Leadership
Robin LI
FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN
Robin LI
FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN
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.
Wei LIU
CO-FOUNDER AND CEO
Wei LIU
CO-FOUNDER AND CEO
Wei is a technology enthusiast who dreams of 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.
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Le SONG
CTO
Le SONG
CTO
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 but 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.
Zhaoshi JIANG
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT
Zhaoshi JIANG
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT
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 the 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 a 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.
Per GREISEN
VICE PRESIDENT
Per GREISEN
VICE PRESIDENT
Per is our Vice President for Computational Protein Design.
Per has achieved a very successful career in Novo Nordisk, where he was Vice President for Computational Drug Design and also served as an interim VP for Research Engineering before he left for BioMap. 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 results, including Mim8 which is currently in Phase 3.
Per also has a great journey in startups when he joined Enevolv (now Gingko Bioworks) 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. There he directed the evolution of enzymes and small molecule binders earning him fruitful academic merits.
Vicky QU
VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OF STAFF
Vicky QU
VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OF STAFF
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 investment. Her career as Vice President of Investments at Baidu Ventures and sophisticated deal experience at GL Capital gained her significant exposure to the industry dynamics and fostered her critical thinking expertise in frontier exploration.
Vicky is a CFA Charter-holder and received her M.Sc. in Finance and B.Sc. in Life Science from Tsinghua University.
Cheng-Chi CHAO
VICE PRESIDENT
Cheng-Chi CHAO
VICE PRESIDENT
Dr. Chao is our Vice President for Antibody Design and he also served as the Chief Immunology Scientist for a wide range of biology challenges.
Dr. Chao has three decades of experience in drug discovery and development, crossing the academic and industrial fields of immuno-oncology and autoimmune inflammatory diseases. Prior to joining BioMap, he was the VP of 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 of 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 in the successful development of 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.
James RONG
VICE PRESIDENT
James RONG
VICE PRESIDENT
Dr. Rong is our Vice President of Discovery Biology where he drives the high-throughput wet labs to integrate into AI and discovery systems.
Dr. Rong has more than 25 years of experience in drug discovery and development with over 15 years of management experience. He has taken Director to Senior Director level leadership positions with expanding responsibilities at GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Broad Institute, and Toran Therapeutics (a biotech incubated by Flagship Pioneering) covering multidisciplinary therapeutic areas including oncology, autoimmune, metabolic, and fibrotic diseases. With a solid understanding of cell biology and translational pharmacology, he successfully advanced molecules from target discovery to different milestones and implemented emerging technologies (chemical proteomics, metabolomics, and functional genomics) to accelerate drug discovery.
Dr. Rong graduated from the College of Chemistry, Peking University, obtained Ph.D. in pathobiology from the University of Southern California, and completed postdoc training at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Xinghua RUAN
VICE PRESIDENT
Xinghua RUAN
VICE PRESIDENT
Xinghua is our Vice President for Engineering and is responsible for streamlining everything from AI Models, computing infrastructures to data atlas via engineering excellence.
Xinghua has over 15 years of experience at large-scale Internet companies and earned rich experience in engineering automation and underlying technical frameworks. He was a pioneer in constructing large-scale computing clusters, graph neural networks, and large-scale AI pre-training models when he served as Principal Architect at Baidu and Du Xiaoman (formerly Baidu Finance). Xinghua also has more than 20 invention patents in many fields, including engineering automation, massive data intelligent labeling, correlation analysis of search results, and anomaly detection.
Xinghua graduated from Nankai University with a Master degree in Computer Science.
Sandy LI
VICE PRESIDENT
Sandy LI
VICE PRESIDENT
Dr. Li is our Vice President of Global Partnerships, with a focus on multinational pharma collaborations.
Dr. Li has been a founding team member of BioMap and built multiple innovation platforms from the ground. Prior to BioMap, Dr. Li served as the Principal and head of Baidu Ventures’ biotech investment team in the San Francisco office. Some of the startups that she has invested in and incubated include Atomwise, Insilico Medicine, Sherlock, Subtle Medical, and Neowise Therapeutics. Dr. Li worked closely with the Silicon Valley life science ecosystem since her earlier career at the strategic consulting firm Simon-Kucher Partners.
Dr. Li holds a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, a M.Eng in Biomedical Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles, a B.Sc in Applied Chemistry and a B.A. in English from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Chen DONG
IMMUNOLOGY ADVISORY CHAIR
Chen DONG
IMMUNOLOGY ADVISORY CHAIR
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, as well as a principal investigator at the Institute for Immunology at Tsinghua University. 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 also was Dean of Tsinghua University School of Medicine in 2016-2020.
Dr. Dong’s research is to understand the molecular mechanisms whereby 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 highly cited researcher for seven times. The honors he has received include 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.
Qimin ZHAN
SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY CHAIR
Qimin ZHAN
SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY CHAIR
ZHAN Qimin, MD, is currently a Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He has dedicated to the research of tumor molecular biology and tumor translational medicine for a long time, he is the first to discover and systematically reveal the function and mechanism of key proteins at cell cycle monitoring points in the world, and clarify multiple important cell cycle regulatory proteins in cell carcinogenesis and tumor diagnosis and individualization the role of treatment.
In recent years, Dr. Zhan has systematically clarified the genetic variation and molecular characteristics of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, providing a theoretical basis and clinical basis for the effective search for molecular markers and drug targets.
Robert GENTLEMAN
BIOINFORMATIC ADVISOR
Robert GENTLEMAN
BIOINFORMATIC ADVISOR
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.
Michael WULFSOHN
DRUG DEVELOPMENT ADVISOR
Michael WULFSOHN
DRUG DEVELOPMENT ADVISOR
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.