meet our speakers

Miles Congreve

Philip Tagari

Shane Lewin

Lingling Shen

Gregory Goldmacher

Wolfgang Colsman

With nearly 30 years of visionary leadership, Wolfgang Colsman serves as the Chief Executive Officer of ZONTAL, a pioneering enterprise platform transforming the way organizations manage and preserve their digital information. Under his leadership, ZONTAL has become a catalyst for change across industries, redefining how data is captured, connected, and safeguarded for long-term value.

Before founding ZONTAL, Wolfgang spent over two decades at OSTHUS as Chief Innovation Officer and Chief Technology Officer, where he guided large-scale digital transformation initiatives. His ability to bridge cutting-edge technology with real-world business needs helped establish OSTHUS as a trusted, vendor-agnostic partner driving innovation for global enterprises.

Beyond his corporate achievements, Wolfgang has left a lasting mark on the life sciences and technology ecosystems through his leadership at the Allotrope Foundation and the Pistoia Alliance Methods Hub project. By championing data standards, interoperability, and collaborative infrastructures, he has empowered industries to break down silos, accelerate discovery, and unlock new opportunities for digital transformation. These efforts continue to shape how organizations think about data as a strategic asset rather than a byproduct.

Recognized for his ability to anticipate technological shifts and inspire collaborative progress, Wolfgang has become a respected voice in the digital landscape—bringing together vision, strategy, and execution to create sustainable impact.

Rameez Chatni

Ari Allyn-Feuer

Arvind Rao

Ethan Pickering

Peter Henstock

Daniyal Hussain

Yves Fomekong Nanfack

Kiran Nistala

David Kombo

Maria Florez

Alexander Horspool

Veera Padmanabhan

Veera is currently managing a team of 40+ scientists, establishing robotics, lab automation predictive analytics and advanced chemometrics in next generation biologics manufacturing at AstraZeneca. He has 25+ years of experience, with expertise crossing R&D, manufacturing operations and supply chain.

Sreyoshi Sur

Yi Hong

Ilknur Icke

Tarun Walia

Melissa Landon

Uli Stilz

Crystal Culhane Ph.D.

Crystal Culhane, Ph.D., applies her extensive academic background in organic chemistry to help life sciences organization protect their products and innovations through U.S. and foreign patent prosecution, client counseling, due diligence, patentability and freedom to operate opinions, patent opinions, and post-grant proceedings.

Known as a responsive communicator with a strong depth of knowledge, Crystal works with clients ranging from universities to start-ups and growing companies to multinational organizations to prepare intellectual property strategies that suit their business goals.

In recent years, Crystal has worked with a number of pharmaceutical clients in high-impact patent prosecution. Her clients include a large pharmaceutical company for which she has helped develop and manage a portfolio of several hundred patent families and another which in 2021 received its first-ever FDA approval for a new drug that treats a rare liver disease.

Crystal earned her doctorate in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, where her research focused on the design, synthesis, and evaluation of novel optical and radioactive small molecule prostate cancer imaging agents. She has significant experience in various scientific disciplines, including synthetic organic chemistry, radiochemistry, biology, radiobiology, and small animal imaging.

Justin Byers

Justin Byers is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Axio BioPharma, an AI biomanufacturing company revolutionizing how monoclonal antibodies are developed and produced. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Axio launched in 2024 with a mission to accelerate and de-risk the development of recombinant proteins and monoclonal antibodies through AI-driven process design and U.S.-based manufacturing.

Under Justin’s leadership, Axio has pioneered a data-rich, machine learning–powered approach that reduces process development timelines from years to days unlocking faster, more cost-efficient pathways for biotech partners. He has steered the company’s rapid growth, from establishing its state-of-the-art facilities to securing strategic partnerships, including collaborations to advance next-generation drug delivery technologies.

With a background at the intersection of biomanufacturing, technology, and entrepreneurship, Justin brings a vision of scaling biologics development with speed, reliability, and accessibility. He is committed to building Axio into a trusted partner for innovators worldwide, combining scientific rigor with cutting-edge AI to bring life-changing therapies to patients faster.

