infectious-disease
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Eric Klasson
Eric Klasson is the founder and CEO of Resilienci.ai, an Austin-based company that uses AI, machine learning and behavioral data to map hyperlocal infectious-disease risk and supply-chain disruption. A longtime entrepreneur and finance executive with a 40-year career spanning Price Waterhouse, PepsiCo and several technology startups, he previously co-founded the social-analytics firm Snaptrends and founded Pandemic Insights. He is also a longtime food-security advocate who has chaired and served on food-bank boards.
Niamh O'Hara
Niamh O'Hara is the co-founder and CEO of Biotia, a New York healthtech company that pairs next-generation DNA sequencing with AI to identify pathogens causing hard-to-diagnose infections. An evolutionary biologist by training, she spun the company out of Cornell Tech with Weill Cornell geneticist Christopher Mason, runs a CLIA-certified metagenomics lab in Long Island City, and is building what she calls a global microbial sequence database to catch outbreaks before they spread.
Dino Dina
Dr. Dino Dina is a Genoa-born physician-scientist who spent 15 years building Dynavax Technologies as its President and CEO, shepherding the company through the long road toward HEPLISAV-B, a two-dose hepatitis B vaccine whose CpG 1018 adjuvant technology later became a cornerstone of global COVID-19 vaccine programs. Before Dynavax, he built the Vaccine Group at Chiron Corporation and led Chiron Vaccines to the first-ever approval of an adjuvanted influenza vaccine in Italy. Since retiring in 2013, he has poured equal scientific rigor into his Cimarossa estate on Howell Mountain, Napa Valley - 60 mountain acres of vines and 1,200 olive trees named for the Italian phrase meaning 'red hilltop.'
Michael Bigham
Michael F. Bigham is a veteran biopharmaceutical executive and investor who spent nearly a decade as Chairman and CEO of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, guiding the company through the FDA approval and commercial launch of NUZYRA (omadacycline) - a novel tetracycline-class antibiotic tackling drug-resistant bacterial infections. A Stanford MBA and CPA with roots in Gilead Sciences' early days, he has built, funded, and led companies across the full arc of drug development. He now operates as founder and managing director of Firebrand River Capital.
Ryan Spencer
Ryan Spencer is the CEO of Dynavax Technologies, the Emeryville biotech behind HEPLISAV-B and the CpG 1018 adjuvant. He joined as an interim controller in 2005, climbed for fourteen years through finance, IR, and commercial roles, and took the top job in December 2019. Under him, Dynavax supplied adjuvant for nearly a billion COVID-19 vaccine doses and, in December 2025, agreed to be acquired by Sanofi for roughly $2.2 billion.
Alec Ford
Alec Ford is the chief executive of Karius, a Redwood City genomics-diagnostics company that reads microbial cell-free DNA from a single tube of blood to identify more than a thousand pathogens. He took the job in October 2020 and led the company through a $100M Series C in May 2024.
Katherine Wu
Katherine J. Wu, Ph.D. is a staff science writer at The Atlantic and one of the most respected science journalists working today. A former Harvard bacteriologist turned acclaimed writer, she translates complex biology - from pandemic viruses to the sex lives of deep-sea creatures - into stories that are simultaneously rigorous and riveting. Winner of the 2024 Kovler Prize and the 2022 Schmidt Award for Science Communication, she has reported for The New York Times, National Geographic, and Smithsonian, and holds a PhD in Microbiology and Immunobiology from Harvard. She writes the newsletter The Pivot, covering science and health.