Founded Character Biosciences to generate first-in-class therapies for inflammatory disease of aging, by first defining patient subgroups based on genetics, pathophysiology, clinical progression.• Created and led all Character Biosciences preclinical and clinical strategies. Responsible for portfolio management.• Established two therapeutic programs in AMD and discovery efforts in Glaucoma. • Authored research protocols and was Primary Investigator on four clinical research studies, covering >70 clinical sites and recruiting >5,000 patients. This formed the foundation for our clinical-genomic discovery platform to identify novel drug targets associated with disease progression.• Initiated strategic partnerships with academic institutions, managed CROs, to advance therapeutic molecules.• Identified and established the first Pharma partnership deal with Roche/Genentech.• Established the scientific vision and strategy to meet value inflection points for the company. • Co-led fundraising efforts to raise a total of $27M from >9 venture sources.• Formed the SAB and recruited 4 leading KOL’s in bioinformatics, stem cell biology, and ophthalmology.• Recruited scientific and clinical staff (>30 employees) and established new research laboratory facilities.

Small molecules for genetically validated targets in inflammatory, and neurodegenerative diseases.• Led indication analysis and selection of inflammatory, neurological and other diseases for TYK2 and LRRK2 small molecule programs.• Managed cross-functional teams, including target biology, genetics, chemistry, PK/PD. Enabled parallel therapeutic and companion diagnostic development.• Enabled the development of a first of a kind companion diagnostic for the LRRK2 program in Parkinson’s disease. Led scientific partnership with Qiagen to develop the assay using next generation sequencing.

• Co-Founded Clover Therapeutics as a subsidiary of Clover Health• Co-Led the spin-out of Clover Tx as an independent drug development company focused on inflammatory, ocular and other diseases of aging

Early-stage Biotech startup with genetically supported drug development programs• Novel pathway and biology discovery (lipid and lysosomal). Led biology discovery strategies for lipid biology targeted programs (APOE).• In-licensing new molecule program diligence• Novel pathway and biology discovery (lipid and lysosomal)• Pre-clinical animal model development and PK/PD study design

Disease and biology expert across variety of diseases, based on human genetics and pathway analysis • Managed external academic collaborations and commercial research organizations.• Served on the Industry Scientific Advisory Board for PPMI (Michael J Fox Foundation).• Metabolic and Ophthalmology disease; NASH/MASH, Geographic atrophy, neovascular AMD, Uveitis• Target identification with human genetics collaborations, human tissue collection, RNAseq, eQTLs.• Led patient selection, heterogeneity and biomarker strategy for preclinical metabolism programs and preclinical through PhI/II intermediate AMD programs.• Integrated clinical imaging endpoints (e.g. OCT, FAF), genetic biomarkers and therapeutic outcomes.• Neuroscience; Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Pain, and ALS. (>10 molecule programs)• New target discovery using human genetics and patient samples for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.• Led Dx biomarker discovery strategies and patient sub-group analysis for crenezumab (Ph II), and anti-Tau (Ph I-II). Integrated clinical imaging endpoints, genetic biomarkers to identify responder/non-responders.

Noncoding RNA regulation of transcription and biomarker discovery• Next-generation sequencing to examine the coding and non-coding RNA transcriptome in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease cases and identified splicing and expression differences

Novel gene discovery and functional genomics• Identified quantitative trait loci for expression (eQTL) and epigenetic marks (CpG methylation; methQTL) in a large series (>500) of human brain tissues.• Novel disease gene discovery and first examination of LRRK2 expression association with disease (with John Hardy and Andrew Singleton Lab).• Designed cell and molecular biological studies to discover the function of disease associated genetic variants DJ-1, PINK1, SNCA) (Mark Cookson Lab).