PEOPLE INTERVIEWED

Dr. Ascoli joined Rockland Immunochemicals in 1991 and began to apply his skills in molecular immunology to solve problems for academic collaborators who required the production of highly specific polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies for research. For more than 20 years Dr. Ascoli has established collaborations with principal investigators at academic and research throughout North America, Europe and Japan.

Previous to this role, Matt served as the head of research and development. He has more than 20 years of experience developing and validating antibodies for life science research. Matt started his career in custom antibody development serving both academic and pharmaceutical customers delivering more than 10,000 customized antibodies. Matt has also worked extensively in immunoassay development and advancing new platforms for the quantitative detection of proteins.

Currently working at the center of research in biological systems at UCSD on the Neuroscience Information Framework and SciCrunch.

These systems (NIF and SciCrunch) work together to aggregate vast quantities of data and then allow the scientific public to create portals into the data cosmos.

He also advises several biotechnology companies and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore.

From 2016-2017 Dr Begley was Chief Scientific Officer at Akriveia Therapeutics based in California. Prior to Akriveia he served as Chief Scientific Officer at TetraLogic Pharmaceuticals, based in Malvern PA. From 2002-2012, he was Vice-President and Global Head of Hematology/Oncology Research at Amgen, responsible for building, directing and integrating Amgen’s 5 research sites. During this time he became interested in the issue of research integrity and scientific reproducibility.

Before joining Amgen he had over 20 years of clinical experience in medical oncology and hematology. His personal research has focused on regulation of hematopoietic cells and translational clinical trials. His early studies first described human G-CSF, and in later clinical studies, he first demonstrated that G-CSF-"mobilized" blood stem cells hastened hematopoietic recovery compared with bone marrow transplantation. This finding revolutionized the approach to clinical hematopoietic cell transplantation.

He is Board Certified in Australia as a Medical Oncologist and Hematologist, has a Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology, and has received numerous honors and awards, including being elected as the first Foreign Fellow to the American Society of Clinical Investigation in 2000, to the Association of American Physicians in 2008, and to the Research "Hall of Fame" at his alma mater, the Royal Melbourne Hospital in 2014.

Berg’s research into the structures and functions of biological molecules has elucidated how zinc-containing proteins bind to DNA or RNA and regulate gene activity. As a bioinorganic chemist, Berg investigates biomolecule interaction inside cells using experimental and computational methods.

Berg’s awards and honors include the American Chemical Society’s Public Service Award, the Distinguished Service Award from the Biophysical Society, and election to the National Academy of Medicine. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and past president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Berg earned his B.S. and M.S. in chemistry at Stanford University, received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University, and was a postdoctoral fellow in biophysics at Johns Hopkins.

He received his Ph.D. (Cambridge University) in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology under the guidance of Nobel Laureate, Dr. Cesar Milstein. After his Ph.D. he spent ten years in Italy: three as a post doc in the CNR Institute of neurobiology, Rome, Italy, where he was involved with cloning antibody genes for use in intra- and inter-cellular immunisation; and seven in Trieste, where he was first visiting professor, and subsequently tenured as assistant professor at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA, Trieste, Italy). He moved to Los Alamos National Lab in July 1999, as a research scientist, and became a group leader in 2010. He left LANL in June 2017 to become chief scientific officer of Specifica (www.specifica.bio), a start-up founded in 2016 to sell unique client specific phage antibody libraries. He has worked in the field of phage display and antibody engineering for almost thirty years, and has helped organize over fifty international congresses and practical courses in this field, both in Europe and the US. He was a founder member and the first president (2007-2010) of The Antibody Society, a professional society for all aspects of antibodies. He has published over 140 peer-reviewed articles, including a number of reviews and perspectives on phage display and antibody engineering. He recently published a commentary in Nature calling for changes in the way research antibodies are supplied, arguing that they should be sequenced and expressed recombinantly in order to improve reproducibility. His present research interests lie in improving in vitro display technologies in order to make in vitro antibody selection the preferred method to generate highly specific, high affinity antibodies. Within this context he has developed an antibody selection pipeline that combines phage and yeast display in methods that exploit the advantages of each. He maintains an active interest in technology development as it relates to display methods and antibody engineering, and also has a long-standing interest in the role auto-antibodies play in the etiology of Celiac disease.

