Arie Belldegrun

Biography
Arie S. Belldegrun is a trail‑blazing urologic‑oncologist‑turned‑biotech entrepreneur whose company‑building spree—from Agensys and Cougar to Kite Pharma—helped usher in the first FDA‑approved CAR‑T therapy and led to Kite’s $11.9 billion sale to Gilead Sciences.After that landmark exit, he co‑founded Allogene Therapeutics and still serves as its Executive Chairman, steering the next wave of off‑the‑shelf (allogeneic) CAR‑T cell products toward the clinic.Beyond Allogene, Belldegrun deploys capital through Bellco Capital, Two River, Symbiotic Capital, Vida Ventures, and the real‑estate venture Breakthrough Properties, nurturing a constellation of startups that translate science into patient impact.Over three decades on UCLA’s faculty, he has authored 500‑plus scientific papers, mentored a generation of physician‑scientists, and kept patient benefit at the center of every deal—cementing his reputation as one of precision medicine’s most influential builders.

Kiran Khush

Biography
Dr. Kiran Kaur Khush is a board-certified, fellowship-trained heart failure cardiologist at Stanford Health Care. Dr. Khush is also a professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Khush specializes in caring for patients with advanced heart failure and those needing a heart transplant or mechanical circulatory support. She is dedicated to delivering patient-centered, compassionate care and improving quality of life for people with heart failure. Dr. Khush’s research interests include developing evidence-based guidelines for evaluating and accepting donor hearts for transplantation. She also studies novel ways to monitor for and prevent early and long-term complications after heart transplantation. Dr. Khush has coauthored more than 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Circulation, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Science Translational Medicine, and The Lancet. She has also presented to her peers at international and national meetings, including annual sessions of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) and the American Society of Transplantation. Throughout her career, Dr. Khush has been an active member of the ISHLT and has served on many of the organization’s committees.

Yoel Sadovsky

Biography
Dr. Sadovsky is the Executive Director of Magee Women's Research Institute, the Elsie Hilliard Hillman Chair of Women's Health Research, Distinguished Professor of OBGYN, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and Associate Dean, Women's Health Research and Reproductive Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. He is board certified in obstetrics and gynecology (Washington University), and maternal-fetal medicine (UCSF). His NIH-funded research focuses on feto-placental development and molecular mechanisms underlying placental function, aiming to better understand early human development and pregnancy health. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the Association of American Physicians. He has served as president of the Society for Reproductive Investigation, on the Councils for NIHNICHD and the March of Dimes, and currently serves on the NIH Advisory Committee on Research in Womens Health. In 2013, he was awarded the Cozzarelli Prize in Biomedical Science from the National Academy of Sciences.

Iwijn De Vlaminck

Biography
Iwijn De Vlaminck trained in applied physics (Ph.D., KULeuven), single molecule biophysics (postdoc, TUDelft) and precision medicine (HHMI research associate, Stanford University). His most recent research has led to the development of sensitive blood tests to diagnose organ transplant rejection, already widely used, the Karius blood test to screen for infection from blood, used in more than 400 US hospitals, RNA liquid biopsy technologies to monitor inflammatory disease, technologies to spatially map RNA in tissues, and highly multiplexed imaging methods to map the biogeography of the human microbiome. He is an elected fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and a recipient of the NIH New Innovator and NIH MERIT awards. He is a co-founder of Kanvas Biosciences and Romix Biosciences.

Charles Chiu

Biography
Charles Chiu, M.D. Ph.D. is a Professor at UCSF, Director of the UCS-FAbbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center (VDDC), and Associate Director of the UCSF Clinical Microbiology Laboratory. Chiu currently leads a translational research laboratory focused on clinical metagenomic sequencing assay development for infectious diseases and genomic investigation and surveillance of emerging pathogens, including the SARSCoV2 coronavirus. He also uses RNASeq transcriptome profiling to develop predictive models using machine learning for host response based diagnosis of COVID19 and other infections. Chius work is supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), philanthropy, and the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine. He has authored more than 100 peer reviewed publications (20 on COVID19), holds over 15 patents and patent applications, and serves on the scientific advisory board for Mammoth Biosciences, Danaher Dx, Biomesense, and Flightpath.

Joseph DeRisi

Biography
Dr. Joe DeRisi is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF and President at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub SF, a nonprofit research institute affiliated with UCSF, UCB, and Stanford. Dr. DeRisi specializes in infectious diseases, including viral, fungal, and parasitic microbes, in addition to autoimmune syndromes in humans. He is a member of the NAS, the NAM, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Minnie Sarwal

Biography
Dr. Minnie M. Sarwal is an adult and pediatric trained transplant nephrologist who heads the kidney pancreas transplant program at UCSF for transplantation of patients with Type 1 Diabetes and renal failure. She has spearheaded new diagnostics for precision medicine to personalize diagnosis of transplant rejection. Her lab has been consecutively funded by the NIH for 30 yrs and leads in computational drug repuprosing and population scale EHR analysis to improve outcomes for chronic disease. Sarwal is trained in India and the UK, competing her MD in India and advanced cliical training at Guys Hospital, London and Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. She earned her doctorate in molecular genetics at the University of Cambridge under her mentor Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner. Sarwal is an exited enterpreneur from Stanford and continues to do pivotal work to produce commercially available tests and new compunds for organ transplant rejection and chronic mutli-organ disease

Joseph DeRisi

Biography
Dr. Joe DeRisi is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF and President at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub SF, a nonprofit research institute affiliated with UCSF, UCB, and Stanford. Dr. DeRisi specializes in infectious diseases, including viral, fungal, and parasitic microbes, in addition to autoimmune syndromes in humans. He is a member of the NAS, the NAM, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.