Silicon Spotlight
BRIDGET MCLEAN
Human Resources Assistant
Bridget McLean is a Human Resources Assistant at Silicon Therapeutics. Bridget is a young professional always looking to take on a new challenge. She has worn many hats through her career that spans from teaching elementary school to working security at Boston Calling. During her undergrad at Bryant University she developed her skills in leadership and team work while focusing her degree in business management. Bridget held leadership roles in several on-campus organizations, where she used her communication and problem-solving skills to advance the organizations’ goals. While studying at Bryant University, Bridget also interned at Management Search Inc. in Providence, RI which taught her the ins and outs of recruiting while honing her attention to detail. Bridget also worked as a Student Manager for Bryant University’s Audio-Visual department where she received the title “Student Worker of the Year” in 2017. After graduation, Bridget worked as an intern at Creative Office Pavilion, where she supported a small Human Resources team. Throughout her short career Bridget has built a great reputation for doing business with a smile.
At Silicon Therapeutics we have assembled a diverse leadership team with deep experience across disciplines ranging from physics and computer aided drug design to chemistry and structural biology.
We share the belief that we can deliver novel medicines to significantly improve the lives of patients by taking an integrated approach that combines experts in biology, biophysics, chemistry, physics, and computer science.
Leela Sriram Dodda, PhD
Leela Sriram Dodda, PhD
Dr. Leela Sriram Dodda is an Investigator, Computational Modeling and Design at Silicon Therapeutics, where he uses various free energy and enhanced sampling methods in combination with Molecular Dynamics to design ligands with drug like properties for target proteins. Prior to Silicon Therapeutics, he obtained his Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry at Yale University under the supervision of Prof. William L. Jorgensen, working in molecular simulations of organic molecules and biomolecules, computational drug discovery methods, force-field development and free energy methods. Dr. Dodda is the lead developer of the LigParGen server, an open source OPLS-AA parameter generator for organic drug like molecules.
Stella Li, PhD
Stella Li, PhD
Dr. Yunxing (Stella) Li is a scientist on the biophysics team at Silicon Therapeutics and studies the interaction between candidate molecules and protein targets in multiple therapeutic areas. Her role is to provide proof of concept support for structure-based drug design using biophysical and biochemical techniques. During her doctoral research, she focused on the activation of Glutaminase C, a gateway enzyme of glutamine metabolism in cancer cells. In particular, she solved several of its crystal structures – each bound with different ligands – and designed different biophysical assays to study the interaction between small molecules and proteins. Her work has led to the identification of several key structural factors for the activation and inhibition of Glutaminase C. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Physics from Peking University and her PhD in Biophysics from Cornell University under the supervision of Dr. Richard A. Cerione.
Shourya Jain, MS
Shourya Jain, MS
Shourya Jain is a Research Associate on the Biophysics and Biochemistry Team and works on a Biochemical Assay that screens compounds against the target protein. She obtained a master’s degree from Northeastern University in Biotechnology, majoring in Pharmaceutical Technologies. Shourya completed her Co-op with us where she assisted in developing purification procedures for target proteins. During her previous Co-op at CuriRx, Inc. she was responsible for the production, purification and analysis of proteins through various analytical techniques and cell-based assays. She completed her bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology from Pune, India. During her undergraduate studies, she also worked as an intern at ACTREC, Mumbai (India) where she tested the effect of HDAC inhibitory drugs on the expression of a specific protein target to develop therapy against Breast Cancer.
Bethany Tesar, MS
Bethany Tesar, MS
Bethany is a Senior Research Associate at STX. Bethany joined STX after working as a Scientist II at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, focusing on drug discovery and the effect of mutations, SNPs and clonal evolution on Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia risk and treatment response. Prior to their work at Dana-Farber, Bethany worked at Yale University, studying the effect of Toll-like receptors and MyD88 on transplantation and response to viral infection. Bethany has a MS in Molecular and Cell Biology from Quinnipiac University, a BS in Pathobiology from University of Connecticut and is a co-author on 24 peer-reviewed journal publications.