He completed his post-doctoral training in Mario Roederer's laboratory at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he performed the first 18-color flow cytometry experiment. As a staff scientist at NIH, he optimized 96-parameter single cell gene expression assays for vaccine trials, and recently co-led the development of 30-parameter flow cytometry. Pratip uses these technologies to explore fundamental T-cell immunology, and to find correlates of disease and immunity in HIV, vaccine, and cancer settings.

Pratip was recently appointed Associate Professor Professor (Pathology) and Director of the Applied Immunology Core at the Cancer Center in New York University's Langone Medical Center.

Dr. Ellis completed a surgical oncology fellowship at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center where he has been on the faculty since 1993. Dr. Ellis has a clinical practice in Surgical Oncology, focused on patients with colorectal cancer. Dr. Ellis has established a reputation in the area of angiogenesis and growth factor receptors in GI malignancies and is funded by several grants. Dr. Ellis is a Deputy Editor for JAMA Oncology. He has also authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications, 110 invited reviews and editorials, four books, and 30 book chapters. Dr. Ellis chaired the ASCO Cancer Research Committee from 2012-2013. He was awarded the honor of being named a Fellow of ASCO (FASCO) in 2014. In 2015, received the honor of being the John Wayne Clinical Research Lecturer, Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO). In 2017, he was awarded the Flance-Karl award from the American Surgical Association.

Prior to joining GBSI, Dr. Freedman served as Vice Dean for Research and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Jefferson Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University. Prior to his leadership role at Jefferson, Dr. Freedman led discovery research efforts in the pharmaceutical industry as a Vice President at Wyeth and Executive Director at Merck. Before moving to industry, Dr. Freedman was a Member and Professor of Cell Biology & Genetics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Weil Cornell Medical College.

Dr. Freedman has received several research awards, including the Boyer Research Award for Biomedical Research, and a MERIT award from the NIH. He was also the 2002 recipient of the Ernst Oppenheimer Award from The Endocrine Society. Dr. Freedman has published extensively and served on numerous scientific review panels and editorial boards. He was an editor of Molecular and Cellular Biology for ten years. In addition, Dr. Freedman has served on the Board of Directors of the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC).

Dr. Freedman earned a B.A. degree in Biology from Kalamazoo College, and a PhD in Molecular Genetics from the University of Rochester. He completed his post-doctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Keith Yamamoto at the University of California, San Francisco.

After a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF, he worked in the biotechnology field for about ten years, specializing in the genetics of cancer, and then in the Pharmaceutical sector where he led the Novartis Oncology Research Group. In 2006, Dr. Kamb joined Amgen to direct Oncology Research at their South San Francisco site. In 2007 he took over the leadership of the Neurosciences Therapeutic Area. In February 2010 he was promoted to Vice President, Research, Neuroscience, and was given the remit to build a specialized department within Amgen Research (Genome Analysis Unit) focused on cross-disease-area applications of next-generation sequencing. At the end of 2011, Dr. Kamb was promoted to Senior Vice President to head all of Amgen’s discovery research; he retired January, 2017.

At Amgen, she held multiple roles in drug development. These included Executive Director in the Biosimilars Business Unit as the lead for Biosimilars Process Development, and as an Executive Director in Discovery Research leading the Biologics Optimization organization, Protein Sciences at the Thousand Oaks campus, and the site head for the Burnaby, Canada research site where XenoMouse antibody development is based. Prior to joining Amgen, Margaret was at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals for 10 years, where she was the Vice President of Traps, Small Molecule and Antibody Development, and the Immunology therapeutic area. She was also the co-lead for the development of the VelocImmune mouse platform for the production of human antibodies. As a leader in biotechnology, she has shepherded multiple large molecule projects from their discovery stage and into clinical trials, as well as to the successful filing of marketing applications. Margaret completed her post-doctoral work at Temple Medical School and her Ph.D. at the University of Utah, and holds a B.A. in MCD Biology from the University of Colorado.

