Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Entrepreneur in residence, Google Ventures
Biography
Nicole Gaudelli is a life sciences entrepreneur in residence and joined the GV team in 2024. She focuses on the interface of chemistry and biology with a particular emphasis on harnessing the principles of organic chemistry to enable the creation of precision genetic medicines. She earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University, in the laboratory of Professor Craig Townsend, where she studied monocyclic beta-lactam antibiotics and elucidated the mechanism through which they are biosynthesized.
She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in the laboratory of Professor David Liu, where she expanded the capabilities of base editing technology by inventing and creating the first adenine base editor (ABE) through directed evolution and engineering. Her doctoral and postdoctoral work culminated in prominent Nature publications in the fields of natural product chemistry and gene editing, and her foundational patent in adenine base editing was licensed by Beam Therapeutics and Verve Therapeutics.
Nicole is an inventor on numerous base editing patents and was the vice president of gene editing at Beam Therapeutics, where her team advanced and engineered precision gene editing tools. Her work enabled new and expanded pipeline development within the Beam enterprise. In addition, she served as the program leader for Beam’s hematology program “ESCAPE,” working to create next-generation autologous cell therapy opportunities for patients with sickle cell disease by developing innovative non-genotoxic conditioning strategies.
Nicole is a recipient of the 2018 American Chemical Society’s “Talented 12” award, recognized as a 2018 STAT News Wunderkind, a 2018 TEDMED Hive honoree, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News “Top 10 Under 40 of 2019”, BioSpace’s 2019 “10 Life Science Innovators Under 40 to Watch”, MIT’s 2019 Technology Reviews’ 35 Innovators Under 35, Business Insider’s 30 Under 40 in 2020, Fortune Magazine’s 40 Under 40 in Healthcare, Endpoint News’s 2021 20 Under 40 in biopharma, and John Hopkins University’s Distinguished Alumna Award of 2022.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2027 Silicon Valley
Track Chair:
Victor Velculescu, Johns Hopkins
PMWC Award Ceremony
• Rebecca Fitzgerald, University of Cambridge (Luminary)
• Mary-Claire King, University of Washington (Pioneer)
• Nickolas Papadopoulos, Johns Hopkins (Pioneer)
Featured Speakers
• Mary-Claire King, University of Washington
• Rebecca Fitzgerald, University of Cambridge
• Nickolas Papadopoulos, Johns Hopkins
• Victor Velculescu, Johns Hopkins
• Phil Castle, NIH
• Elad Ziv, UCSF
• Ash Alizadeh, Stanford
• Hamed Amini, Hepta
• Becky Taub, Madrigal Pharmaceuticals
• Trevor Pugh, University of Toronto
• Doga Gulhan, Harvard
• Pranav Rajpurkar, Harvard
• Chris Douville, Johns Hopkins
• Sylvia Katina Plevritis, UCSF
In Precision Medicine, Almost All Diseases Are Genetically Rare
A genetics-first keynote framing risk, prevention, and actionability.
The Reckoning
What the first wave of early detection got right and wrong.
The End of One Size Fits All
Risk-stratified screening, high-risk populations, and single-cancer tests.
Treating Disease at the Earliest Stage
Where detection and therapeutic interception begin to converge.
Pre-Cancer Detection & the Liver Disease Frontier
cfDNA and clinical action across the liver-disease-to-cancer continuum.
AI Across Multimodal Signals
Fragmentomics, methylation, imaging, pathology, and integration: hype versus real science.
PMWC Hall of Impact
Previous Speakers Include
Nobel laureates, technology founders, regulators, CEOs and scientific pioneers who have taken the PMWC stage.
