We are Herophilus.

Saul Kato, PhD

Saul Kato is co-founder and CEO of Herophilus. He is a former tech entrepreneur turned neuroscientist. He holds the Alice and Alfred Werth Endowed Professorship of Neuroscience at the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco and has made seminal discoveries in understanding the function of biological neural networks. He has a deep background in computer science, physics, and neuroscience, with a PhD in neurobiology from Columbia University and an MS in electrical engineering and BS in physics from Stanford University. Prior to his PhD, he was a pioneer in computer graphics and wireless technologies, as founder and CEO of Sven Technologies, a 3D graphics software company acquired by Dassault Systemes, and founder and CEO of WideRay Corp., a wireless infrastructure company acquired by Dimensional Associates.

Gaia Skibinski, PhD

Gaia Skibinski is the Senior Vice President of Biology at Herophilus. She leads the scientific progress driving new methods of drug discovery by combining brain organoid science, systems neuroscience approaches, robotic automation, and advanced machine learning techniques. Before joining Herophilus, Gaia spent seven years at the Gladstone Institutes where she specialized in developing disease models and phenotypic assays using patient derived iPSCs and differentiated neurons, and developed automated imaging platforms to identify disease associated targets and screen drugs. As a scientific program leader, she developed and led a series of collaborations, with academic and industry partners including Biogen, Merck and Verily, to identify and validate therapeutic targets. Gaia has a BA in Biological Sciences from Oxford University and a PhD from UCL’s Institute of Neurology where she identified a novel gene for Frontotemporal dementia.

Sean Escola, MD, PhD

Sean Escola is co-founder of Herophilus and an assistant professor in the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience and the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. His research, funded by the NIH and NSF, studies circuit models of motor function and learning. He is a co-founder of Herophilus, where he is involved in multiple aspects of the company’s scientific program. As a psychiatrist, Dr. Escola sees patients in the outpatient and emergency room settings. Dr. Escola received his undergraduate degrees in biochemistry and computer science, master’s in computer science, and MD-PhD degrees with a thesis in computational neuroscience, all at Columbia. He completed a residency in clinical psychiatry also at Columbia.

Scott Saywell

Scott Saywell is the Chief Business Officer at Herophilus. He has over twenty-five years of experience in the biotech industry in a variety of functional roles, most recently as Vice President, Corporate Development and Strategy at Theravance Biopharma. Across several companies, Scott has completed out-licensing and divestiture transactions with a combined potential value of more than $2B. Prior to his business development roles, Scott led the commercialization planning and pre-launch activities for a first-in-class personalized cancer vaccine and contributed to establishing one of world’s first high-throughput DNA sequencing operations. Scott has a BS from UCLA and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Doug Flanzer

Doug Flanzer is the Chief Technology Officer at Herophilus. He has over 25 years of experience building teams and systems to acquire and deliver machine-driven analysis of fast-moving and high-volume data at scale and in the cloud. Prior to Herophilus, he successfully led the technology efforts of multiple startup companies from infancy to acquisition as the CTO of WaterSmart Software and the Director of Engineering at StarMine. Doug has an MS and BS in Civil Engineering from Stanford University, where he specialized in the complex modeling of fluid dynamics.

Frédéric Kerrest

Frederic Kerrest is co-founder and board director of Herophilus, and the Executive Vice Chairman, Chief Operating Officer, and Co-Founder of Okta. Prior to Okta, Frederic worked in sales and business development at Salesforce.com, and in venture capital at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

Frederic is the author of Zero to IPO, a guide to building startups based on his own experiences and those of some of the world’s most successful and recognizable entrepreneurs. The book was an outgrowth of his award-winning podcast of the same name, which features Silicon Valley founders, investors, and entrepreneurs sharing insights from their experiences building businesses. He serves on the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Executive Advisory Board and advises early stage software companies.

Frederic earned a B.S. in computer science from Stanford University, and an M.B.A. in Entrepreneurship & Innovation from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he was the 2008 MIT Patrick J. McGovern, Jr. Entrepreneurship Award recipient.

Pavan Ramkumar, PhD

Pavan Ramkumar is the Director of Machine Learning at Herophilus. He has an academic background in neuroimaging and computational neuroscience and an industry background in building data science organizations, and production machine learning systems. He has published extensively in the computational neuroscience literature and developed open source software in Python. He holds a PhD in neuroscience, signal processing, and machine learning from Aalto University, an MSc in bioinformatics from Helsinki University of Technology in Finland, and a B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

Brad Savall, PhD

Brad Savall is the Vice President and Head of Chemistry at Herophilus. He has over 20 years of experience in medicinal chemistry, including the design of molecules optimized for brain diseases. He began his career at Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) where he led multiple drug discovery programs that delivered several clinical candidates across neuroscience and immunology, including JNJ-54175446, the first-in-class brain-penetrant P2X7-receptor antagonist in development for major depressive disorder. Subsequently he served as the Associate Director of Drug Discovery at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, leading medicinal chemistry and drug discovery efforts on multiple early and mid-stage drug discovery programs. Prior to joining Herophilus, Dr. Savall served as Director of Medicinal Chemistry at Plexium where he led efforts to leverage the company’s phenotypic screening platform to discover monovalent protein degraders.

Kevan Shah

Kevan Shah is the Director of Discovery Biology at Herophilus. He leads teams working on disease modeling, genetic engineering, scaled organoid production, and complex assay development. Kevan has over 15 years of experience working with pluripotent stem cell-derived models in academic, start-up, and large biopharma environments. He was an early pioneer of the use of iPSCs for drug discovery at iPierian. Kevan gained extensive experience in GMP settings while working on the development of a cell therapy intermediate drug product at Lonza. Following this, he focused on translational neuroscience at the Gladstone Institutes, bridging high throughput molecular and phenotypic assays with data science, which included published collaborations with Google Accelerated Sciences. Kevan has a B.S. in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley and a M.S. in Bioengineering from UC San Diego.

Morgan Stanton, PhD

Morgan Stanton is a Principal Scientist at Herophilus. She is currently leading the Herophilus Schizophrenia program and developing the first virus induced Schizophrenia-organoid model. Previously, she has led the company Neuroimmune program and established the Herophilus Neuroimmune Cortical Organoid (NICO) for high-throughput drug testing in neurological disorders. Morgan has 13 years experience investigating cell-cell and cell-material interactions to solve bioengineering and cell biology problems at scale. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and completed her post-doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute of Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany.