University, where he developed in vivo FRET bioassays.

Dylan Morris is a Managing Director at Insight. He joined the firm in 2021 to focus on investments in computational biology. Dylan was previously a general partner at CRV, where he built the bioengineering practice, leading the firm’s investments in Dyno Therapeutics, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, and Plexium, among others. Prior to CRV, Dylan invested at Innovation Endeavors, Eric Schmidt’s early stage venture capital firm, where he drove investments in companies operating at the intersection of data science and life science.

Before becoming an investor, Dylan cofounded Integrated Plasmonics, a venture-backed point-of-care diagnostics startup. Prior to that, he conducted graduate research in biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Caltech, where he co-authored multiple peer-reviewed publications. Dylan received his A.B. in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Fei received her Ph.D. in Neuropharmacology from Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and a B.Sc in Biochemistry from East China University Science & Technology. In 2007, she started her industrial career at Theravance Biopharma as an in vivo pharmacologist and led a lab in driving multiple research projects from exploratory, lead optimization to development candidate nomination, including TD-1473 in Ulcerative Colitis, Ampreloxetine in Fibromyalgia, Velusetrag in Gastroparesis, TD-8954 in Post-operative Gastrointestinal Dysfunction. In 2015, she joined Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc. Global Immunology and Respiratory Disease Research in Ridgefield where she started as a Laboratory Head and became the Head of in vivo Pharmacology group in 2016. From 2015 to 2020, before joining the BI Venture Fund, Fei led a group of ~20 in vivo pharmacologists supporting the Immunology and Respiratory Portfolio for small molecule, antisense and antibody projects.

Venkat Srinivasan is a serial entrepreneur and investor. Innospark Ventures is an evergreen venture fund investing in early stage AI led startups. He brings deep expertise in AI and computational algorithms to the firm, especially natural language understanding, combined with deep functional knowledge in multiple domains including operations research, finance and accounting. He has founded several successful AI-led startups, including eCredit, Corporate Fundamentals and Rage Frameworks. More recently he has founded EnglishHelper (using AI to solve illiteracy at scale), Gyan.AI (first explainable natural language understanding engine), Creda Health (Digital Health Assistant for continuum of care) and PrismX (automated software development platform).

Venkat was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by The Indus Entrepreneurs [TiE] in 2017 (http://bit.ly/2j5ElGG). Dr. Srinivasan holds 9 patents, has published over 30 research papers in prestigious peer-reviewed journals, has co-edited two books and is the author of a book titled, The Intelligent Enterprise in the Era of Big Data (Wiley, 2017). Venkat has strongly advocated for and believes that successful AI-led transformation will be characterized by explainability, traceability, context awareness and the ability to learn from sparse data environments.

Prior to his entrepreneurial career, Venkat served as an Associate Professor at the D’More-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University.

Barbara E Engelhardt is a Senior Investigator at Gladstone Institutes and Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Biomedical Data Science. She received her B.S. (Symbolic Systems) and M.S. (Computer Science) from Stanford University and her PhD from UC Berkeley (EECS) advised my Prof. Michael I Jordan. She was a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Matthew Stephens at the University of Chicago. She was an Assistant Professor at Duke University from 2011-2014, and an Assistant, Associate, and then Full Professor at Princeton University in Computer Science from 2014-2022. She has worked at Jet Propulsion Labs, Google Research, 23andMe, and Genomics plc. In her career, she received an NSF GRFP, the Google Anita Borg Scholarship, the SMBE Walter M. Fitch Prize (2004), a Sloan Faculty Fellowship, an NSF CAREER, and the ISCB Overton Prize (2021). Her research is focused on developing and applying models for structured biomedical data that capture patterns in the data, predict results of interventions to the system, assist with decision-making support, and prioritize experiments for design and engineering of biological systems.

Paul J. Hergenrother attended the University of Notre Dame, where he received his B.S. in Chemistry in 1994. From there Paul moved to the University of Texas at Austin, to conduct graduate research under the direction of Professor Stephen F. Martin. He graduated with his PhD in Chemistry in 1999, and moved on as an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow to Harvard University, where he worked in the laboratory of Professor Stuart L. Schreiber in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Paul established his own laboratory in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001 and in 2013 was named the Kenneth L. Rinehart Endowed Chair in Natural Products Chemistry. The Hergenrother lab works on the discovery of new antibacterials where his group has developed predictive guidelines for compound accumulation in Gram-negative pathogens.  Paul’s lab has also discovered anticancer compounds including ErSO, with potent activity against ER+ breast tumors. Professor Hergenrother led the team that developed a novel saliva-based assay for SARS-CoV-2, a simple protocol that bypasses the need for RNA isolation and as such is inexpensive, returns rapid results, and can be used on scale.  The University of Illinois administered over 1,000,000 of these tests on its campus during Fall 2020, typically testing ~10,000 people a day, and this test is now widely used throughout the state, country and world.

Professor Hergenrother has been the recipient of an NSF-CAREER Award, a Research Corporation Research Innovation Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the GlaxoSmithKline Chemistry Scholar Award, the ACS David Robertson Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the ACS Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry, was named as an American Cancer Society Research Scholar, was named by Technology Review magazine as one of the top innovators under the age of 35, and was the recipient of the 2016 Innovation Transfer Award from the University of Illinois. More recently he was named as the recipient of the 2016 UCB-Ehrlich Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry, of the 2016 Akron Section Award from the ACS, a 2017 ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, and the 2018 ACS Sosnovsky Award for Cancer Research. Most recently he was named as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

At the University of Illinois Professor Hergenrother is the Leader of the IGB Theme “Anticancer Discovery from Pets to People”, and is the Director of the NIH Chemistry-Biology Interface Training Grant, and is Deputy Director of the Cancer Center at Illinois. Professor Hergenrother has served or serves on the editorial board/editorial advisory board for multiple journals, including ACS Central Science, Current Opinion in Chemical Biology, Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Organic Reactions, and ChemBioChem. The Hergenrother laboratory seeks to use small molecules to identify and validate novel targets for the treatment of intractable diseases, including cancer and multi-drug resistant bacteria.