Steve Gibson

Steve has held a range of C-Suite positions in technology companies ranging from financial technology services, to data science consulting. Currently he serves as Chief Commercial Officer at Strangeworks; an advanced compute platform as a service (PaaS) company based in Austin, Texas. Prior to Strangeworks, Steve helped build several startups from the ground up, the most successful being Honest Dollar which was the first startup acquired by Goldman Sachs in their 147 year history. Prior to Honest Dollar, Steve worked for a number of large multinational corporations in the European aerospace sector delivering platforms for military, civil and space applications. Steve holds a Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Systems Engineering from the University of Coventry in the UK.

Tobias Hahn, PhD

Tobias Hahn is R&D Director of chromatography mechanistic modeling activities at Cytiva. As former co-founder and CEO of GoSilico, now part of Cytiva, Tobias is responsible for delivering simulation software and workflows for in silico process development. He received his undergraduate education in computational mathematics and technical physics in Karlsruhe and Stockholm, earning his PhD in chemical engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). During his doctoral studies, he utilized his background in mathematics and software engineering to create the simulation software now known as GoSilico™ chromatography modeling software.

Mike Eckrote

Mike Eckrote is Senior Vice President of Strategic Solutions & Technology at Advarra, where he leads efforts to advance innovative approaches to clinical research and development. He brings more than a decade of experience in real-world data, technology solutions, and clinical trial optimization, with leadership roles spanning HealthVerity, Medable, and Medidata Solutions. Throughout his career, Mike has specialized in applying AI/ML, real-world evidence, and data-driven strategies to improve trial design, site selection, and patient outcomes.

Tom Oliver

Tom Oliver is Head of Product at Faculty, where he leads the strategy and roadmap for Faculty Frontier™, the company’s decision-intelligence platform that helps enterprises operationalize AI in day-to-day decisions. Tom partners with executives and cross functional teams, including product managers, engineers, data scientists, and designers, to discover, build, and scale products that solve real problems for technical and business users. He collaborates closely with Faculty’s leadership and with key stakeholders and clients across pharma, retail, consumer goods, and healthcare, turning complex challenges into measurable outcomes. Before joining Faculty, Tom held leadership positions at PwC, focusing on technology enabled transformation, operating model change, and enterprise technology selection and deployment. His public writing explores the future of work, AI ethics, and human centric design, asking how powerful systems can advance human flourishing, not only efficiency. He holds a degree from the University of Oxford.

Harris Bell-Temin

Eli Bixby

Eli makes sure Cradle's models and algorithms are doing what we think they are doing, and he keeps an eye out for the latest and greatest techniques in the literature. He was previously at Google (Brain, Accelerated Science, Cloud) working on biological sequence design, AutoML, and natural language understanding. He studied mathematics, computer science, and biochemistry

Dennis Nenno

Dennis Nenno is a founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Examol, an operating system for computational drug discovery focused on small molecules. He led project teams at BASF, developing software solutions to automate chemical plants worldwide. As a research fellow, he simulated the properties of advanced and unrealized materials at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids. He holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics. Dennis is an advisor on quantum technologies for venture capital.

Hitesh Seth

At Salesforce, Hitesh is responsible for the end-to-end architecture of platforms delivered to financial services and insurance clients globally. His focus is on working with key strategic customers to align Salesforce implementations with their business goals, particularly around the conjunction of Data+AI and CRM. This involves collaborating with retail and commercial banking, payments, wealth management, investment banking, insurance, and capital markets to influence product roadmaps and shape the future of technology in these industries. A significant part of Hitesh's role includes facilitating discussions with CTOs, CIOs, CDOs, and Chief Architects to: •⁠ ⁠Analyze current architectures and design target states. •⁠ ⁠Optimize Salesforce technologies for customer needs. •⁠ ⁠Integrate and Interoperate with Salesforce platforms within broader ecosystems. Being the executive sponsors for the customers, I play a key role in influencing product development within Salesforce by advocating for customer-driven innovations. 

Hitesh oversees end-to-end platform and solution architecture for global financial services and insurance clients. He specializes in aligning Salesforce solutions with strategic business objectives, particularly at the intersection of Data+AI and CRM. By collaborating with retail and commercial banking, payments, wealth management, investment banking, insurance, and capital markets, Hitesh helps influence product roadmaps and shape the future of technology in these industries.

A key part of his role involves engaging CTOs, CIOs, CDOs, and Chief Architects to analyze current architectures, design target states, and optimize Salesforce within broader ecosystems. As an executive sponsor, Hitesh champions customer-driven innovation, ensuring product development meets evolving industry needs.

Stephanie Vakaljan

Michaela Tolman

John Mayfield

Christopher D. Taylor

Christopher D. Taylor is Director of Applied Sciences at Promethium (QC Ware Corp.), bringing over 25 years of expertise in density functional theory (DFT). He works with drug discovery teams to bridge AI and quantum chemistry, guiding the deployment of DFT-based rational drug design and descriptor-driven frameworks for drug discovery. Throughout his career, Christopher has used DFT to solve problems once considered unsolvable, and he now highlights how high-quality quantum mechanical data, when used to train AI models, delivers significant gains in accuracy and insight. By translating complex scientific challenges into scalable workflows, he helps accelerate both small molecule and macromolecule design with quantum-level precision.

Gevorg Grigoryan

Steve Worland

Steve Worland, Ph.D. serves as the CEO of Numerion Labs (formerly Atomwise) and has over 30 years of experience in corporate leadership and pharmaceutical R&D. He was previously President, CEO, and Board Member of eFFECTOR Therapeutics, which he co-founded in 2012. Prior to that, he was CEO of Anadys Pharmaceuticals, where he led the company through its acquisition by Roche in 2011. Before becoming CEO, he served as Chief Scientific Officer and President of Pharmaceuticals at Anadys.

Earlier in his career, he held senior positions at Agouron Pharmaceuticals, Warner-Lambert, and Pfizer, where his scientific research contributed to the discovery and development of Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir), Inlyta (axitinib), zotatifin, tomivosertib, and other clinical-stage candidates. At Agouron, he was Vice President and Director of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, remaining at the company through its acquisitions.

Dr. Worland earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Molecular Biology at Harvard University as an NIH fellow. He earned a B.S. with Highest Honors in Biological Chemistry from the University of Michigan. He serves on the Board of Directors at Blacksmith Medicines and has previously served on the boards of Tracon Pharmaceuticals, Forge Therapeutics, and GenMark Diagnostics.

Sam Winders

Sam is the lead representative for the healthcare and life sciences team at Patsnap. One of the organization’s longest serving employees, Sam works closely with our leading customers and the Patsnap product development team to ensure that our customers’ needs our met and that Patsnap continues to rapidly expand the technical frontier within the evolving drug discovery space. 

Toby Sayre

Toby Sayre is a commercial leader with a background in life sciences and biotechnology consulting, business development, and product strategy. He holds master’s degrees in Cell and Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from San Francisco State University and UCLA. His work bridges bioinformatics, real-world data, and AI-driven software, integrating technical and commercial expertise to advance innovation in the life sciences.

Generoso Iannicello

Generoso Ianniciello is a strategic leader in life sciences with expertise in multi-omics, diagnostics, biopharma, and platform services. As Chief Business Officer at Anima Biotech, he leads the global strategy for the Biology GPU - a new category in drug discovery infrastructure that connects how AI thinks with how biology works, tackling one of the biggest challenges in the field.

Previously, as CBO at Dante Genomics, he scaled the start-up into a global enterprise with over 200 employees and $100 million in annual revenue. He launched the Dante MyGenome Platform for longevity, personalized medicine, and rare disease diagnostics, and built key partnerships with hospitals, biopharma, and research institutions worldwide.

Alex Madama

Alex Madama is a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, specializing in strategic technology integration for life sciences organizations, including healthcare, pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device companies. He leads initiatives combining high-performance computing, Hybrid Cloud, IoT, big data, and AI to advance drug discovery, pharmaceutical R&D, and biologics manufacturing, aiming to optimize patient outcomes and reduce costs. Before re-joining HPE, Alex served as Vice President of Product at UnitedHealth Group R&D, where he drove innovation in healthcare research and development. He holds a bachelor’s degree in life science and a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine from New York Institute of Technology, with additional clinical training at Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center, and lectures as an Adjunct Professor of Health Information Technology at Hofstra University. Previously, Alex founded Onyx CCS and held leadership roles at Nook.com, Barnes & Noble, AIG, Cravath Swaine & Moore, and as founder of seekPhysician.com.

Chris Anagnostopoulos

Jeff Messer

Lana Garmire

Benjamin Stevens

Farouk Daher

Petar Pop-Damkov

Eric Kehoe

Maria-Dorothea Nastke, PhD