Keynote Speakers
Heidi Zhang: Epigenetic editing: Next frontier of genetic medicines
Sunday, August 13 from 3:00 – 3:40 pm in Foothill D during Cell & Gene Therapy
Dr. Heidi Zhang is the Executive Vice President and Head of Technical Operations at Tune Therapeutics. She is a seasoned scientific executive who has led global teams across a range of biotech and pharmaceutical companies, including Juno Therapeutics, Genentech, Novartis, and Amgen. Prior to Tune, Heidi was the Vice President of Cell Therapy Product & Analytical Development at Bristol Myers-Squibb.
Her many accomplishments in science and leadership include commercial launches of numerous life-saving medicines – including recent cell therapies Abecma and Breyanzi.
Wenjun Zhang: Biosynthesis of unusual clickable functionalities in natural products
Tuesday, August 15 from 4:00 – 4:40 pm in Foothill G2 during Biomolecular Engineering & Biophysical Processes
Wenjun Zhang is a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California Berkeley and the Charles R. Wilke Endowed Chair in Chemical Engineering. She completed her doctoral training with Yi Tang at UCLA and her postdoctoral training with Christopher T. Walsh at Harvard Medical School before joining UC Berkeley in 2011.
She has received awards such as Pew Scholar (2012), NIH Director’s New Innovator (2015), Sloan Research Fellow (2016), American Cancer Society Research Scholar (2017), Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineering (2019), etc. The Zhang Lab is broadly interested in natural product discovery, biosynthesis, engineering, and biological studies.
Kerry Love: Democratizing biomanufacturing of recombinant proteins
Wednesday, August 16 from 3:00 – 3:40 pm in Foothill E during Bioprocessing 4.0
Kerry R. Love is CEO & President at Sunflower Therapeutics, a women-owned and led biotechnology company with a world-class team of scientists and engineers. Sunflower has deep expertise in fermentation and purification process development, biopharmaceutical manufacturing, and quality management. Kerry earned her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Theodore Randolph: Subvisible particles and fill-finish: “facial recognition” to identify causes of protein particle formation
Thursday, August 17 from 9:00 – 9:40 am in Foothill D during BIOT Spotlight
Ted Randolph received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, and then joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Yale University as an Assistant Professor. After promotion to Associate Professor, he was named Yale’s first John J. Lee Junior Professorship Chair in Chemical Engineering.
In 1993, Dr. Randolph accepted the Patton Associate Professorship Chair in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Colorado. He currently serves as the Gillespie Professor of Bioengineering and co-Director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology. Dr. Randolph is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, and received the AIChE Professional Progress Award and the American Pharmacists Association Ebert Prize three times. He is an author of more than 255 peer-reviewed journal articles in biopharmaceutical formulation, lyophilization of proteins, protein-solvent interactions in non-aqueous environments, and protein refolding. Dr. Randolph is an inventor on 29 US patents and has co-founded three companies, RxKinetix Inc., Barofold, Inc., and VitriVax Inc.