James Rice, PhD
James Rice, PhD
Dr. James Rice is a Principal Investigator at Silicon Therapeutics with expertise in adaptive immunology/ immuno-oncology and multiplexed immunoassay development. During his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Rice developed multiple FRET assays in an effort evaluate the Antizyme/Antizyme Inhibitor PPI as a potential prostate cancer therapeutic target. Additionally, he developed peptide and mRNA based cancer vaccines through a collaboration with Department of Nanomedicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His previous work at Ciencia, Inc. included the development of a novel SPCE multiplexed immunoassay platform for the detection of autoreactive T cells in Type I diabetes. Dr. Rice serves on the editorial board two peer-reviewed immunology journals and has authored numerous publications in the fields of basic and applied immunology. Dr. Rice studied at the University of Connecticut where he earned a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology for his work on CD4+ T cell signaling and effector development.
Tucker Lynn, MS
Tucker Lynn, MS
Tucker is an associate in Lab Operations at Silicon Therapeutics. He completed an MS in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Virginia, focusing on Androgen Receptor in cancer. After completing his degree, he joined Dr. Bill Petri’s lab at the University of Virginia. While there, he studied techniques for clinical tests to qualitatively score severity of C difficile infection. He also worked in lab management, as a clinical coordinator, and managed a project with multiple collaborators. He then became the lab manager for Dr. Tami Lieberman, at MIT. As the first employee of a brand new PI, he set up the lab and wrote many of the SOPs. He also coordinated several studies involving human subjects. In his career of lab operations he has developed proficiencies in purchasing and inventory management, hazardous waste management, shipping and receiving, lab organization, and equipment maintenance.
Sharon Shechter, PhD
Sharon Shechter, PhD
Sharon is a principle Investigator at Silicon Therapeutics with expertise in computer-aided drug design, bioinformatics, and software engineering. Before joining Silicon Therapeutics, she ran a computational drug design consulting boutique (Shechter Computational Solutions) where she focused on two major targets (Galectin-3 and Importin a/b). Those efforts have yielded 4 patents and a high-profile publication (Nature Reports). Prior to that, she was the Head of Computational Discovery at Karyopharm Therapeutics where she was involved with the discovery of a novel Exportin1 inhibitor, which is currently in phase 3 clinical trials. Another novel compound she discovered, targeting PAK4 and NAMPT, recently entered clinical trials. She is author on 30 research publications and patents.
Cherl Koh, PhD
Cherl Koh, PhD
Dr. Cheryl Koh is a Senior Investigator at Silicon Therapeutics. As part of the Biology team, her current work focuses on the functional characterization of the cellular mechanism of action and in vitro pharmacology of lead compounds. Dr. Koh was previously at AstraZeneca, where she was involved in early stage small molecule discovery activities driving multiple concurrent projects, encompassing various target classes and across therapeutic areas. During her postdoctoral work on cancer biology in Dr. Ernesto Guccione’s lab (IMCB, A*STAR), Dr. Koh was co-first author on a study that was published in Nature, and was awarded 2 research grants. Dr. Koh received her Ph.D. in Pathobiology from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she studied the oncogenic role of Myc in prostate cancer in the lab of Dr. Angelo De Marzo. Dr. Koh is an author on 18 peer-reviewed scientific articles.
Charlie-Lin, PhD
Charlie-Lin, PhD
Charlie is an Investigator at STX focusing on developing new methods and algorithms for the STX drug discovery workflow on current and next-generation hardware. Prior to joining Silicon Therapeutics, Charlie was finishing up his PhD at GlaxoSmithKline looking into relative binding free energy in the TNN13K system. Charlie received his PhD from Professor Ross Walker’s group at the University of California San Diego, where he worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center developing novel algorithms for the AMBER molecular dynamics suite for binding free energy calculations and membrane simulations. As part of his PhD work, he also worked in close conjunction with Intel Corporation to develop a distributed memory version of AMBER that was scalable to thousands of cores.
Ramya Samant, MS
Ramya Samant, MS
Ramya joins the STX team as a Research Associate after graduating from Northeastern University with a Masters in Pharmaceutical Sciences. During her masters, she worked as a Co-op at Absorption Systems, where she studied the dissolution and permeation of drugs using the IDAS-2 system. Her second Co-op was at GlaxoSmithKline, where she worked in the biology team for developing binding assays to validate binding of compounds using the DNA Encoded Library Technology. Prior to her masters, she did her Bachelors in Pharmacy from Mumbai, India.
