SLAS Mentor Program

Hannah Lui Park, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Associate Director of the Genetic Epidemiology Research Institute at the UC Irvine School of Medicine. She earned her B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley and M.S. in Cell Biology at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. She then completed her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at Stanford University and her postdoctoral fellowship in translational cancer epigenetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Park serves as the Director of the Wisdom Study and the Athena Breast Health Network at UC Irvine. Her studies include basic, clinical, environmental, genetic, and epigenetic cancer epidemiology, including the identification and validation of biomarkers for cancer risk.

Ivan Krylov has more than 10 years of experience in both academic and industry setting developing new instruments and consumables for biotech industry. Ivan’s background is truly diverse and ranges from Materials science to Medicinal Chemistry and Assay development. Ivan earned his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Southern California. In his current role at Molecular Devices, Ivan is responsible for the development of new biosensors and assay kits for real-time label-free biomolecular interactions analysis using biolayer interferometry (BLI)-based instruments (Octet platform).

Shastine has been doing automation for over 20 years, originally for industrial manufacturing and then for Biotech starting in 2005. She has focused on laboratory robotics, working in several companies that have spanned the gamut from drug discovery, to synthetic biology to diagnostics. After dabbling with consulting for a couple years on the side, she took the leap and became a full-time consultant in early 2019. The first year was a huge success and she enjoys the opportunity to focus exclusively on the technical challenges and also to set her own schedule.

Leader with 20+ years experience in operational planning, team management, assay development to enable clinical and non-clinical studies, system implementation with a focus on automation and LIMS to support high through put sample management, functional genomics, antibody discovery and genomic engineering.

Gabe is a Sr. Scientific Alliance Manager with Global Strategic Accounts at MilliporeSigma. Having served in various life science sales roles after graduate school, he joined Sigma Aldrich in 2015 as a Sr. Account Manager focusing on identifying and closing complex and custom bulk sales opportunities for large industrial customers. He also served as the interim Regional Director for the Central US Commercial Region during 2018. Gabe has an M.S. in Biology and maintains over 10 years of commercial life science experience.

Alison co-founded DropGenie in 2018, a startup that automates gene editing pipelines. Lying at the intersection of hardware, software and wet lab biology, DropGenie is developing a platform to execute CRISPR protocols in mammalian cellular systems, thus amplifying the pace of scientific discovery. As a scientist who took the plunge into the world of startups, she is a strong advocate for technical founders seeking to disrupt the status quo of the biotech industry. She’s happy to share DropGenie's experiences navigating the biotech start up ecosystem, personal challenges in flexing from an academic to entrepreneurial mindset, or chat about the innovations shaping the gene editing space. She has over 10 years of R&D experience related to the genetic manipulation of a wide breadth of different disease models and cell types including human embryonic stem (ES) cells, primary human and mouse immune populations, patient derived xenographs, and transgenic mouse models of breast cancer. She holds a PhD in Biochemistry from McGill University, MS from the University of British Columbia, and a BSc from Queen’s University.