Tagged: ucla
16 results
Samantha Andonian
Samantha Andonian is a San Francisco-based executive business partner who has spent more than a decade as the operational right hand to founders and C-suite leaders. She started as a stage manager and theater producer before turning that backstage discipline into a career supporting CEOs and chief product officers at Google, Slack, Bumble, Render and Splice. Beyond her own desk, she is an active voice in the executive-assistant community through eaMAFIA/eaRISE, mentoring EAs and pushing the field to be treated as a strategic profession rather than clerical support.
Steve Arnold
Steve Arnold is the CEO of E-Line Media, the video game developer and publisher behind the BAFTA- and Peabody-winning Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), Beyond Blue, and the upcoming Never Alone 2 and Neighborhoods. He has been making games professionally since 2003, starting at Electronic Arts, where he rose from production intern on the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series to Executive Producer working across EA Partners and the Origin store, with credits on Rock Band, The Beatles: Rock Band and Alice: Madness Returns. In May 2014 he joined Oculus, becoming Head of Oculus Studios in June 2016 and running the company's first-party and partner content slate through November 2019, a period covering Lone Echo, Robo Recall, The Climb, Chronos and Journey of the Gods, with partnerships spanning Epic, Insomniac, Ubisoft, Marvel and Lucasfilm. He then founded his own studio, Imagination Games, and ToyChest.AI, an early-stage venture using computer vision to let ordinary physical toys unlock content in games without special hardware. At E-Line he now leads a studio whose work sits in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has reached more than 25 million players.
Victor Zhou
Victor Zhou is the co-founder and CEO of Klarity Health, a digital healthcare marketplace he started in 2020 to connect patients with independent, licensed telehealth providers. A UCLA graduate and repeat founder who previously built and sold Sentinel Tec, Zhou has grown Klarity to serve hundreds of thousands of patients across 45+ states and launched Kiwi Health, a SaaS growth platform for private practices, backed by investors including Mucker Capital, Atypical Ventures, and Zoom founder Eric Yuan.
Steve Sibulkin
Steve Sibulkin is the CEO and board member of BioLumic, a New Zealand-and-US agtech company that uses precise UV light signals to switch on genetic traits in seeds without genetic modification. A repeat CEO with a background bridging advertising strategy and agriculture, he earlier co-founded and led Agronomic Technology Corp, maker of the Adapt-N nitrogen tool, which was acquired by fertilizer giant Yara International. He now leads BioLumic's push to commercialize xTraits, light-programmed seed traits it says can cut years and up to 90% of the cost out of traditional trait development across corn, soybean, rice and forage.
Alice Zhang
Alice Zhang is the CEO and co-founder of Verge Genomics (now Verge Labs), a San Francisco biotech she started in 2015 after walking away from an MD/PhD program at UCLA. She built a company that pairs machine learning with one of the largest collections of human brain tissue to find drug targets for diseases like ALS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. A Princeton molecular biology graduate, Soros Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Zhang turned her inexperience into what she calls a 'superpower,' raising more than $130 million and partnering with Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca before pivoting the company toward selling its data and insights to pharma in 2025.
Allen Chen
Allen Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Fitbod, the San Francisco strength-training app that uses machine learning to design a fresh, personalized workout every time you open it. A UCLA computer science grad and former Wall Street high-frequency trading strategist, Chen swapped optimizing stock portfolios for optimizing sets and reps, building an algorithm that picks exercises the way he once picked trades. Since launching in 2015 with co-founder Jesse Venticinque, Fitbod has grown to more than 300,000 paid subscribers while staying lean and profitable.
TORL BioTherapeutics LLC
TORL BioTherapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in Culver City, California developing antibody-based cancer therapies, including antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and monoclonal antibodies. Built on discoveries from the UCLA laboratory of Dennis Slamon - the scientist behind Herceptin and Ibrance - TORL is advancing a pipeline against novel cancer targets such as Claudin 6, Claudin 18.2, CDH17, and DLK1. Its lead program, TORL-1-23 (ixotatug vedotin), a CLDN6-targeted ADC, is in pivotal trials for platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. The company has raised over $450 million across multiple rounds, including a $96 million Series C in October 2025.
Sherry A. William
Sherry A. William is the founder and managing attorney of Pacific Ivy Law Group, a Los Angeles-area corporate boutique that pairs Big-Law rigor with what she calls emotional IQ. Harvard Law educated and trained at three top-tier firms in New York and Los Angeles plus a stint in Tokyo, she negotiates deals for companies, individuals, governments, and financial institutions worldwide. Raised by an immigrant single mother in the Egyptian American community, she is fluent in Arabic, licensed to practice law in California and New York, holds real estate broker licenses in both states, and leads the Harvard Law School Association of Los Angeles and the League of Egyptian American Professionals.
