All paid attendees are welcome to participate in the SLAS2020 Mentor Program! Don't miss out on the opportunity to participate in a 45-minute one-on-one mentoring session with an industry expert. Click on a photo below to learn more about our esteemed mentors to determine with whom you would like to meet. Sessions take place during exhibition hours in private rooms at the SLAS Booth.
Laboratory automation engineer with 10+ years of experience in the biotech industry developing assays and applying them to robotics. Strong emphasis on process improvement, sample management and study design.

Anne Baldwin
Peter Goldenblatt earned his B.S. in Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Miami and began his career in the Biopharmaceutical industry in 1997 at Mitotix/GPC-Biotech. Later he worked at Curis as a scientist and an automation manager. Since 2006, Peter has been at Merck Research Laboratories, Boston and is currently an Associate Principle Scientist within the Quantitative Biosciences Biochemistry/Biophysics Team. Peter has wide-ranging expertise in laboratory automation & integration, high throughput biochemical and cell based screens, and High Content Screening. He currently oversees the integrated automation laboratory at MSD Boston, supporting early discovery efforts in Immuno-oncology and Neuroscience.

Peter Goldenblatt
Nick Shah
Associate Director, In Vitro Pharmacology
DiCE Molecules
Nick is a scientist and leader with extensive experience in leading cross-functional teams that build tools to interrogate difficult drug targets. He currently leads the In Vitro Pharmacology efforts at DiCE Molecules where the team is working to leverage chemical evolution in small molecule drug discovery. Prior to DiCE, Nick was an early scientist at Flexus Biosciences / FLX Bio and worked with the team to discover two molecules that are currently in clinical testing for cancer immunotherapy: BMS-986205 in multiple Phase II trials & FLX475 in Phase I. Throughout his career, Nick has been deeply involved in assay development for drug discovery while leading project teams and managing multiple large-scale screening campaigns.

Nick Shah
Chi Yun
Director, NYU High Throughput Biology Laboratory
Research Assistant Professor, Biochemistry & Molecular Pharmacology
NYU School of Medicine
Chi has overseen hundreds of diverse, 2D and 3D cell based, high throughput screening projects from academic researchers in the New York City area. As an expert in functional genomics, high content screening and cell-based assay development, she has presented at high content analysis meetings, directed courses on best practices for RNAi screening, and teaches a graduate course section on automation, screening and data analysis. She co-founded the NYU Image Analysis Working Group which discusses software applications, image analysis standards, project based examples, and best practices for data retention. Chi is also Chair of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Laboratory Research & Innovation Group (LRIG).

Chi Yun
David is an old-school systems' engineer, enjoying the challenges of meshing the diverse disciplines of science and engineering. Via Master in Physics at Cambridge University and a further Masters in Instrumentation Systems at UCL, David wrapped up his university credentials with a PhD in Medical Physics, creating novel instrumentation to detect breast cancer with non-ionizing radiation. He started into Lab Automation at Applied Biosystems, leading architecture for a new oligo-neuclieotide manufacturing plant. He moved from California to Milan, Italy, to join a drug discovery CRO, Axxam SpA, to create compound storage and management systems for high-throughput screening, then back to the Bay Area, to guide an organization of scientists and engineers at Counsyl (now Myriad) in building a fully-integrated platform aimed at scalable sample preparation for genetic screening. Most recently, he's been building CRISPR-based cell-engineering factories for Synthego.

David Jennions
Christina Minnick received her B.S. in Biology from Delaware Valley College and has been working in the pharmaceutical industry since 2010. Tina has worked for multiple pharmaceutical companies and CRO’s over the years and she has worked with many types of automated liquid handlers. She has a broad range of experiences in the industry including live virus work, cell pharmacology, biochemical assays, and compound management. For the past 3 years she has been in an automation lab at Merck working with state of the art robotic platforms. Tina has worked on projects from the target validation stage to the lead optimization stage, giving her a wide range of knowledge in drug discovery.

Christina Minnick
Ian Yates
Director Marketing & Business Development
Thermo Fisher Scientific
I spent the first part of my career working in drug discovery at GSK (then Glaxo) in the UK and then AstraZeneca (then Astra) in Sweden. I worked on both natural product and small molecule programs and quickly found automation to be a vital tool to drive our research. I left AstraZeneca to join Velocity11 and be part of providing solutions, instead of purchasing them. This turned out to be more rewarding as I got to work on a broad range of applications with many different companies. Following the acquisition of Velocity11 by Agilent I moved to Canada and, after tiring of commuting to California, took a break from life science to try my hand at being an entrepreneur by starting a company. After that company was acquired, I joined Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2017 to lead the Marketing and Business Development Team.

Ian Yates
Scott Mosser
Director of Quantitative Biosciences/Manager
MSD
Scott started his journey back in high school where he developed a keen interest in Biology and Chemistry. He pursued these interests during his undergraduate studies at Moravian College and the University of Delaware. He then joined Merck where he discovered his passion for studying how cells communicate and function through various signaling pathways. During his time at Merck Scott discovered, and was recognized for, having a knack for instrumentation and people management. Under excellent tutelage he helped build a LIMS to enable the integration/automation of compound and assay management to support In Vitro Pharmacology. Currently, Scott leads a team of scientists focused on the integration of innovative technologies to enable robust and efficient execution of a wide range of In Vitro assays and all the associated activities including: compound management, data capture and reporting, and automation, to support small molecule drug discovery at MSD. Scott's primary focus is to use his management skills and the scientific knowledge he has accrued over the last 27 years to enable scientists to innovate and impact Merck's pipeline from target identification through lead optimization. He has had the pleasure of working on teams that discovered Belsomra® the first-in-class Orexin Receptor Antagonist approved for insomnia and many other innovative medicines.

Scott Mosser
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.

Hannah Lui Park, Ph.D.
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).

Ivan Krylov
Shastine Keeney
Principal Automation Engineering Consultant
Zevon Automation
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.

Shastine Keeney
Karen Billeci
Senior Director Lab Operations
Precision for Medicine
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.

Karen Billeci
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.

Gabriel Connell
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.

Alison Hirukawa