SLAS Mentor Program

Anne Baldwin, Ph.D., has spent the last 17 years in the biotech industry where she has worked her way from the bench to behind the robots. For the last few years, Baldwin has built out high-throughput screening capabilities and high-throughput cell culture systems for mammalian cancer lines and iPSC lines. She enjoys taking her assay development and GMP background and applying it to building robotic work cells and process engineering work flows for startup labs. Her specific focus has been on liquid handling and geeking out over all the cool things scientists can do to little bits of liquid that move around in a lab.

Scientist turned marketeer who has an extensive research background in molecular genetics, as well as scientific and strategic marketing expertise in clinical, research and single cell multi-omics product portfolios. She is currently responsible for commercial management of curiox biosystems product portfolio including global new product development, product management, product strategy, upstream strategic marketing, and downstream B2B/ABM marketing. She leads a team of six lifecycle management and downstream marketing leaders.

Joshua Bauer, Ph.D., is the Director of the Vanderbilt University High-Throughput Screening (VHTS) Facility and Director of Functional Genomics Screening and High-Content Imaging within the Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology. Bauer has a broad background in pharmacology, cancer biology and biochemistry, with specific experience in oncology-related functional genomics screening (FGS), high-content screening (HCS) and chemical/drug library screening. He currently leads the HTS team with the development of biological assays and screens to enable the discovery of chemical and genetic modulators of a variety of molecular targets and pathways in cell biology for therapeutic implications. His research interests focus on bioinformatics and chemical genomic approaches, including FGS and HCI, to identify novel drug targets and to better understand the molecular and genetic mechanisms that underlie how cells and patient-derived samples (eg, organoids) respond to therapeutics. His main goal is to identify novel strategies to overcome therapy resistance or new indications that will have clinical application.

William Borrell is a Biomedical Engineer with over a decade of laboratory automation experiences. He currently works at Merck as an associate director of robotics, where he brings lab automation to the regulated space. Over his career, he has helped build and develop the laboratory automation business for both Beckman Coulter and Molecular Devices. Borrell is passionate about life science automation, data analysis and considers himself a professional problem solver. In his free time, he coaches youth sports, enjoys wood working and home improvement. Borrell has a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Drexel University.

Beth Cimini, Ph.D., is a Senior Group Leader, CZI Imaging Scientist and head of the Cimini Lab in the Imaging Platform at The Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA. She obtained her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn at the University of California, San Francisco by splicing variants of the telomere master scaffolding protein TIN2 which honed her interests in image analysis and lead to her to postdoctoral and staff scientist roles with Dr. Anne Carpenter's lab at the Broad. The Cimini Lab focuses on bioimage analysis tool creation (Piximi) and maintenance (CellProfiler), as well as on applying open source tools to novel biological problems. She created and now directs the Postdoctoral Training Program in Bioimage Analysis and also leads the Broad’s efforts towards community engagement and biological projects for the Center for Open Bioimage Analysis (COBA).

Patrick Courtney, Ph.D. has 20 years experience in the development of laboratory technology with a special focus on technology transfer. He has worked as director for global firm PerkinElmer, as well as at Sartorius, Cap Gemini, and with startups and spinouts as investor and mentor. He has a long involvement in EU and national programmes, leads a European working group on analytical laboratory robotics, is member of the SiLA (Standards in Laboratory Automation) board of directors and is a deal leader with Swiss Health Angels. Courtney holds an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. in Robotic Engineering/Molecular Biology, and has 100 publications and ten patents.

Eli Fine, Ph.D. has a background in Biomedical Engineering, with a focus on genetic engineering of human cells. After graduate school, he's been part of several start-ups in the pharma and biopharma space, always with a focus on automating human cell culture. Working in smaller companies, he has also led software engineering projects and data science initiatives. Currently, he leads a team of Automation Engineers and Informatics Engineers working together to create end-to-end automated workflows where the liquid handlers, instruments, Electronic Lab Notebook and other cloud infrastructure are all interconnected with bi-directional communication. One area he is most interested in pushing the field forward is creating more comprehensive automated in silico testing and simulation of methods and larger workflows.

Peter Goldenblatt, Ph.D., has been at Merck Research Laboratories, Boston for 16 years and is currently an Associate Principal Scientist within the Quantitative Biosciences group. Goldenblatt has wide-ranging expertise in laboratory automation and integration, high-throughput biochemical and cell-based screens, and high-content screening. He currently leads a team responsible for compound management, integrated platforms and many device-supporting early discovery efforts.

