Ashraf joined Genalyte as Chief Executive Officer from Google Life Sciences (Verily) where he was Chief Operating Officer. Ashraf spent over a decade as a Vice President at Genentech leading portfolio planning, alliance management, and finance.  He started his work career at McKinsey and Company, has a PhD in Physics from Harvard, and an M.D. from the University of Massachusetts.

Andrew Conrad, PhD, is the Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Founder of Verily where he oversees an integrated team of engineers, scientists, designers, and medical experts working on a wide spectrum of healthcare-related projects.

Previously, he was Chief Scientific Officer of Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp). Dr. Conrad co-founded the National Genetics Institute, where he served as Chief Scientific Officer.

He is a Working Group Member on the Precision Medicine Initiative and a member of the UCSF-Stanford Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation (CERSI) Scientific Advisory Board.

Jeff Huber is the Founding CEO and Vice Chairman of GRAIL (2016-present). GRAIL’s mission is to detect cancer early, when it can be cured.

Prior to GRAIL, Jeff was a Senior Vice President at Google. Over 13 years at Google, Jeff co-founded Google’s life sciences efforts in Google[x] (2013-2016), and led development and scaling for Google Maps (2011-2013), Google Apps (2005-2010), and Google Ads (2003-2011). During his tenure as an executive at Google, Jeff oversaw 50x growth in revenues (from $1 billion to >$50 billion) and organization (1,000 to >50,000 employees), and managed a $5 billion P&L and large distributed teams (5,000+ direct-line employees). Earlier, Jeff was vice president of architecture and systems development at eBay and senior vice president of engineering at Excite@Home, where he led consumer product and infrastructure development.

Jeff was recognized as one of the ‘100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs’ (2017), and is an active early-stage investor/advisor in breakthrough life sciences and technology, including Openwater, Mammoth Biosciences, Vir, Sana, Zymergen, Atomwise, Genalyte, Pinterest, Honor, OpenDoor, and AngelList.

Jeff holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois, where he was Commencement Speaker (2016) and received a ‘Distinguished Alumni Award’ from the College of Electrical & Computer Engineering (2018) for ‘challenging the status quo through innovation’. He also holds a master’s degree in business from Harvard University. Jeff is a board member of GRAIL (Vice Chairman), Genalyte (Chairman), Electronic Arts (EA), Openwater, and The Exploratorium, and a former board member of Illumina (ILMN; 2014-2016).

Rob Faulkner is the Managing Director of RedMile Group, a healthcare investment organization that makes venture, growth, and crossover investing across healthcare.

Rob has been an equity analyst in the medical device industry since 1994. His coverage areas have included, among others, cardiology, orthopedics, urology, vision care, aesthetic surgery and diabetes. Rob has held positions with Thomas Wiesel Partners, Prudential Financial and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Rob began his career on Wall Street at S.G. Warburg & Co. (now UBS) where he covered biotechnology and medical device stocks for three years. Prior to moving to sell-side research, he spent two years with The Wilkerson Group (now IBM), a consulting firm specializing in the assessment of the value of healthcare technologies.

Rob graduated from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and Harvard University.

Rajesh is a Partner at Khosla Ventures. Rajesh brings with him two decades of experience assisting and investing in deeptech/ hardware startups across many industries including Cleantech and Healthcare.
Before joining Khosla Ventures, Rajesh served as the Head of Applied Ventures LLC, the Venture Capital arm of Applied Materials, where he managed a portfolio of over 85 hardware startups across 13 countries. Rajesh also drove the establishment of an $850M Materials Engineering Technology Accelerator (META) facility in NY, to enable access of semiconductor fabs for startups. Rajesh received Global Corporate Venturing’s (GCV) Powerlist award in 2019.

Before joining Applied Ventures, Rajesh worked at the venture arm of Third Point LLC. Previously, at Lucent’s Bell Labs, he drove the technical assessment & partnerships with several Photonics, MEMS and RF startups. Rajesh also led the design for reliability program for Lucent’s 10Gb/s and 40Gb/s telecommunication systems and supported the successful deployment of these systems globally.

While pursuing his MBA at Harvard Business School, Rajesh interned at Deutsche Bank’s cleantech investment banking group. Rajesh completed his M.S. at the University of Maryland at College Park, and received his Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras where he was awarded the Shankar Dayal Sharma (President of India) Medal for overall excellence.

Dr. El Assal is a scientist-clinician turned venture capitalist investing in healthcare and life sciences. He is the Managing General Partner & Co-founder of Boutique Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that specializes in early-stage investments in Biotech, Medtech, Digital Health, Health Economics, and Health Edtech startups. Rami and his partners launched the Early Disease Detection and Early Treatment Fund, which is recognized in the industry as one of the earliest vehicles focusing on early detection and treatment, and is dedicated to translating the most promising innovations originating from esteemed research labs. In 2022, he was selected to be amongst the Top Healthcare Investors by GrowthCap Advisory.

Prior to founding Boutique, Rami was a Research Scientist (Academic Staff) at the Canary Center for Cancer Early Detection at Stanford University School of Medicine, and is currently affiliated with the Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostic Center at Stanford University. Previously, he completed two Postdoctoral Research Fellowships at Stanford and Harvard Medical Schools. He has been recognized by several entities, such as the Center of Nanoscale Systems (CNS) at Harvard University, and published in the field of Early Detection & Early Treatment, including a two-volume book published in Springer Nature.

Saeid is the Managing Director at HBM Genomics investing in world-class entrepreneurs in life sciences companies.

He has more than 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur building successful biotech companies from scratch. Saeid is an active investor/advisor in leading life sciences companies, including Genalyte, Clear Labs, Convergent Genomics, Encoded Therapeutics, Haystack Biosciences, Seer Biosciences, Trace Genomics, and Xcell Biosciences.

Prior to HBM Genomics, Saeid was the founder, President & CEO of NextBio which was acquired by Illumina in 2013. Prior to founding NextBio, he was the President & CEO of Silicon Genetics which was acquired by Agilent in 2004. Mr. Akhtari has also held executive management positions at several other life sciences companies.

Joe Markee Managing Director at Express Ventures

Joe brings extensive experience in early stage company formation, capital raising, corporate management, and public and private corporate governance. Joe’s startup experience encompasses Primary Access as a founder and senior manager, Copper Mountain Networks as founding CEO, CTO and Chairman, Figure 8 Wireless as CEO and StackIQ as CEO and Chairman.

Joe was also a founder and served as President of the San Diego Telecommunications Council (renamed CommNexus). He has been honored with awards for his contributions to San Diego’s high-tech business community, including Master Entrepreneur.

Dr. Cary Gunn has been blazing trails in the technology community for almost 30 years.

Prior to founding Genalyte, Cary served as co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Luxtera, a developer of innovative optical solutions; his military career includes almost 10 years in the United States Air Force, where he was responsible for launching GPS satellites. Holding 81 (and counting) issued U.S. patents, Cary has been recognized in publications including the MIT Technology Review, which named him a Top Young Innovator in 2003. Five years later, Cary’s achievements in silicon photonics were awarded with the Optical Society of America Adolph Lomb Medal and the Berthold-Leibinger Foundation Innovation Prize. He received his bachelor’s degree in Applied Physics and Organic Chemistry from the United States Air Force Academy and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).