Shaping the Future of Innovative Treatments with AI

Alex Gorsky

Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Johnson & Johnson

Alex Gorsky is the former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Johnson & Johnson.

He began his Johnson & Johnson career with Janssen Pharmaceutical in 1988, advancing through positions of increasing responsibility in sales, marketing, and management until, in 2012, he became the seventh leader to serve in the dual role of Chairman and CEO. He became Executive Chairman at the end of 2021, which he held until his retirement in January 2023.

Under Alex’s leadership, Johnson & Johnson became an industry stalwart. As part of the company’s commitment to serving more than a billion people each day, Alex oversaw significant breakthroughs in public health, including the deployment of an Ebola vaccine and the development of the Janssen single-shot COVID-19 vaccine in just 13 months. He promoted a more diverse and inclusive culture at Johnson & Johnson, serving as the driving force behind many of the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, including a $100 million pledge to fight health inequities faced by communities of color in the United States.

Through his work as a member of the Business Roundtable and the Business Council Executive Committees, Alex’s influence has shaped both the healthcare landscape and the greater business community. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of Apple, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, and the Travis Manion Foundation, and serves on the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania Board of Advisors.

Alex completed his undergraduate education at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and earned his MBA from Wharton in 1996.

Anantha Kancherla

Engineer at Meta

Anantha Kancherla works at Meta. There he led the AI Platform team that built PyTorch and launched the AI Research SuperCluster which is among the fastest AI clusters in the world.

Prior to Meta, most recently he was at Lyft’s self driving division where he led the software for their self driving car efforts. There he was responsible for all the software, whatever that ran in the car as well as the infrastructure in the cloud.

Anantha started his career at Microsoft specializing in 3D Graphics, working on DirectX and Windows helping shape the GPUs via the shader architecture that led to the current boom in AI. 

Anantha is currently helping launch the next generation of the Quest VR/MR headsets.

Artur Saudabayev

Co-founder & CTO Causaly

Artur is a computer scientist and intelligent systems expert, with a background in machine learning and bioinformatics. For 7 years Artur was working in academia on applications of machine learning for vision and language problems in Robotics. Soon after attending Singularity University Future Studies and getting his Master degree in the University of Edinburgh, Artur taught his last course and started building Causaly with Yiannis.

Birgit Schoeberl

Dr. Birgit Schoeberl is the Global Head of Data Science, PK Sciences at Novartis Institutes of Biomedical Research (NIBR) in Cambridge MA. Her team is an early adopter of Data42 and uses AI/ML to address drug development questions. Prior to joining NIBR Dr. Birgit Schoeberl spent time at GNS Healthcare as SVP of Scientific Value using Bayesian Network Inference to build models directly from data to identify causal disease drivers or to identify predictive biomarkers. She was a founding scientific team member of Merrimack Pharmaceuticals where she applied different modeling techniques to inform drug discovery and held various leadership roles. Before leaving Merrimack Pharmaceuticals she was responsible for Discovery and the early clinical development and part of the executive leadership team. 

Dr. Birgit received her Chemical Engineering degree from the Technical University in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Ph.D. in Biological Eng. from the Max Planck Inst. for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg. She received Postdoc training was a post-doctoral training in the Biological Engineering laboratories of Douglas Lauffenburger and Peter Sorger at MIT. 

Bob van Luijt

Bob van Luijt is a technology entrepreneur, technologist, and new media artist from the Netherlands. He is the co-founder of Weaviate and the chairman of the Creative Software Foundation. In March 2016 Van Luijt started the open-source vector search engine Weaviate. He has published and lectured about (open-source) software business models and the positioning of broadly applicable infrastructure software (e.g., databases and search engines). During a presentation for  TEDx UniversiteitVanAmsterdam he shared his ideas about how the evolvement of language impacts ideas in software development.

Caroline Xie

Caroline Xie is a General Partner at ICONIQ Growth investing in software, healthcare and internet companies. Prior to ICONIQ, Caroline covered financial institutions and healthcare for Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong and California. Caroline’s investments include Apprentice, Benchling, Braze, Datadog (DDOG), Devoted Health, GitLab (GTLB), GoodRx (GDRX), Guild Education, Komodo Health, Moveworks, Nayya, Notable Health, QGenda, Reify Health, Relativity, Restaurant365, Sprinklr (CXM), Twin Health, Unite Us, DexCare, Causaly and others.