At Silicon Therapeutics, Ramya is working with the Biology team to study binding of compounds using various cell function and molecular biology assays.
Andres Calderon
Andres Calderon
Andres Calderon is the Executive Assistant to the CEO and the Office Manager at Silicon Therapeutics. As a multi-talente, young professional and having worked steadily since high school, Andres has established a broad foundation of proficiency in multiple platforms, with an emphasis on customer service and cutting-edge creativity.
As an assistant to several different managers, Andres honed his craft as an event coordinator with an eye towards administrative organization. Eventually he began work as a barista at the highest volume Starbucks on the East Coast, where he again stood out as one of the store’s first certified Coffee Masters. Since graduating Andres has worked for several high-end catering and food service industries, which has helped him to gain an ever-increasing network of connections while developing in all aspects of customer relations. Working as part of already established teams and emerging startups both, Andres is well-versed in the in’s and out’s of day-to-day operations, and has always been noted for his prodigious work ethic and team-building in all work environments. He is also a member of Boston Executive Assistants.
Kristen Marino, PhD
Kristen Marino, PhD
Kristen is a Senior Investigator at Silicon Therapeutics with expertise in the application of MD simulations and enhanced sampling methods to characterize the conformational changes of protein targets for drug design. Kristen completed her PhD in Chemical Engineering at Princeton University in the group of Prof. Emily Carter. Prior to joining Silicon Therapeutics, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City with Prof. Marta Filizola working on the application of enhanced sampling methods to characterize binding pathways of ligands to GPCRs. She was also awarded a Marie Curie fellowship to work with Prof. Francesco Gervasio at University College London to determine the effects of oncogenic mutations on kinase activation.
Matthew Cullen, PhD
Matthew Cullen, PhD
Dr. Matthew Cullen is a Principal Investigator at Silicon Therapeutics with expertise in medicinal and synthetic chemistries. Matt joined Silicon Therapeutics in July 2017 as Senior Investigator and has played a key leadership role across a number of our key projects. Matt has a very impressive depth and breadth of experience in medicinal chemistry as well as the broader drug discovery process. Before joining SiTX, Matt was a Senior Scientist/Program Lead at Proteostasis Therapeutics, where he was employed from November 2009 through August 2017. There, he was responsible for compound management activities, the management of company data, designing tools and interfaces for data analysis and data retrieval, and personnel. He later transitioned to Chemistry Lead on a neurodegeneration program for a novel protease target in early Lead Optimization. He was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he developed a de novo method for the catalytic, stereoselective functionalization of inactivated olefins with sulfur electrophiles. Matt received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Irvine and a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry & Molecular Pharmacology from Purdue University.
Gino Romano
Gino Romano
Gino is the Laboratory Manager and Operations Lead at Silicon Therapeutics. He began his career in the Laboratory Operations field at X-CHEM Pharmaceuticals in Waltham, MA. In his two years there he played an important role in developing laboratory and administrative operations while receiving training certifications in life sciences. In 2013, he joined Agilux/Charles River as the sole Lab Operations member at their USDA regulated InVivo Laboratory in Worcester, MA. During his five years there, he became proficient in all aspects of laboratory logistics including metrology, hazardous waste management, hazardous shipping and receiving, compound management, sample quality control, project coordination, purchasing and inventory management. Gino provides operational excellence to the Silicon laboratory operations and played a key role in the laboratory build-out supporting biology, chemistry and biophysics. He is a highly motivated team player who seeks solutions to all problems and believes there is no task too big or small. He graduated from Nichols College with a BSBA Degree in Business Management.
