Sam is the Chief Financial Officer at Totus Medicines, where he is responsible for the financial operations and financial strategy of the company. Prior to Totus, Sam spent over 12 years investing in biotechnol­ogy companies at Granahan Investment Management and Mistral Capital with a focus on early development stage companies. Previously, he spent time as an investment analyst at Wellington Management and Loomis Sayles including earlier experience in public accounting.

Sam graduated from Bentley University with Bachelors Degree in Accountancy and a Masters Degree in Finance. He also holds the CFA designation.

Tom Hughes has more than 30 years of industry experience in the discovery, development and commercial­iza­tion of pharmaceuti­cal products. Tom has served since 2018 as CEO of Navitor Pharmaceuti­cals, a privately held biopharmaceu­ti­cal company.

Prior to joining Navitor, Tom served as President and Chief Scientific Officer, and earlier as CEO of Zafgen Inc. Prior to Zafgen, Tom held several positions at Novartis including Global Head of the Cardiovascu­lar and Metabolic Diseases Therapeutic Area at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. He oversaw many drug discovery and development projects targeting major global aging-related health issues including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

John is a Managing Partner at DCVC Bio. Prior to joining DCVC, John was a VP at Monsanto and Managing Director of Monsanto Growth Ventures (MGV). Before joining MGV, John was a Managing Director at Burrill & Company. Prior to his career in venture capital, John was an entrepreneur, initially at Paradigm Genetics, where he joined as a visiting scientist before becoming Chief Science Officer and eventually President and CEO following the company’s IPO. After Paradigm, John founded and served as CEO of Arête Therapeutics, which earned backing from leading life science venture firms.

John started his career in academia, rising to the rank of Full Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Purdue University, where he was a David and Lucille Packard Fellow and an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow. John received a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. from the University of Windsor and a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of California, Davis.

Most recently, Dr. Gottlieb served as the 23^rd Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administra­tion (FDA) from 2017 to 2019. Prior to serving as Commissioner, Dr. Gottlieb held several roles in the public and private sectors including serving as Managing Director, T.R. Winston & Company from 2013 to 2017. Dr. Gottlieb was previously the FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Medical and Scientific Affairs from 2005 to 2007, as well as the senior advisor to the FDA Commissioner from 2003 to 2004. Dr. Gottlieb is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and is a Contributor to the financial news network, CNBC. He also serves on the boards for Pfizer, Illumina, Aetion, and Tempus.

Shaan C. Gandhi is a Director at Northpond Ventures on the firm’s biotechnolo­gies team. Shaan is a Board Director at Aro Biotherapeu­tics, CAMP4 Therapeutics, Candel Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CADL), DICE Therapeutics (NASDAQ: DICE), Garuda Therapeutics, Mestag Therapeutics, Parthenon Therapeutics, StrideBio, and Vigil Neuroscience. Previously, Shaan was a Principal at the Longwood Fund, where he created and invested in life sciences companies, including Pyxis Oncology (NASDAQ: PYXS), an antibody-drug conjugate and monoclonal antibody oncology company, which he co-founded and served as President. Prior to Longwood, he was an attending hospitalist at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he also did his residency in internal medicine. He holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School; an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar; a D.Phil. in medical oncology from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a B.S. with honors in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University. Shaan is the Vice President of the Suffolk District Medical Society, the professional medical society of Boston, and a Trustee of the Boston Medical Library.

John brings over 25 years of expertise in creating and leading diverse technology teams and has mentored some of the best computational scientists in the industry. Most recently, John served as the Chief Technology Officer of Kaleido Bioscience, where he created and led the new technology platform group comprising computational biology, software engineering, compound management, and lab robotics. Prior to Kaleido, he helped reshape the data and computational strategy at Novartis and developed several unique industry-leading computational approaches, which resulted in more than 100 publications across the informatics group.

John received his Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry from University College London before embarking on postdoctoral studies in the then-emerging field of computational chemistry at GlaxoSmithKline.

Jason Pontin is a Partner at DCVC, where his belief that emerging technologies and new scientific insights can solve urgent challenges and expand human possibilities inspires his investments in Deep Tech and life sciences companies. Among his operational responsibil­i­ties at DCVC, he helps portfolio companies tell their stories.

He was the first investor in Totus Medicines, where he is a founding board member, and in Menten​.AI. Before joining DCVC, he was a senior partner and senior advisor at Flagship Pioneering in Cambridge, MA, where he worked with the enterprise’s therapeutics and agriculture companies.

Jason was CEO and editor in chief of MIT Technology Review and editor of Red Herring magazine, the bible of the dot​.com boom. At MIT, he founded MIT Solve, the Institute’s open innovation platform, which deploys capital and other resources toward solutions to grand challenges; chaired the MIT Enterprise Forum, the Institute’s global entrepreneur­ial community; and was senior advisor to MIT’s 16^th President, Susan Hockfield.

Neil Dhawan is the Co-founder and CEO of Totus Medicines, where he focuses on combining small molecule design, structural biology, genetics, biochemistry, and cell biology to design new classes of drugs to target untreatable diseases.

Prior to founding Totus Medicines, Neil co-founded Dual Therapeutics, a venture-backed biotechnol­ogy company developing the first phosphatase agonists for cancer patients. Neil co-invented and helped develop the lead drug program, small molecule agonists of PP2A, which led to a collaboration deal with Bristol Myers Squibb valued at up to $225 million.