Cliff Brangwynne, Ph.D.
Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Princeton University
Cliff Brangwynne, Ph.D.
Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Princeton University
Clifford Brangwynne is a biophysical engineer and leading expert in soft matter physics who is currently a professor at Princeton University in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Cliff has devoted his career to advancing understanding of membrane-less biological phase separation and biomolecular condensate formation in living cells – pioneering work which has been recognized with numerous awards, including a Macarthur Fellowship (2018), Wiley Prize (2020), Blavatnik Award (2020), and Nakasone Award (2021). He earned a bachelor’s degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001 and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University and conducted postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems from 2007 to 2010, prior to joining the faculty of Princeton University in 2011.
Matthew P. Jacobson, Ph.D.
Venture Partner, Apple Tree Partners (ATP); Professor Emeritus, University of California, San Francisco
Matthew P. Jacobson, Ph.D.
Venture Partner, Apple Tree Partners (ATP); Professor Emeritus, University of California, San Francisco
Matt Jacobsen is an ATP Venture Partner, co-founder and Interim CSO of ATP portfolio company Nine Square Therapeutics, and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. He has co-founded several successful companies including Global Blood Therapeutics, acquired by Pfizer in 2022 for $5.4 billion; Relay Therapeutics, which currently has four targeted oncology candidates in clinical development; and Circle Pharma, a designer of precision macrocycle therapeutics. A leading authority in computer-aided drug design and computational structural biology and biophysics, he is the author of more than 200 research publications and several patents. Software written by Matt and his collaborators is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry, and he served on the Scientific Advisory Board of Schrödinger, Inc., for two decades.
Matt earned his BS from Stanford, his PhD in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and completed postdoctoral research at Oxford University and Columbia University. He has been a faculty member in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at USCF since 2002 and is currently Professor Emeritus. At UCSF, he received the NSF CAREER Award as well as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and several UCSF School of Pharmacy teaching awards. He has served on the editorial boards of eight journals, including Biochemistry, PLoS Computational Biology, and Structure.
Cigall Kadoch, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Pediatric Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School
Cigall Kadoch, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Pediatric Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School
Cigall Kadoch is an associate professor of pediatric oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School and an institute member and co-director of the Epigenomics Program at the Broad Institute. Her laboratory studies chromatin regulation, with a strong focus on the structure and function of the mammalian SWI/SNF or BAF family of chromatin remodeling complexes in human health and disease. She is also the Scientific Founder of Foghorn Therapeutics and currently serves on its Board of Directors. Cigall completed her bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley and her graduate research at the Stanford University School of Medicine before assuming her faculty position in Boston.
Spiros Liras, Ph.D.
Venture Partner, Apple Tree Partners (ATP)
Spiros Liras, Ph.D.
Venture Partner, Apple Tree Partners (ATP)
As a venture partner at Apple Tree Partners (ATP), Spiros Liras has led ATP’s creation of and investment in several portfolio companies, including Nereid Therapeutics. He also has led scientific innovation and discovery at some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. At Biogen, he established and helmed the External Portfolio Innovation unit within Research and Development. Prior to that, Spiros was vice president of Medicinal Chemistry at Pfizer, where he led teams to deliver clinical pipelines in disease areas including cardiovascular and metabolic diseases and neuroscience. Under his leadership, his divisions explored cutting edge drug discovery concepts including selective protein translation inhibition, design of macrocycles for drug discovery in tough target space, allosterism, and tissue targeting design strategies for the delivery of small molecule, oligonucleotide therapeutics and other modalities. Spiros earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Iowa State University and completed postdoctoral studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Alice Ting, Ph.D.
Professor of Genetics, Biology, and Chemistry, Stanford University
Alice Ting, Ph.D.
Professor of Genetics, Biology, and Chemistry, Stanford University
Alice Ting is Professor of Genetics, Biology, and Chemistry at Stanford University and an investigator of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Prior to joining Stanford, she was a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for 14 years. Her lab develops molecular technologies for studying proteins and signaling pathways in living cells and organisms and applies them to neuroscience and mitochondrial biology. Her work has been recognized by the NIH Pioneer Award, the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award, and the ACS Arthur Cope Scholar Award. Alice studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Harvard, earned her Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley working with Peter Schultz, and completed postdoctoral training at the University of California San Diego with Roger Tsien.
Jared Toettcher, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Molecular Biology, Princeton University
Jared Toettcher, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Molecular Biology, Princeton University
Jared Toettcher is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. His work currently focuses on engineering optogenetic tools to control diverse intracellular processes and studying how growth factor signaling regulates cell fate in development and disease. His honors and awards include being named a 2019 Vallee Scholar, a 2018 NSF CAREER Award, a 2016 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, a Cancer Research Institute postdoctoral fellowship, an MIT Presidential Fellowship, and a UC Berkeley Regents’ Scholarship. Jared graduated with a B.S. in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley, performed his graduate studies in Biological Engineering under Bruce Tidor (MIT) and Galit Lahav (Harvard Medical School), and completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco with Wendell Lim and Orion Weiner.