Kalpesh Gupta, Ph.D., is an experienced biotech engineer with proven expertise in both wet lab and automation. Gupta has extensive experience in analytical assay development for biologics and downstream automated protein process development, along with experience in automating complex workflows for analytical/upstream and downstream processes and implementing integrated barcoding/LIMS workflows for seamless integration of automation systems to data analytics/LIMS systems. He is also an expert in programming, troubleshooting and modifying current systems within the Hamilton liquid handler.

Gupta leads high-performing teams spanning scientific and engineering disciplines such as laboratory automation, process engineering, technical operations and high-throughput delivery and boasts more than 14 years of experience working in the biotechnology industry ranging from large organizations to small startups. He is passionate about leadership, organizational management frameworks and coaching the next generation of engineers and scientists to achieve their dreams.

Zack Gurard-Levin, Ph.D., has served as chief scientific officer at SAMDI Tech, Inc. since June 2016 and is currently a member of the SLAS Board of Directors. He has more than 15 years of multidisciplinary drug discovery research experience with expertise in chemistry, biochemistry and cellular biology. Gurard-Levin was a pioneer user of SAMDI technology and co-developed SAMDI as a high-throughput, label-free solution for drug discovery research. Prior to SAMDI Tech, he was a research scientist at the Institut Curie in Paris, France, leading epigenetics drug discovery and diagnostics projects in oncology. Gurard-Levin has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and has been awarded multiple research grants. He has a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Institut Curie.

Alison is the co-founder and CEO of a Boston/ Montreal based start up accelerating drug discovery by removing the bottlenecks from gene editing workflows. DropGenie has developed a microfluidics based non-viral delivery platform to enable arrayed genetic screening at the single donor resolution. She is a co-inventor of the technology and hold a PhD in Biochemistry from McGill University.

Shastine Keeney has been working in automation for 25 years. She began in industrial automation working in the semi-conductor and fiber optic cable manufacturing spaces. In 2004, she stumbled into biotech and quickly landed at Genentech working with the automation of fermenters and purification systems in the pilot plants. However, because she missed working on equipment that had moving parts, she searched Genentech's internal job postings for the word "robot" which is how she discovered laboratory automation and has never looked back. These days she runs her own very successful one-woman consulting firm, working with clients small and large and in all facets of biopharma from synthetic biology and diagnostics, to early and late-stage drug discovery and beyond. When she's not working, Shastine likes to dance as well as spend time with her two grandchildren and her several cats. Keeney loves mentoring because she loves to help people understand their worth and get perspective on career growth by focusing on what they've already accomplished and how they can feel empowered to move their career in new directions. She is especially attuned to ways that both explicit and implicit bias can impact folks in the workplace, and feels that it is an important part of the discussion about career growth.

Sunran Kim, Ph.D. leads the High-Throughput Screening team at Bayer Crop Science in Chesterfield, Missouri. Her team utilizes plant, insect and fungal cell-based assays to support product development for small molecules, biologics and plant biotechnology. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside in plant cell biology and as a mentor would like to share her career development advice as it applies to transitioning from academia to industry.

Christina Minnick received her B.S. in Biology from Delaware Valley College and has been working in the pharmaceutical industry since 2010. Minnick worked for multiple pharmaceutical companies and CROs over the years and with many types of automated liquid handlers, instruments and automated platforms. She has a broad range of experiences in the industry, including live virus work, cell pharmacology, biochemical assays, radioligand bind assays, cell based and ELISA assays, robotics and compound management, and for the past eight years she has been in an automation lab at Merck working with state-of-the-art robotic platforms. Minnick has also worked on projects from the target validation stage to the lead optimization stage, giving her a wide range of knowledge in drug discovery.

Scott Mosser leads a team of Merck scientists focused on the integration of innovative technologies to enable robust and efficient execution of a wide range of In Vitro assays. His team works together to drive efficient, automated workflows to enable compound and assay management, data capture and reporting, instrumentation and robotic platforms. These workflows primarily support the small molecule drug discovery efforts and are expanding to include other modalities (antibodies, vaccines, etc.). Mosser enjoys working on teams where he can share his scientific knowledge that he has accrued over the last 30 years with a goal to enable scientists to innovate and impact Merck's research. Minnick has had the pleasure of working on teams that discovered Belsomra® the first-in-class Orexin Receptor Antagonist approved for insomnia and many other innovative medicines.

