Speaker Bios for Spring 2018

Laura Deming
Founder, Longevity Fund

Since she was a kid, Laura Deming been fascinated by the idea that longevity is a mechanism we can manipulate. She grew up in New Zealand, and at the age of 12 moved to the US to take graduate coursework at UCSF before studying at MIT. She has worked in the Kenyon, Guarente, Weiss and Firestein labs on a number of topics, including aging and synthetic biology. In 2011, she started Longevity Fund, the first VC firm dedicated to funding high-potential longevity companies. So far, Longevity Fund has raised $26M and backed Unity Biotechnology, Precision Biosciences, Metacrine, Navitor, and Alexo Therapeutics.

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Maureen Hillenmeyer
CEO, Hexagon Bio

Maureen Hillenmeyer is a founder and CEO of Hexagon. Previously, Maureen was director of the Genomes to Natural Products program and group leader at the Stanford Technology Genome Center.


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James Lloyd
Co-founder & CTO, Redox

James is co-founder and CTO at Redox, the industry-leading healthcare API platform. James started his career as a software developer at Epic, then consulted with many startups and SMBs around data integration and strategy.

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Eric Yablonka
CIO, Stanford Health Care

Eric Yablonka has over thirty years of experience in leading hospital operations and information systems management functions. He is the recently appointed Chief Information Officer at Stanford Health Care (SHC). At SHC Eric's responsibilities include all information technology functions, information security and biomedical engineering. Eric's role is to develop and execute strategies that leverage technology to support the three missions of SHC. He also closely collaborates with leaders at the Stanford School of Medicine and Stanford Children's Hospital in the execution of those strategies and to support enterprise technology needs. He manages a staff of over 500 with capital and operating budgets more than $240M annually. Eric earned his MBA from the Advanced Management Program, Broad School of Management at Michigan State University and his BS in Business Studies at the State University of New York College at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY.

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Alvin Rajkomar
Senior Research Scientist, Google

Alvin Rajkomar, MD is a Senior Research Scientist at Google and an Adjunct Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hospital Medicine at UCSF. After graduating with a degree in Chemistry and Physics at Harvard, he completed medical school at Columbia University, his residency in internal medicine at UCSF, and fellowship in Hospital Medicine at UCSF. He now works on applying modern machine learning techniques to a variety of healthcare datasets, including electronic health records.

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Samantha Scovanner
Healthcare and Life Sciences Product Manager, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Samantha Scovanner is a product manager at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. She is leading the development of a data platform for the Human Cell Atlas, an international collaboration to build an atlas of all the cell types in the human body as a reference for health and disease. For the past 12 years she has been developing software applications for life sciences and health IT. Prior to joining the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, she was Head of Product at Syapse, a precision medicine technology company where she worked with health systems and testing laboratories to integrate clinical and genomic data for cancer patients. Previous roles include Solutions Engineer at Keas where she built patient portals for drug education and adherence; and Software Engineering Group Manager at Aviir, a molecular diagnostics company specializing in cardiovascular disease. She has a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford.

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Nathan Siemers
Director, R&D Translational Medicine, Bristol-Myers Squibb
Nathan Siemers is Director, R&D in the Translational Medicine division at Bristol-Myers Squibb. He has 27 years experience in Pharmaceutical and Diagnostic industries, including efforts in oncology, bioinformatics, genomics, and informatics technology areas. Trained in organic chemistry (synthesis of periplanone natural products with advisor John McMurry) he entered the field of antibody targeting of cancer as a postdoctoral fellow with Peter Senter (now at Seattle Genetics), studying enzyme-prodrug approaches to drug delivery. As the human genome and related projects matured, he joined and was a founding member of the BMS genomics division, initally focusing on target identification by bioinformatics data mining. He spent a year as visiting scientist at the Whitehead Institute, working in the Lander and Golub functional genomics groups to exploit the (then new) Affymetrix RNA profiling platforms. Nathan supports the advancement of drug targets, clinical drug candidates, and new indications for approved therapies in the area of Immuno-Oncology, working at the BMS research site in Redwood City, California.


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Colt Courtright
Director, Data & Analytics, Premera Blue Cross
Premera Blue Cross provides healthcare benefits to the employees of Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, Expedia, Weyerhaeuser, and other household brand name companies. Colt Courtright is responsible for data & analytic strategies that impact Premera's 2.1 million members and 38,000+ physician network. He provides leadership to teams of data scientists, data engineers, statisticians, healthcare analysts, business intelligence and application developers that deliver new capabilities to the healthcare system. Colt completed his undergraduate degree in Economics at the University of Essex and Master in Public Administration at Lewis & Clark College (Oregon), and brings over 20 years of healthcare system experience overseeing numerous technical and quantitative teams in established and start-up organizations.


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