Before joining PLOS in 2015, she held several senior editorial positions with the Nature journals, worked in the biotech industry and trained as a molecular biologist. Véronique obtained her Ph.D. in molecular biology from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

The company has been successful in its aim by producing and validating over 12,000+ antibodies against 12,000+ targets of high reliable quality. Dr. Li holds a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Wuhan University, Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and City University of New York, respectively. As a post-doc at Rockefeller University in the Immunology department, he researched under Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, Dr. Ralph M. Steinman. Later he discovered the Marcksl1 protein associated with binding and regulating actin and the microtubule cytoskeleton, which was more recently found to be involved in controlling membrane fluidity and molecular mobility of membrane proteins.

She sold Novus to Bio-Techne in July 2014 to become one of the brands that greatly expanded the antibody portfolio for customers working in tandem with R&D Systems brand. Karen continues her commitment to her work as the Vice President of the Antibody Business Unit and Digital Marketing with Bio-Techne.

Dr. Polakiewicz has driven the successful implementation of four generations of novel antibody platform technologies critical for CST’s ongoing success. Prior to joining CST, Dr. Polakiewicz received his B.S. in Chemistry and Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed postdoctoral studies at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at M.I.T. Dr. Polakiewicz has published approximately 66 peer-reviewed publications, and is a named inventor on numerous patents and patent applications.

At Yale since 1994, Dr. Rimm is the Director of Yale Pathology Tissue Services and the Yale Tissue Microarray Facility. He is a member of the Executive Team in Pathology and serves as the Director of Translational Pathology. His lab group focuses on quantitative pathology using the AQUA® technology invented in his lab with projects related to predicting response to therapy or recurrence or metastasis in breast and lung cancer. The technology has also been used in a series of efforts related to biospecimen science. The work is supported by grants from the NIH, BCRF, and sponsored research agreements from biopharma. He is a member of a number of correlative science committees for multi-institutional breast cancer clinical trials including SWOG, ALLTO, and TEACH.He also serves on the Molecular Oncology committee for the College of American Pathologists (CAP).

He is an author of over 300 peer-reviewed papers and 8 patents. He has served on advisory boards for Amgen, Genentech, Novartis, BMS, Perkin Elmer, Dako, ACD, Biocept, OptraScan and Genoptix. He was a scientific co-founder of HistoRx, a digital pathology company (sold to Genoptix in 2012) and Metamark Genetics, a prognostic determinant company.

Before joining the company in 1994, he started his scientific career at the Institute of Genetics, University of Cologne, where he wrote both his diploma thesis and his PhD thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Andreas Radbruch. J.S. acquired a broad expertise in immunology including cellular and humoral immunology, which he constantly expanded. Today, he supervises a highly interdisciplinary team of about 260 employees, covering an entire spectrum of activities from basic research to applied research to product development. Tools for cell therapy and regenerative medicine have always been at the forefront of his activities at Miltenyi Biotec. J.S. is member of the American Society of Hematology (ASH), the American Association of Immunologists (AAI), the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT).

Dedicated, innovative leader and team player with a comprehensive background in in vivo and in vitro immunology, cell signaling and epigenetics. Strong analytical problem solving abilities. Excellent interpersonal skills and extensive management experience working with small and large teams to achieve pre-defined objectives. Focused on people development and building successful teams. Strong in process development and change management. Particular emphasis on launching innovative antibody development technologies, implementing high-throughput methodologies, and utilizing cross-platform validation.

Named as the director of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) in September 2000, he held that post through August 2010. Prior to joining NIH, Dr. Tabak served as the senior associate dean for research and professor of dentistry and biochemistry & biophysics in the School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Rochester in New York. A former NIH MERIT recipient, Dr. Tabak has received several honors and awards for his work including being elected as a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He has also received teaching awards for his work with both graduate and medical students.

His research is focused on protein science, antibody engineering and precision medicine and range from basic research in human and microbial biology to more applied research, including clinical applications in cancer, infectious diseases, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases and neurobiology. The research has resulted in more than 550 publications with a current h-index of 98 (Google Scholar).

The over 900 ABRF members work in core facilities, research laboratories and administrative departments at academic, governmental, non-profit and commercial institutions. Frances is the Head of the Bi-Institutional Antibody and Bioresource Core Facility which supports researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and The Rockefeller University. The primary focus of this shared resource is the development of custom monoclonal antibody for research and clinical purposes.

Frances earned her B.S. from The College of St. Elizabeth, M.S. from the University of Massachusetts Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and Ph.D. from Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. She conducted her post-doctoral studies in cellular immunology at The Rockefeller University.