Andrew Napper, Ph.D., received his doctorate in Chemistry from Penn State University and has spent 15 years working at various bio-techs in the Boston/Cambridge, MA area, including Genzyme, Enanta, Arqule and Elixir Pharmaceuticals. In 2005 he transitioned into academic drug discovery by joining the University of Pennsylvania as the Director of High-throughput Screening. In 2009, he moved to Nemours/A.I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, DE to establish a lab focused on drug discovery for childhood cancer and other pediatric diseases. After one year at FLX Bio in the San Francisco Bay Area, Napper joined Evotec as the Vice President of Discovery Sciences based in their Princeton, NJ office. In March 2021, he joined BMS as the Executive Director, Head of Automation and Assay Technologies and leads several teams in Lead Discovery and Optimization. Outside ofwork, he enjoys outdoor family activities such as camping, hiking, kayaking and skiing.

Kim Friis Olsson, Ph.D., has worked in laboratory automation and with liquid handlers (Hamilton, Tecan, Biomek) for the last eight years. In that time, he’s developed and automated a variety of methods and assays for fermentation and characterization of microbial organisms. Olsson is also the founder of the Copenhagen Laboratory Automation Network (CphLAN), a non-profit and vendor independent association where colleagues working with laboratory and data automation in the Copenhagen Area can meet locally and knowledge share.

Christian Parker is the director of a group that conducting high-throughput screens to support novel target identification by testing libraries of annotated compounds, siRNA, cDNAs and secreted proteins as well as conducting pooled CRISPR screens.

Nick Shah is a scientist and leader with extensive experience discovering novel therapies for unmet medical needs. He is currently Head of Quantitative Biology at Nura Bio where the team is working to discover novel therapies to halt neurological disease. Previously, Shah was Head of In Vitro Pharmacology at DICE Therapeutics where the team discovered DC-806 (psoriasis) and had a successful IPO. Before that, he was an early scientist at Flexus Biosciences and helped discover Linrodostat (cancer) driving an acquisition by BMS. He also was a project lead at RAPT Therapeutics where the team discovered FLX475 (cancer) and RPT193 (autoimmune disease).

As a volunteer, Shah advises early-stage startup founders through Creative Destruction Lab and Springboard, serves as a judge and career panelist for the BioGENEius Challenge and is a member of the California Life Sciences Racial and Social Equity Committee. Shah completed his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.

Ary Shalizi, Ph.D., is a neurobiologist by training, and screening scientist by vocation. He is currently the Group Leader for High-Dimensional Screening at Calico Life Sciences, where he is responsible for implementing high-content assays that combine imaging, genomics and mass spectrometry to further the understanding of the biology of aging. Prior to Calico, Shalizi was a Senior Scientist in the Genomics and Functional Screening group at Synthego, where he led the execution of multiple arrayed CRISPR screens in the oncology and metabolic disease spaces. His first role in industry was developing point-of-care tests for microbial infections. Shalizi completed his doctoral work at Harvard, where he studied the transcriptional regulation of synaptic stability, and his postdoctoral training at Stanford, where he was introduced to small molecule screening through a collaboration with The Broad Institute.

Mary Jo Wildey, Ph.D., is the Sr. Director in Screening & Compound Profiling at Merck, focusing on automation and informatics. In her current role, she oversees automation and informatics workflows supporting small molecule high-throughput screening (HTS) with the aim of identifying new chemical matter to support targets in therapeutic areas such as animal health, cardiometabolic disease, immunology, oncology, infectious disease/antivirals and neuroscience. If there’s a robot nearby generating quality data, she’s happy! HTS at Merck uses a matrix-driven resource philosophy, which also adds to one of her life goals of helping scientists to learn and grow in the early drug discovery screening processes.

Chi Yun successfully transitioned from academia to the startup world in 2021 and is excited to share her experience. To date, she has overseen hundreds of diverse, 2D and 3D cell-based, high-throughput screening projects from academic researchers in the New York City area. As an expert in functional genomics, high-content screening and cell-based assay development, she has also presented at high-content analysis meetings, directed courses on best practices for RNAi screening and teaches a graduate course section on automation, screening and data analysis. Yun co-founded the NYU Image Analysis Working Group which discusses software applications, image analysis standards, project based examples and best practices for data retention and is also Chair of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Laboratory Research & Innovation Group (LRIG).

Adam Zweifach, Ph.D., received his B.A. in biology from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. in physiology from Yale University. After postdoctoral research at Stanford University, Zweifach started his own research lab in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. In 2006, he moved to the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut where he developed an interest in using flow cytometry to screen for small molecule immune modulators. Most recently, he has become interested in understanding assay performance and the various metrics (like Z’) used to assess it. He joined the Editorial Board of SLAS Discovery in 2021 and has contributed to the development of a new protocol article format for the journal and will be serving as Protocols Editor.