Diverse in our backgrounds, training, and thinking
United in our mission

Jim is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science as well as Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. Jim is widely heralded as one of the founders of the field of synthetic biology, which applies engineering principles to the biological sciences in order to program novel gene circuits that can better control cellular behavior. Using this approach, Jim has pioneered innovative ways to detect and treat infections, and to study antibiotic action, bacterial defense mechanisms, and the emergence of resistance.

In addition to his role as a faculty member at MIT, Jim is a Core Faculty member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Jim is a member of all three National Academies, and has been a Rhodes Scholar, a Macarthur Fellow, and a recipient of the NIH Pioneer Award. He is a co-founder of Senti, EnBiotix, Synlogic (NASDAQ: SYBX) and Sherlock Biosciences. Dr. Collins’ patented technologies have been licensed by over 25 biotech, pharma, and medical device companies.

Martin is a member of Engine Biosciences’s Scientific Advisory Board, with deep experience in functional genomics technology development and applications in cancer and neurodegenerative disease. He is an Associate Professor in the UCSF Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at UCSF. He received his BA and MA in Natural Sciences (Biochemistry) from Cambridge University and his PhD from the Rockefeller University, where he used biophysical approaches to characterize the architecture and dynamics of the nuclear pore complex with Dr. Günter Blobel.

As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Jonathan Weissman’s group at UCSF, Martin spearheaded the development of a functional genomics platform that makes it possible to robustly identify human genes relevant to a cellular process of interest, and to elucidate cellular pathways and networks using systematic genetic interaction maps. One important application of the screening platform is the identification of genes that control the sensitivity of cells to a given drug. This approach can identify the relevant cellular targets of new compounds, predict drug-resistance mechanisms, and guide the rational development of combination therapies.

Currently, the goal of Martin’s research is to understand how human cells maintain their proteins in a functional and balanced state. The cellular pathways safeguarding proteome function and balance are termed the “proteostasis network.” Martin aims to elucidate how the proteostasis network dynamically adapts to the needs of the cell and how it is challenged and rewired in diseases, especially cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Identification of proteostasis factors that control formation, spread, and clearance of protein aggregates associated with neurodegenerative diseases will shed light on the disease mechanisms and reveal potential therapeutic targets.

Martin has received several highly prestigious awards, including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2015), the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation’s Allen Distinguished Investigator Award (2015), and the NIH Pathway to Independence Award (2014). The Kampmann lab is affiliated with the Innovative Genomics Initiative and the Paul F. Glenn Center for Aging Research at UC Berkeley and UCSF.

Hu is an Associate Professor at the Mayo Clinic. His group is focused on systems pharmacology and individualized systems medicine. Li’s team is active in developing novel network tools and harnessing machine learning methods to study context-dependent activities of regulatory networks at genome-wide scale. The major theme in the research team is to develop novel computational methods that can detect meaningful biological information embedded in the sea of Big Data and uncover novel regulatory mechanisms that explain the properties of biological phenotypes to benefit individualized disease diagnosis, drug discovery, and precision medicine. The developed computational platforms can greatly illuminate the understanding of disease mechanisms underlying drugs’ modes of action, addressing key challenges in Big Data-oriented biomedical complex systems and will ultimately lead to precision medicine for each patient suffering from a devastating disease.
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Hu completed his post-doctoral fellowship in systems biology at the Wyss Institute at Harvard Medical School and received his Ph.D. in computational biology and bioinformatics from the National University of Singapore.

Dr. Trainor brings 30 years of experience in the Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industries. He has expertise in overall drug discovery strategy and execution, medicinal chemistry, and the application of transformative technologies. Leading teams of over 100 scientists, he has advanced over 35 drug candidates into clinical development in a diverse spectrum of therapeutic areas including antivirals, cancer, neuroscience, and inflammation. His team provided key discovery support that enabled the successful launch of SustivaTM for HIV disease.

Dr. Trainor is a partner at BioMotiv which he joined after leaving Bristol Myers Squibb Company as Vice President of Oncology and Early Discovery Chemistry. At BMS George was responsible for all aspects of medicinal chemistry for the oncology area as well as hit-to-leads activities in support of all therapeutic areas. Prior to being merged into Bristol Myers Squibb, Dr. Trainor was Executive Director for Medicinal Chemistry at Dupont/Dupont Merck Pharmaceuticals. His key contribution from that period was the discovery and commercial development of fluorescence-tagged chain terminators for use in automated DNA sequencing. This breakthrough technology was subsequently employed in the sequencing of the human genome, and In 2011, Trainor won the American Chemical Society’s Heroes of Chemistry Award for his work on DNA sequencing. Dr. Trainor did his undergraduate work at Stevens Institute of Technology, received his PhD in Organic Chemistry at Harvard University, and was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University.

Darin has two decades of experience in corporate finance and transactions in U.S.A. and Asia. He started his career as a corporate attorney at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Chicago. Following that, he became an investment banker with Salomon Smith Barney / Citigroup, both in Chicago and in Hong Kong. Darin also worked as a senior investment banker (Managing Director) at HSBC and Canaccord Genuity in Hong Kong. Darin has advised on many capital raising transactions, both public and private, in his career, as well as cross-border and U.S. domestic mergers and acquisitions. This includes listing companies on a number of international exchanges.

Darin obtained a B.A. in Economics and Management, summa cum laude, from Albion College, in Albion, Michigan, U.S.A., and a Juris Doctorate, cum laude, from the Harvard University Law School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.