VISIONARY LEADERSHIP

KIRAN MAZUMDAR SHAW

Co-Founder

Ms. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is a pioneering biotech entrepreneur, a healthcare visionary, a global influencer and a passionate philanthropist. She is a pioneer of India’s biotech industry and founder of Biocon. She is the proud recipient of two of India’s highest civilian honours, the Padma Shri (1989) and Padma Bhushan (2005).  She has been conferred with the EY World Entrepreneur of the Year™ 2020 Award, which is a testimony to her entrepreneurial journey of over four decades.  She has also been appointed as the Vice Chair of the U.S.-India Business Council in 2021. She has many other international accolades to her credit including the Order of Australia, Australia’s Highest Civilian Honour in 2020, the highest French distinction – Knight of the Legion of Honour in 2016 and Othmer Gold Award 2014.  She serves on the board of Pure-Tech Health, USA, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, USA, Lincoln Center, USA, and Narayana Health, India, apart from holding key positions in various industry, educational, government and professional bodies globally.

SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE, MD, DPhil

Board Member, Advisor & Co-founder

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a pioneering physician, oncologist, and author who has redefined our public discourse on human health, medicine and science. A profoundly influential voice in the scientific community, he is best known for his books. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer earned him the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and was nominated by Time as one of the century’s 100 most influential books, introducing millions to modern cancer research. His book The Gene: An Intimate History won international awards and was recognized by The Washington Post and The New York Times as one of the most influential books of 2016. Exploring the essence of humanity, The Song of the Cell, his third masterpiece, captivated readers and earned the prestigious title of a New York Times best seller.

Dr. Mukherjee was recently elected to the esteemed National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and honored for contributing important research in the immunotherapy of myeloid malignancies, such as Acute Myeloid Leukemia, for establishing international centers for immunotherapy for childhood cancers, and for the discovery of tissue resident stem cells. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Pennsylvania in recognition of his outstanding contributions to medicine.

Dr. Mukherjee’s achievements as a writer and educator build upon his career as a renowned medical scholar.  His ground-breaking studies into the composition and behavior of cancer cells have pushed the boundaries of modern medicine.  His innovative research signals a paradigm shift in cancer pathology and has enabled the development of treatments that reach beyond current pharmaceutical models toward new biological and cellular therapies.  Serving as a professor of medicine at Columbia University and as a staff cancer physician at the university’s medical center, Dr. Mukherjee generates hope for countless patients and families around the world, while revolutionizing our blueprint for healing. He writes for the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and many other publications, has received numerous awards for his scientific work, has published his original research and opinions in journals such Nature, Cell and the New England Journal of Medicine, and lives in New York City with his wife and daughters.

NARESHKUMAR JAIN, Ph.D.

Co-Founder

Dr. Jain is the CEO and Member of the Board at NJ Bio, Inc. which is headquartered in Princeton, NJ, and has additional facilities in Bristol, PA and Mumbai, India. Prior to founding NJ Bio in 2018, Naresh served as Global Head of Chemistry and Senior Vice-President of ADC Biomanufacturing at Abzena. In 2009, he founded the chemistry based CRO, The Chemistry Research Solution LLC (TCRS), and served for six years as Managing Director of the company until its acquisition by Abzena in late 2015. Naresh has over ten years of medicinal chemistry experience at Johnson and Johnson, where he worked on advancing new drug molecules from early lead to lead optimization and clinical trials. He has co-authored over 60 publications, patents, and book chapters. Among his notable achievements are the total syntheses of complex natural products including the antibiotics vancomycin and rutamycin. Naresh received his Ph.D. from Boston University with Prof. James Panek and was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California with Prof. K.C. Nicolaou. Naresh received extensive leadership training through the Advanced Management Program at The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania.

EREZ KALIR

Advisory Board Member/ Observer

Erez Kalir is the Founder and CEO at Martial Eagle Fund, a long-term investor in early-stage projects pursuing technological innovation in domains such as life sciences, AI and climate change resilience. He serves as a Venture Partner at FJ Labs and The Legal Tech Fund. He co-founded and served as CEO at Stansberry Asset Management. He also is an investor in Block Green, Coadjute, DIBA, SimWin Sports, and serves as the Advisor and Board Member of Xeniapp, Inc.

Prior to joining Stansberry Asset Management, he co-founded and led Sabretooth Capital, an event-driven fund that invested in distressed credit and equities and managed $1 billion in assets for investors including Julian H. Robertson, the Rockefeller family, and several highly regarded endowments. He also worked at Eton Park Capital Management, a large hedge fund spun out of Goldman Sachs, as the first analyst hired into the Special Situations Group.

Erez holds a JD from Yale Law School, where he was a senior editor of the Law Journal and a Coker Fellow. He has an MSc with distinction (highest honors) from Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied on a Rhodes Scholarship, and an AB (highest honors) from Stanford University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Young President’s Organization Manhattan Chapter, the New York Economic Club, and the Atlas 400. He has been an invited investment presenter at the Ira Sohn Conference and the Greenwich Roundtable and named to Institutional Investor’s “Hedge Fund Rising Stars” list.