Christina Silcox

Research Director for Digital Health at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy

Christina Silcox is the Research Director for Digital Health at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, working on policy solutions to advance innovation in health and health care and improve regulation, reimbursement, and long-term evaluation of medical products, with a focus on digital health.

Dr. Silcox’s portfolio includes multiple areas in digital health policy, particularly as relates to AI and medical devices, and real-world data. Currently she is concentrating on challenges to regulating and adopting artificial intelligence-enabled software and payment for digital health technologies. Previous projects have included the using mHealth to collect real-world data, characterizing real-world data quality and relevancy, the exploration of value-based payments for medical devices, and the convening the National Evaluation System for health Technology (NEST) Planning Board. She also led the Center’s extensive work on COVID-19 testing.

Before she joined Duke-Margolis, Dr. Silcox was a senior fellow at the National Center for Health Research, focused on federal regulation of and policies for medical products. She earned a M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST).

Eric Adam

Global Head of Operations, Neuroscience and Rare Diseases at Roche pRED

Dr. Adam joined Roche in 2019 to serve as Global Head of Operations within pRED/Neuroscience.

 Eric has 25 years of experience developing health technology products and healthcare access initiatives. He has had scientific and entrepreneurial roles in the pharmaceutical industry, biotechnology and medical device companies, and in the non-profit arena.

Prior to joining Roche, Eric launched three organizations in the antimicrobial resistance space: two biotechnology start-ups and a non-profit organization promoting access to essential medical care in developing countries. Eric has also had diagnostics experience developing and launching life-saving tests in high-disease burden and low-income countries.

His biotech and pharma experience include Takeda California working on structure-based drug design and Otsuka Pharmaceuticals Japan as part of the launch team of Deltyba. 

Eric holds a PhD in Biomedical Research from the University of Paris XI for research performed at New England Biolabs in Boston, MA in the United States, and has had postgraduate training in business administration.

Kevin Munnelly

Senior Vice President (SVP) of Platform Technologies

Kevin is passionate about innovation in all areas of life sciences, at the product, process and business model levels. He came to Third Rock to lead technology R&D, providing competitive advantages and product engine differentiation for our companies and seed projects. He and his group improve access to novel technologies and services, develop innovative solutions and deploy platforms for both wet lab and data sciences throughout the discovery and development process. Along with his colleagues, he shares an ambition for accelerating treatments for patients in need.
Prior to joining Third Rock, Kevin has spent the last decade creating, advising or leading technology based Life Science start up companies, most recently as Entrepreneur in Residence for Biological Engineering Ventures, LLC, a technology incubator and life science fund. Prior to that, He was President and CEO of Gen9, Inc until its acquisition by Ginkgo Bioworks. Earlier in his career, Kevin served in a number of scientific, technological and business roles at Life Technologies (acquired by Thermo), Millennium Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Takeda Pharmaceuticals) and Applied Biosystems (acquired by Invitrogen).
Outside of TRV, Kevin is an avid supporter of several local charities and enjoys spending time with his family, friends and especially his pets. He is a self-proclaimed SciFi ‘geek’, a Patriots fan and is always up for a vacation at the beach.

Sean Liu

Head of Scientific Assets & Decision Support Takeda

Sean Liu is head of Scientific Assets & Decision Support within the R&D Technology department at Takeda. Sean is a biologist by training and has worked in the bio/pharmaceutical industry for the past 20 years in the area of scientific informatics and data science. His team in Takeda is involved in unleashing the power of data by data integration, contextualization, visualization, exploratory analysis, and predictive modelling to support data driven decision making.

Yiannis Kiachopoulos

Co-founder & CEO Causaly

Yiannis is a computer scientist and has consulted with the world’s largest companies before co-founding Causaly in 2018. Yiannis holds a Bachelor and Master in Computer Science, an MBA from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and took part in Singularity University’s Future Studies program.