Dazhi Tan, PhD
Dazhi Tan, PhD
Dazi Tan is a Principal Investigator at SiTX. Dazhi joined SiTX in September 2017 as Senior
Investigator and has contributed significantly to Platform development (force field, RBFE, and
HPC job control infrastructure) as well as making significant contributions to the SWAT and
ASPIRE projects in structural biology as well as modeling and design. Previously, Dazhi was a
Research Fellow with D.E. Shaw Research, where he successfully developed an accurate force
fields for nucleic acids and protein-nucleic acid complexes. Dazhi served as a Graduate Student
at Liang Tong Lab, Columbia University from August 2009 through May 2014 where he
successfully solved the structures of several proteins and protein-RNA complexes. Before that,
he was Undergraduate Research Assistant at Junmim Pan Lab, Tsignhua University from July
2007 through June 2008 where he discovered genes responsible for cilium-growth deficiency and
related human disorders. Dazhi has a B.S., Biological Sciences from Tsinghua University and a
PhD, Structural Biology from Columbia University.
Eureka Zhao, PhD
Eureka Zhao, PhD
Dr. Ziyan (Eureka) Zhao is a scientist on the biology team at Silicon Therapeutics and studies the interaction of candidate molecules with key regulators of the innate immune signaling pathways. Her role is to offer proof-of-concept for lead compound selection process using cell reporter assays. During her doctoral research, she designed several immune cell-based assays and implemented them in high-throughput screenings to look for novel immune modulatory compounds. In particular, she focused on the activation of cytotoxic T lymphocyte, the cell type involved in tumor cell killing. Her work has led to the identification of several novel immune modulatory compounds, some being developed into chemical leads, and several peer-reviewed publications. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Biomedical Engineering from Beihang University and PhD from the University of Connecticut under the supervision of Dr. Adam Zweifach.
Dwight McGee, PhD
Dwight McGee, PhD
Dwight is a Senior Investigator at Silicon Therapeutics and focuses on developing workflows and applications for docking and virtual screening that can be leveraged to help guide computer aided drug design. Prior research efforts, involved using molecular dynamics to understand the mechanisms of how drug-resistant mutations reduce the efficacy of known inhibitors and evaluating the shifts in pKa values of protein residues in the apo and bound forms. Specifically, he has been involved several successful drug-discovery projects ranging from HIV to Cancer that has resulted in the identification of drug-like leads. In addition, Dwight assisted in the development of MMPBSA.py, a program that can be employed in end-state free energy calculations, as well as the software docking program DOCK6. Dr. McGee holds a B.S. and M.S. from Florida A & M University, Ph. D. from the University of Florida and was an AGEP-T FRAME postdoctoral fellow at Stony Brook University.
Huang Huang, PhD
Huang Huang, PhD
Dr. Huang is an Investigator at Silicon Therapeutics with expertise in medicinal chemistry, drug discovery and organic chemistry. Dr. Huang studied at East China University of Science and Technology in Prof. Hualiang Jiang and Prof. Jian Li’s group, where he obtained his PhD degree in medicinal chemistry for his research in medicinal chemistry and organic synthetic methodologies. Prior to joining Silicon Therapeutics, Dr. Huang was trained as a Post-doctoral research fellow at University of Michigan in Dr. Tomasz Cierpicki & Dr. Jolanta Grembecka’s lab studying medicinal chemistry and chemical biology on anti-cancer drug discovery. Before post-doc training, Dr. Huang worked as a Senior Scientist in WuXi AppTec (Shanghai) providing R&D service for Takeda (San Diego). In total, Dr. Huang is the first author of 6 peer-reviewed publications and named as inventor for 3 patents.
Samuel Sparks, PhD
Samuel Sparks, PhD
Bio coming shortly.
Zhixiong Lin, PhD
Zhixiong Lin, PhD
Zhixiong is a Senior Investigator at Silicon Therapeutics working on the development of free energy simulation methods and applications in Silicon’s drug discovery programs. Zhixiong did his PhD in a joint program between the University of Science and Technology of China and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology under the supervision of Prof. Haiyan Liu and Prof. van Gunsteren studying molecular dynamics, force fields, and free energy methods. He then continued with Prof. van Gunsteren for his postdoc where he focused on developing highly efficient free energy simulation methods and enhanced sampling techniques. Prior to joining Silicon, Zhixiong was a Senior Scientist at Adagene (Suzhou) Limited leading the computational group, where they developed methods related to antibody discovery and applied computational tools in their antibody discovery programs.
