Speaker Profile
Biography
James an Associate Professor of Biomedical Data Science and, by courtesy, of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. James works on making AImore reliable, human-compatible and statistically rigorous, and am especially interested in applications in human disease and health. James received his Ph.D from Harvard in 2014, and was at one time a member of Microsoft Research, a Gates Scholar at Cambridge and a Simons fellow at U.C. Berkeley. James joined Stanford in 2016 and am excited to also be a Chan-Zuckerberg Investigator. We are also a part of the Stanford AI Lab. His research is supported by two Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator Awards, the Sloan Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, a Top Ten Clinical Achievement Award and faculty awards from Google, Adobe and Amazon.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2026 Silicon Valley
Track Chairs:
Gad Getz, Broad Institute & Alex Morgan, Khosla Ventures
PMWC Award Ceremony
• Greg Brockman, President & Co-Founder, OpenAI
• Steve Wozniak, Co-Founder, Apple
Fireside Chat
• Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures
• Greg Brockman, President & Co-Founder, OpenAI
Target Discovery: Beyond Genomics – Revealing Hidden Layers of Biology with AI
• Keynote: Stephen Quake, CZ Biohub
• Chair: Cindy Lawley, Olink
• Aritro Nath, City of Hope
• Massa Shoura, Phinomics
• Omar Serang, DNAnexus
Foundation Models for Human Biology: Accelerating Immunotherapy Discovery Through Multimodal AI
• Ron Alfa, Noetik
Systems Integration for Drug Discovery and AI
• Hugo Lam, Genentech
Interpretable AI Models for Multi-Modal Biomarker Discovery in Drug Development
• Vitalay Fomin, Numenos
Closing the Loop: Coupling AI with In Vivo Validation
• Gabriel Musso, biosymetrics
Interpretable AI for Biomarker Discovery: Accelerating Drug Development
• Chair: Rajat Roy, PATHOMIQ INC
• Shivanni Kummar, MD, OHSU
Can AI Really Create the Next Blockbuster Drug? Closing the Loop from Discovery to Development
• Chair: Amar Das, Guardant Health
• Ari Caroline, Weave Bio
• Dina Katabi, Emerald/MIT
• Andrei Georgescu, Vivodyne
• James Zou, Stanford
Gemini Digital Twins Accelerate Precision Medicine
• Collin Hill, Aitia
Scaling Rare Disease Discovery with AI: From Genomic Data to Therapeutic Insights
• Lisa Gurry, GeneDx
Enabling Targeted Precision Drug & Gene Delivery with Predictive AI
• Andre Watson, Ligandal
Is AI the New Drug?
• Chair: Alex Morgan, Khosla Ventures
• Michael J. Kahana, Nia Therapeutics




