Scientist Spotlight
HOLLY SOUTTER, PhD
Assoc. Director of Biophyiscs and Biochemistry
Dr. Holly Soutter is Associate Director of Biophysics and Biochemistry at Silicon Therapeutics bringing more than a decade of experience in the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors. She joins us from X-Chem Pharmaceuticals where she led a group responsible for assay development and validation, protein expression and purification, protein characterization, structural biology, and biophysics. In her previous role at Pfizer, she provided structure-based drug design support for projects in multiple therapeutic areas including in oncology, anti-infectives, immunology, cardiovascular and inflammation. She is co-inventor of multiple clinical candidates, co-author of 22 peer-reviewed manuscripts and two patents.
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.
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.
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 Senior 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Matthew Cullen, PhD
Matthew Cullen, PhD
Dr. Matthew Cullen is a Senior Investigator at Silicon Therapeutics with expertise in medicinal and synthetic chemistries. Prior to joining Silicon, Dr. Cullen was a Senior Scientist and Program Leader at Proteostasis Therapeutics, where he developed a clinical candidate for a deubiquitinase and made multiple contributions to their portfolio of CFTR modulators (amplifiers, correctors, potentiators) for the treatment of cystic fibrosis. Dr. Cullen is named as an inventor on severaland author on more than a dozen pharmaceutical patents and has authored research publications across a variety of disciplines, including medicinal chemistry, synthetic methodology, drug discovery, and molecular pharmacology. Dr. Cullen studied at Purdue University where he obtained a Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry & Molecular Pharmacology for his research on optimizing a novel series of inhibitors for HIV reverse transcriptase.
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
Dazhi is a Senior Investigator at STX focusing on developing the physical models, aka “force fields”, for the INSITE computational drug design platform. Prior to joining Silicon Therapeutics, Dazhi worked as a research fellow at D. E. Shaw Research, a biotechnology firm in New York, where he substantially improved the force field parameters for nucleic acids and successfully elevated their accuracies to the same level as state-of-the-art protein force fields. Dazhi received his PhD from Prof. Liang Tong’s group at Columbia Univeristy, where he primarily used X-ray crystallography to characterize the structures and functions of multiple protein-RNA complexes involved in the post-transcriptional processing of mRNAs.
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 is a Senior Investigator with STX and directs STX informatics infrastructure, which coordinates data storage, access, and analysis across the company. Allen’s doctoral research focused on large-scale computational screening and machine learning approaches to drug discovery, where he designed, tested and validated a large-scale high-throughput computational screening pipeline to discover novel multitarget inhibitors in kinase and epigenetic signaling space. This pipeline integrated ligand and structure-based models to prioritize chemical scaffolds using a combination of Bayesian statistics, docking, and molecular dynamics simulations. Additionally, he was a member of the Data Coordination and Integration Center for the Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS), where he helped standardize and process chemical entities used in LINCS assays. Since joining the team at Silicon Therapeutics, Bryce has focused on data-driven approaches to improving molecular modeling methodology through the integration of chemical, genomic, and proteomic datasets to learn actionable therapeutic insights from orthogonal sources using machine learning and statistics. He received his PhD from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine under the supervision of Dr. Stephan Schürer and Dr. Nagi Ayad.
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
Bio coming shortly.
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.
Istvan Kolossvary, PhD
Istvan Kolossvary, PhD
István is a 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.