Dr. Dong is a Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the advancement of Science and the Chinese Academy of Medicine. He is a Professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine and Director for the Shanghai Immune Therapy Institute, a principal investigator at the Institute for Immunology at Tsinghua University, as well as the first dean of the Westlake University School of Medicine. Dr. Dong served as a Professor of Immunology and the Director of the Center for inflammation and Cancer at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center before his move to China, and was also Dean of Tsinghua University School of Medicine from 2016-2020.

Dr. Dong’s research is to understand the molecular mechanisms by which immune and inflammatory responses are normally regulated, and to apply this knowledge to the understanding and treatment of infection, autoimmunity and allergy disorders, as well as cancer. The work from Dr. Dong’s group has led to the discoveries of Th17 and T follicular helper (Tfh) cell subsets in the immune system and elucidation of their biological and pathological functions. Dr. Dong has over 200 publications and was rated as the most highly cited researcher seven times. He has received several honors including the 2009 American Association of Immunologists-BD Bioscience Investigator Award and 2019 International Cytokine and Interferon Society Biolegend-William E. Paul Award. He is currently Editor-in-chief for Frontiers in Immunology- T Cell Biology, Associate Editor for Current Opinion in Immunology, Advances in Immunology and China Sciences- Life Sciences, and an Editor for Annual Review of Immunology and Immunity, and a Scientific Advisor for Med.

Dr. Chao is our Vice President for Antibody Design and also serves as the Chief Immunology Scientist for a wide range of biology challenges.

Dr. Chao has three decades of experience in drug discovery and development across the academic and industrial fields of immuno-oncology and autoimmune inflammatory diseases. Prior to joining BioMap, he was a VP at ChemPartner, CSO of AbVision, CTO/SVP of R&D in GenoImmune, and Senior Director/Head of preclinical research and technology in AbGenomics. Before that, he was a team leader and senior scientist at numerous global pharmaceutical companies and prestigious research institutions, such as Merck Research Laboratories, Schering-Plough/DNAX Research Institute, and Novartis. He led the activities of target/lead identification, validation, and in vivo pharmacology for therapeutic antibodies. He has an extensive portfolio of successful developments with numerous therapeutic protein, antibody, and cell therapy programs that have advanced from discovery to clinic or commercialization.

Dr. Chao received his Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Iowa School of Medicine and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University. He also served as a Vice President and board member for the Chinese Bioscience Association in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Fernando is the recipient of the 2015 Scripps CHAVI-ID Young Investigator Award for his exceptional contributions to the development of an anti-HIV-1 vaccine.

Fernando received his bachelor’s degree in Microbiology from the Catholic University in Porto, Portugal. His research journey began in 2004 when he was granted an international PhD fellowship at the University of Barcelona, Spain. After completing his doctoral studies in Structural Biology and Biochemistry, he moved to the Institute of Cancer Research in London, UK, to take on his first postdoctoral research fellowship. Here, his focus was on proteins involved in DNA Repair, exploring their potential as targets for oncology, including a drug discovery project in collaboration with AstraZeneca.

In 2012, he embarked on his second postdoctoral experience at Professor Ian Wilson’s lab at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, where he honed his expertise in structure-guided protein design applied to an HIV-1 vaccine.

In 2016, Fernando embarked on a new chapter at Amgen, where he established and led a pioneering Protein Engineering team at the interface of computational protein design and Protein Sciences. Many of his breakthroughs contributed to a better understanding of the structure/developability relationship for Multispecific Antibodies, delivering an industry-leading workflow for this new class of biologics. Additional contributions included the design of three bispecific molecules that reached phase I and several peer-reviewed articles.

In 2021, Fernando joined Gilead as Director of Protein Therapeutics. Here, he was entrusted with building the Next Gen Biologics Engineering (NGBE) team and the required infrastructure to enable Biologics.

Throughout his academic and private research career, Fernando has co-authored approximately 35 peer-reviewed publications and secured more than 20 patents.

Prof. Song is a famous graph network expert and has extensive experience in AI technology and engineering. He held a tenured professorship in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology and served as the deputy director of the Machine Learning Centre. He was the Head of the Deep Learning team at Ant Financial and a researcher at the DAMO Academy.

Since 2008, Prof. Song initiated research in bio-computing at CMU and has achieved a series of breakthrough results in target discovery and drug design using machine learning methods. He has won many Best Paper awards in major machine learning conferences, such as NeurIPS, ICML and AISTATS to name a few. As a leading artificial intelligence scholar, he has served as the Program Chair of ICML and different chair-ships of NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI and IJCAI, the associate editor of JMLR and IEEE TPAMI, and a board member of the International Machine Learning Conference. He was also a researcher at Google and a postdoctoral researcher at CMU.

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Michael Wulfsohn, M.D., Ph.D., received his medical training from University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He obtained his Ph. D. in biostatistics from Harvard University. During his 20+ years tenure at Gilead Sciences, Michael helped the company grow into one of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies. As Senior Vice President, Michael led the biometrics team providing statistical support for drug development in multiple therapeutic areas, including virology (HIV, HCV, HBV), inflammation, cardiovascular, respiratory and oncology. His strong leadership led to the approval of 20+ novel drugs. In addition, Michael is a passionate advocate of leveraging AI and multiple omics tools for drug discovery. Under his visionary leadership Gilead Sciences built strong scientific capabilities in genomics and bioinformatics and leveraged a successful data-driven model to develop first-in-class medicines.

