The 2024 Translational Medicine Symposium is co-sponsored by the Program in Translational Medicine and the Cancer Cell Biology Training Program.  

Draft Agenda

9:00-10:20a Welcome and Opening keynote address by Dr. Shiva Malek, Novartis
10:30-11:20a Trainee Talks with poster previews at the end for session 1
11:30-12:30p Poster session 1
12:30-1:30p Networking Lunch in 3 rooms with about 7 alums (plus two keynote speakers)
1:40-2:30p Trainee Talks with poster previews at the end of session 2
2:30-3:30p Poster session 2
3:45-4:45 Closing Keynote Talk by Dr. Sean Ekins, Collaborations Pharmaceuticals
4:45-5:00 Student Awards & Closing Remarks

About the invited speakers:
Dr. Shiva Malek, Global Head, Oncology Disease Area at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research.

As the Global Head of Oncology at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) – a position she took up in October of 2021 – Dr. Shiva Malek leads a team that shares her mission to make transformative medicines with the potential to improve outcomes and quality-of-life for patients with cancer. Check out this inspirational article about Dr. Malik: https://www.novartis.com/stories/shared-mission-take-impossible-cancer-research


Dr. Sean Ekins, CEO of Collaborations Pharmaceuticals 

Read on for a bio of Dr. Ekins in his own words:  I am Founder and CEO of Collaborations Pharmaceuticals Inc. a company focused on developing and using machine learning technologies to create and advance treatments for rare and neglected disease drug discovery. Our software products can be used for molecule design and analysis which may be licensed to other pharmaceutical and consumer product companies. To date with collaborators we have won $17.3M in grants since 2016.

I have authored or co-authored >360 peer reviewed papers and >40 book chapters as well as edited 6 books and many issued patents. I recently authored the book "Winning grants" from Springer Nature. I have given hundreds of invited presentations around the world. My research areas of interest are in vitro and computational ADME/Tox, machine learning, Systems Biology, cheminformatics, computer-aided drug discovery, drug repurposing and rare and neglected diseases. I have a long running interest in using machine learning to improve drug discovery and our most recent efforts have focused on quantum machine learning applications and generative models. I have even become a chemistry prompt engineer!

Diseases that I have performed research on include Tuberculosis, Ebola, Batten Disease, Pitt Hopkins disease, Chagas disease, Zika, enteroviruses, SARS-CoV-2 and many others. I am passionate about collaborations with scientists around the world and mentoring the next generation of scientists. Our research is funded by NIH and DOD.

I am a proud graduate of the University of Aberdeen; receiving an M.Sc., Ph.D. and D.Sc.
I was a postdoctoral fellow at Lilly Research Laboratories. Then I worked as a senior scientist at Pfizer, Senior Computational Chemist at Lilly Research Laboratories, Associate Director of Computational Drug Discovery at Concurrent Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Vice President of Computational Biology at GeneGo. I was also CSO at Collaborative Drug Discovery and CEO and Co-Founder of Phoenix Nest Inc. I am currently adjunct professor at 3 US Universities including UNC-Chapel Hill. In total I have well over 26 years of industrial experience. I am on the Editorial board for Drug Discovery Today (since 2005), Editorial Board, Artificial intelligence in the Life Sciences, GEN biotechnology (since 2021) and Editorial Advisory Board for ACS Omega (since 2023).

My hobbies include listening to and collecting Jazz and many other genres of music on vinyl and riding my cycles (but not at the same time).
I appear in the Netflix documentary Unknown: Killer Robots.