Stephanie Aubrey
Stephanie Aubrey is VP of People and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Alation, the Redwood City data intelligence company. A UCLA-trained mathematician turned people leader, she sits at the seam where strategy meets headcount, holding the pen on both org design and executive priorities.
Alejandro Guerrero
Alejandro Guerrero is the Co-Founder and General Partner of Act One Ventures, a Los Angeles micro-VC firm that backs pre-seed and seed companies across vertical SaaS, fintech, compliance, and AI-native enterprise software. A first-generation Mexican-American and former two-time founder, he authored the Diversity Rider, a clause now adopted by hundreds of funds that obligates lead investors to make space on cap tables for underrepresented co-investors. Act One closed a $73M Fund III in 2024 - roughly 3x its prior fund.
Ashley Caldwell
Ashley Caldwell is Partner and General Counsel at Sapphire Ventures, the Menlo Park venture capital firm with more than $11B in AUM across its Ventures, Partners, and Sport platforms. She runs legal across all three strategies — deal execution, governance, regulatory, exits — for a firm that backs growth-stage technology companies globally. A former Kirkland & Ellis private equity associate and Bluevine in-house counsel, she joined Sapphire in 2019, was elevated to General Counsel in 2021, and now wears the Partner title too.
Stuart Peterson
Stuart Peterson is the Founder and Managing General Partner of ARTIS Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm he launched in 2001 that coined and trademarked the term 'TechBio.' A 2017 Forbes Midas List honoree, Peterson led early-stage investments in YouTube (acquired by Google) and StemCentrx (acquired by AbbVie for $10.2 billion - the largest-ever venture-backed life sciences acquisition), and has since focused ARTIS at the convergence of computer science and life science, closing a $200 million TechBio II Fund in December 2023 to back next-generation health and medicine companies deploying AI, machine learning, and deep learning to transform human health.
Daniel Perez
Daniel Perez is a veteran electronics manufacturing executive with over 35 years of industry leadership. He co-founded OnCore Manufacturing Services, served as EVP at Solectron Corporation where revenues grew from $250M to over $12B, and joined Clover Wireless in April 2017 as CEO and Executive Chairman. He architected the acquisition of Teleplan in 2019 and led the subsequent rebrand to Reconext in 2020 - creating a global aftermarket lifecycle services company serving manufacturers, retailers, data centers, and enterprises across consumer electronics, mobile devices, and enterprise equipment. Perez holds an MBA and BA in Political Science from UCLA and serves on the boards of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and The Tech Interactive.
Neschae Fernando
Neschae Fernando is the CEO of Zone24x7, a 22-year-old technology engineering company headquartered in San Jose, California, with a major hub in Sri Lanka. With a dual background in electrical engineering (MS and BS from UCLA) and enterprise IT delivery at Cisco, Fernando leads a 270-person team that sits at a rare intersection: companies capable of integrating hardware and software end-to-end. Under his leadership since June 2022, Zone24x7 has won seven industry awards in 2025 alone, including Gold at NBQSA and the IoT Technology of the Year Award, while expanding its AI, RFID, and cognitive vision platforms across 50+ enterprise clients globally.
Don Vaughn
Don Vaughn, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ampa Health, a Palo Alto-based neurotechnology company building FDA-cleared portable TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) devices that compress 36 days of depression treatment into a single day. A Stanford-educated physicist turned UCLA neuroscientist, Vaughn has built a career at the intersection of brain science, machine learning, and accessibility - detoured, notably, through a DJ career that landed him a #28 iTunes Dance chart hit featuring Nick Lachey. His TEDx talk on neurohacking has surpassed one million views. Ampa raised an oversubscribed $8.5M pre-A round in October 2025, achieved FDA clearance for its Ampa One device in February 2025, and is targeting 5,000 patient remissions by end of 2026 - with a long-term audacious goal of a billion remissions in ten years.
Lia Haberman
Lia Haberman is a creator economy strategist, educator, and the author of ICYMI — a weekly newsletter read by 45,000+ marketers, brand social teams, and creators. Teaching social media and influencer marketing at UCLA Extension since 2018, she built her reputation as an independent, no-nonsense analyst who helps brands and creators navigate a landscape that reinvents itself every six months. With clients ranging from Google to Disney and a Threads following that dwarfs her Instagram audience, she practices what she preaches.