
He began as a self-described paper pusher, questioned the machinery from every seat he occupied, and built a career around making clinical research easier to enter and harder to abandon.
Derk Arts is a Dutch physician-turned-entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Castor, a clinical-trial software company he started in 2012 after coding the first version of its Electronic Data Capture platform himself. Trained as a medical doctor and epidemiologist with a PhD, he built Castor to make clinical research more inclusive, patient-centric, and data-driven. The platform now supports thousands of trials across roughly 90 countries and was used by the World Health Organization for its Solidarity Trial. Castor has raised more than $60 million, including a $45 million Series B in 2021, and Arts is a recognized voice on decentralized trials, eConsent, and the responsible use of AI in research.
Shayan Khorassani is the Field CEO at Huma, the London-based AI health infrastructure company powering regulated digital health applications for pharma, providers, and governments across 70+ countries. A licensed architect turned health technology operator, he moved from designing physical structures at Tom Wiscombe Architecture and SCI-Arc to translating Huma's platform into deployments for global health systems.
Belinda Tan is a physician-scientist turned serial founder who builds the missing evidence layer for wellness. An MIT-trained, UCLA MD/PhD dermatopathologist, she co-founded Science 37 to pioneer decentralized, telemedicine-enabled clinical trials, then launched People Science, a Los Angeles public-benefit company she co-leads with her husband Noah Craft. Her mission: bring the rigor of the randomized trial to the things people already use - probiotics, traditional Chinese medicine, food-as-medicine, psychedelics - so wellness can be backed by data instead of marketing.
Samuel Whitaker is the founder and CEO of Mural Health, a Philadelphia-area clinical trials technology company building a participant-first platform that bundles fee-free payments, transportation, two-way communication, and real-time satisfaction data. He invented the original participant payment tool, the ClinCard, when he founded Greenphire in 2008 and grew it into a billion-dollar company on roughly $2.2 million of outside capital. After a stint as CTO of Signant Health, he launched Mural Health in 2022 to push the same idea further: treating the trial participant, not just the sponsor, as the customer. He also drove the creation of the Harley Jacobsen Act, federal legislation to stop taxing payments to clinical trial participants.
Joel Morse is the co-founder and CEO of Curavit Clinical Research, a virtual contract research organization (VCRO) that designs and runs decentralized clinical trials for digital therapeutics, devices and drugs. A mechanical engineer turned serial healthcare operator, he previously co-founded C3i Solutions in 1993 and built it into a global leader in tech-enabled clinical trial services before selling to Telerx in 2014. At Curavit he is betting that trials can be run where patients actually live, stitching together wearables, web recruitment and real-world evidence to reach people traditional sites never see.
Josh Rose is the CEO of Hawthorne Health, Inc. (formerly Hawthorne Effect), a Walnut Creek-based company building the largest community-based clinical trial site network in the U.S. A clinical research industry veteran with over 20 years of experience, Rose previously led decentralized clinical trial strategy at IQVIA and CVS Health before taking the helm at Hawthorne Health in early 2024. Under his leadership, Hawthorne has expanded to 75+ community locations, partnered with 40+ pharma sponsors, and pioneered a model that embeds certified clinical research staff inside independent pharmacies and patients' homes - bringing trials to communities that traditional research networks have long bypassed.
Dr. Michelle Longmire is the co-founder and CEO of Medable, the leading platform for agentic AI in clinical development. A Stanford-trained physician-scientist who grew up in a Los Alamos nuclear-research family, she pivoted from dermatology to founding Medable in 2015 after hitting enrollment walls in her own clinical research. Under her leadership, Medable has raised over $500 million in venture capital, deployed its platform in roughly 400 trials across 70 countries in 120 languages, and served more than one million patients globally - transforming how the world runs clinical trials.
Tom Lemberg is the Founder & CEO of Curebase, a San Francisco-based decentralized clinical trial platform that has enrolled over 60,000 patients across 60+ studies. A Harvard-trained computer scientist and molecular biologist, Lemberg built Curebase from his couch in 2017, joined Y Combinator in 2018, and raised $59M to transform how clinical trials work - letting patients participate from home and bringing their own doctors into the research process. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022, he's on a mission to make clinical trials accessible to any patient, anywhere.