Bryce Allen, PhD
Bryce Allen, PhD
Bryce Allen is a Principal Investigator, leading the data analytics and machine learning team. Bryce joined Silicon Therapeutics as an Investigator in November 2016 and has contributed significantly to the Platform in key areas, including free energy calculations, uncertainty quantification, de novo design, and database infrastructure. Before joining SiTX, he was a Biomedical Data Scientist at LINCS Data Coordination and Integration Center from February 2014 – September 2016. He led the architecture and development of data storage, query, and analysis infrastructure – SciDB, Hadoop, MapReduce, Impala, and Python. He also developed and maintained custom ETL processes and machine-learning models for chemical and genomic entities used in the Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) from multiple sources. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow, Biomedical Informatics, at Harvard Medical School. Bryce holds a BS in Biochemistry from Virginia Tech and a PhD from the University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine.
Marcel Schumann, PhD
Marcel Schumann, PhD
Marcel is a Senior Investigator at Silicon Therapeutics with experience in methods development in and application of computer-aided drug design. Previous research included development of receptor-ligand binding free-energy assessments, development of efficient docking algorithms including modeling of side chain and backbone flexibility, as well as invention of structure-based approaches aimed at identifying distant off-targets.
Marcel received his PhD degree in bioinformatics from the University of Tübingen.
He worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Thomas Jefferson University (Philadelphia), where he researched extensions to this computational chemistry methodology and successfully applied it to experimental projects focussed on lead-identification for a range of targets. Subsequently, Marcel led clinical trial data science R&D teams at a major CRO and was responsible for strategic data science advise in this domain.
Timothy Dwight, PhD
Timothy Dwight, PhD
Timothy Dwight is a Senior Investigator at SiTX. Tim joined SiTX as Investigator in June 2018 and has made significant contributions to the SWAT project both as medicinal chemist, as well as leading the chemistry effort towards DC nomination. Tim has exemplary synthetic skills and acumen, and has transitioned seamlessly into strategic role on the SWAT project, and is expanding his presence in the exploratory space by working with the WRN effort. He came to us from Vertex Pharmaceuticals where he was a Research Scientist from February, 2016 through June, 2018 where he synthesized focused sets of compounds to answer specific SAR questions supporting lead optimization on a cystic fibrosis project and engaged in multi-parameter SAR development to increase CFTR activity and improve metabolic stability while reducing off-target liabilities. Before that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, developing mechanism-based inactivators of GABA aminotransferase for the treatment of Epilepsy. Prior to that, he was an Associate Scientist at ARIAD Pharmaceuticals, Inc from January 2008 through July 2009. Tim holds a BS, Chemistry and Biochemistry from San Diego University, a master’s
degree, Chemistry from University of Rhode Island, and a PhD, Organic Chemistry from
University of California, Los Angeles.
Istvan Kolossvary, PhD
Istvan Kolossvary, PhD
István is a Senior Fellow at Silicon Therapeutics with both academic and industrial expertise in computational drug discovery. Before joining Silicon Therapeutics he worked at D.E. Shaw Research for over a decade where he contributed to the Desmond molecular dynamics (MD) code base and explored the use of long timescale MD simulations in drug discovery applications. Prior to that he worked at Novartis, where he developed and applied molecular modeling techniques to structure-based drug discovery projects. István been a visiting professor at Columbia University and was most recently a Senior Research Scientist at Boston University. István invented low-mode conformational searching (LMOD), which is one of the first collective variable methods used in advanced conformational sampling. He published over 60 research papers and authored or co-authored 3 books.
Jingqiang Wei, PhD
Jingqiang Wei, PhD
Dr. Jingqiang Wei is Senior Investigator of Medicinal Chemistry Department at Silicon Therapeutics. He joined us from GSK where he worked on DNA-encoded library technology and related medicinal chemistry projects. Before that, he was a research chemist at Broad Institute, played a major role to establish the large-scale production of diversity-oriented synthesis (DOS) libraries, and participated in medicinal chemistry efforts covering multiple therapeutic areas including infectious disease, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Dr. Wei obtained Ph.D. from Iowa State University and finished his postdoc at Harvard University and Broad Institute.