Ross Wilkie is VP of Global Communications & Public Affairs at Google, based in San Francisco. A biologist-turned-communications-strategist, he spent over 15 years rising through GlaxoSmithKline before serving as Chief Communications Officer at Danaher Corporation. In February 2024, he joined Google to oversee global communications and public affairs for one of the world's most scrutinized technology companies.
Ron Alfa is Co-Founder and CEO of Noetik, an AI-native biotech building foundation models trained on one of the world's largest collections of multimodal human tumor data. A physician-scientist with an MD-PhD from Stanford and an MA in the History of Medicine from UCL, Alfa spent six years at Recursion Pharmaceuticals rising to SVP Head of Research before co-founding Noetik in 2023. The company's OCTO-VC virtual cell models and TARIO-2 autoregressive transformer are designed to predict which cancer patients will respond to which therapies - attacking the 95% failure rate of cancer clinical trials from the data side rather than the pharmacology side. In January 2026, Noetik signed a landmark $50M licensing deal with GSK, one of the first large-scale transactions to monetize a biological foundation model as a scalable enterprise asset.