Per is our Vice President for Computational Protein Design.

Prior to joining BioMap, Per spent several years at Novo Nordisk, where he was Vice President for Computational Drug Design and also served as an interim VP for Research Engineering.. Per established and led the De Novo Protein Design Group of Novo Nordisk, driving significant advancements in protein engineering and discovery. He was part of multiple protein engineering programs and achieved notable successes, including Mim8 which is currently in Phase 3.

Per has also benefitted from experience in startups including Enevolv (now Gingko Bioworks) who he joined in 2019 in Boston, specializing in protein engineering, and was part of engineering SYNB1934 (Phase III).

Per received his bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and master’s degree in Bioinformatics from the University of Copenhagen. He started his PhD in quantum mechanics, neural networks, and protein folding but he quickly pivoted his research area to computational protein design. In 2012 Per went to the University of Washington to focus on computational protein design of metalloproteins in David Baker’s Lab where he led work on the evolution of enzymes and small molecule binders..

Robert Gentleman is a world-renowned statistician and bioinformatician, who is recognized, along with Ross Ihaka, as one of the originators of the R programming language, and the Bioconductor project.

He is currently the founding Executive Director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at Harvard Medical School. He was previously vice president of computational biology at 23andMe and senior director of bioinformatics at Roch/Genentech. In recognizing his exceptional work on the R programming language, the Bioconductor project, and his commitment to data and methods sharing，Dr. Gentleman was bestowed the Benjamin Franklin Award in 2008, and he was elected as a fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology and the American Statistical Association in 2014 and 2017.

Robin is the Founder and Chairman of BioMap. Since founding his last start-up, Baidu, in January 2000, Robin has built the company into China’s largest search engine alongside a world-leading Artificial Intelligence platform company.

Sagar is currently the Lead Scientist for BioMap US and a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, NJ, USA. He has a PhD in Biophysics and Biochemistry from UNC Chapel Hill and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. Sagar is an expert in computational enzyme design and has pioneered the development of several design methods with applications in therapeutics, biocatalysis and bioremediation. These include conditionally activated designed enzymes sensitive to external triggers such as light and proteases, hyperstabilized enzymes using unnatural amino acid-based protein stapling, multi-enzyme assemblies with fractal topologies for high-efficient molecular capture, among others. Sagar leads several enzyme redesign and de novo design efforts within BioMap with applications in synthetic biology and sustainability.

Vicky is our Vice President for Corporate and Business Development, where she oversees our strategy, investment, platform partnership, and key collaborations. She is also the Chief of Staff and leads the company-wide project management efforts.

Prior to joining BioMap as a founding team member, Vicky has vast experience in healthcare and biotech investment. Her career as Vice President of Investments at Baidu Ventures and extensive deal experience at GL Capital provided significant exposure to the industry dynamics and helped foster her critical thinking with regards to frontier exploration.

Vicky is a CFA Charter-holder and received her M.Sc. in Finance and B.Sc. in Life Science from Tsinghua University.

Wei is a technology enthusiast who is inspired by building cutting-edge technologies to improve industrial efficiency. Spanning his twenty-year technology investment career, Wei has served as General Partner of Legend Star Ventures and the Founding CEO of Baidu Ventures. He has invested and incubated 300 early-stage global technology companies, including more than 50 AI for Life Science-related companies.

Dr. Jiang is our Senior Vice President for Data Science. He also oversees our activities in drug development, including target identification and antibody discovery.

Dr. Jiang is a highly accomplished industry veteran with a proven track record in drug development. His expertise encompasses drug target identification, biomarker discovery, and clinical trial optimization, specializing in the application of genomics and data science throughout the entire life-cycle of drug development. Before joining BioMap, Dr. Jiang served as Executive Director of Gilead Sciences. He led the clinical bioinformatics and data science team and provided strategic oversight to genomics and biomarker data analysis for Gilead’s clinical development programs. The team provided data analysis support to over a hundred clinical trials, contributing to the approval of over ten novel medicines in various disease areas, including virology (HCV, HBV, HIV, and COVID-19), oncology, and autoimmune diseases.

Dr. Jiang obtained his medical degree from the Department of Clinical Medicine at Zhejiang University and completed his residency training in surgical pathology at the prestigious PUMC hospital. Subsequently, he earned a Ph.D. in Genome Sciences and a Certificate in Technology Entrepreneurship from the University of Washington. During his doctoral research, he worked under the world-renowned geneticist Evan E. Eichler (Member of the National Academy of Science). As a physician-scientist, Dr. Jiang possesses exceptional knowledge of disease biology and the latest advancements in genomics, bioinformatics, and data science. His dedication to research is evident through his prolific publication record, with over 40 peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals, including five papers published in Nature. His contributions to translational research have garnered widespread recognition and citation from his peers in the scientific community.

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