A high-caliber mix of science, business and software development professionals.

Associate Member, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Dr. Robins obtained his bachelor’s degree at Harvard University (1995) as a physics major with a concentration in mathematics. He then obtained his Masters and Ph.D. in theoretical physics (string theory) from the University of California Berkeley with a visiting appointment to the California Institute of Technology (“Caltech”). Dr. Robins obtained a postdoctoral appointment in theoretical physics in the particle theory group at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Interested in the mathematics behind genetics and observing the potential utility of high-level mathematics to study problems in the biological sciences, Dr. Robins took another postdoctoral appointment at the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton University in 2002 to study under the famed biologist Dr. Arnold Levine. Working with Dr. Levine at Princeton, Dr. Robins concentrated on developing bioinformatic algorithms for messenger RNA targets and bacterial genome analysis, a precursor to his current faculty appointment (2006) at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the Computational Biology Group, Public Health Sciences and Human Biology Divisions. In August of 2009, Dr. Robins was the recipient of the Ellison Award from the Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholars Program to support new investigators of outstanding promise in the basic biological sciences.

Assistant Member, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

After his tenure as a Pomona College (1992) Sigma Xi honors society member and molecular biology major, Dr. Carlson received his Ph.D. in Genetics from Stanford University in 2000, where he worked on methods for high-throughput genome sequencing and genotyping with Dr. David Cox, founding CSO at Perlegen Sciences. After graduation, Dr. Carlson worked in the DNA diagnostics industry at Roche Molecular Systems in Alameda, CA, and then studied as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Deborah Nickerson at the University of Washington from 2002-2005, where he developed algorithms and software for the selection of genetic markers to use in genome-wide association analyses, a burgeoning field of genetic research. He was appointed to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center faculty in 2005 as a genetic epidemiologist in the Cancer Prevention Program, with joint appointments in Epidemiology and Computational Biology.

Chief Executive Officer and President, Adaptive Biotechnologies Corporation

Mr. Robins is a Cornell University honors graduate, with a major in entrepreneurship and business. He obtained his MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with a major in finance and concentrations in marketing and operations. Prior to business school, after a corporate finance position at Bank of America, Mr. Robins opened the West Coast office of Wasserstein Perella’s software and internet services group before moving to the operating side to run the West Coast office of a publicly traded online health insurance company, HealthAxis.com. Post Wharton, Mr. Robins has held positions as Vice President of Operations for Pulte Homes (NYSE:PHM) and Chief Operating Officer for Connaught Real Estate Finance, an opportunistic hedge fund.

Founder and CEO of VentiRx Pharmaceuticals

Dr. Hershberg is a founder of VentiRx Pharmaceuticals and serves as Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors. VentiRx Pharmaceuticals is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company committed to the development and commercialization of novel medicines for the treatment of cancer. The Company’s initial focus is developing novel small molecule product candidates targeting Toll-like receptor 8 (TLR8) for oncology and allergy. Prior to VentiRx, Dr. Hershberg served as Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Dendreon Corporation, developing immunotherapy approaches for cancer. Previously, Dr. Hershberg was an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

President Emeritus, University of Washington

After distinguished service in academic leadership spanning more than two decades, Lee Huntsman was named President Emeritus by the University of Washington Board of Regents in July 2004. He continues to provide leadership in a variety of scientific and policy initiatives underway at the University and in the state of Washington and as a member of various for profit and nonprofit boards. In one of those roles, he has served as the first executive director of the Life Sciences Discovery Fund Authority, a public-private partnership intended to give life sciences research in the state a major boost.

Systems Biology Professor, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Natural Sciences, Princeton, NJ, and Professor, Departments of Biochemistry and Pediatrics, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, NJ

Arnold Levine’s research centers on the causes of cancer. In 1979, Levine and others discovered the p53 tumor suppressor protein, a molecule that inhibits tumor development. As chair of the National Institutes of Health Commission on AIDS Research and the National Academies Cancer Policy Board, he has helped determine national research priorities. He established the Institute’s Center for Systems Biology, which concentrates on research at the interface of molecular biology and the physical sciences; on genetics and genomics, polymorphisms and molecular aspects of evolution, signal transduction pathways and networks, stress responses, and pharmacogenomics in cancer biology.

Chief Executive Officer and President, Adaptive Biotechnologies Corporation

Mr. Robins is a Cornell University honors graduate (1996), with a major in entrepreneurship and business. He obtained his MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with a major in finance and concentrations in marketing and operations. Prior to business school, after a corporate finance position at Bank of America, Mr. Robins opened the West Coast office of Wasserstein Perella’s software and internet services group before moving to the operating side to run the West Coast office of a publicly traded online health insurance company, HealthAxis.com. Post Wharton, Mr. Robins has held positions as Vice President of Operations for Pulte Homes (NYSE:PHM) and Chief Operating Officer for Connaught Real Estate Finance, an opportunistic hedge fund.

Founder and Chairman, ZS Associates; Marketing Professor, Kellogg School of Management

Andris A. Zoltners holds the Nemmers Professorship in Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where he has been a member of the faculty for more than 30 years. Prior to this, he was a member of the Business School Faculty at the University of Massachusetts, and received his Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University. Professor Zoltners has written more than 40 academic articles, edited two books on Marketing Models and has co-authored a series of books on sales force management. In 1983, Professor Zoltners and former Kellogg colleague, Prabhakant Sinha, founded ZS Associates, a global management consulting firm specializing in sales and marketing strategy, operations and execution. ZS now serves clients worldwide with more than 1,000 people across 17 offices in North America, Europe and Asia. His areas of expertise are sales force strategy; sales force size, structure and deployment; sales force compensation; and sales force effectiveness. The success of ZS was recognized by Professor Zoltners’ induction into the Chicago Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame in 2005. He has personally consulted for over 100 companies in over 20 countries. In addition to his consulting, he is a frequent speaker on the topic of sales force effectiveness.

Director, Translational and Correlative Studies Laboratory
Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute and Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine

Dr. Kalos is Adjunct Associate Professor in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and Founding Director of the Translational and Correlative Studies laboratory, where he is involved in the translational/clinical development and biomarker evaluation of novel T cell based immunotherapeutics.

Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania in 2008, Dr. Kalos was the founding director of a GLP-level laboratory at City of Hope where he focused on the development and application of methodologies and approaches to evaluate in a comprehensive manner the impact and effectiveness of early stage T cell immunotherapy protocols.

Dr. Kalos has presented invited seminars on immunotherapy-related topics at national and international scientific meetings and institutions, has authored multiple primary and review articles as well as book chapters in the field of cancer immunotherapy, and is a member of the steering committees for national and international immune biomarker working groups.

Director, Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason Seattle, WA, and Professor (Affiliate), Department of Immunology University of Washington School of Medicine

Gerald (Jerry) Nepom received his Bachelors Degree (1972) from Harvard, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry (1977) and his M.D. (1978) from the University of Washington. After post- doctoral work in immunogenetics at Harvard Medical School, he joinied the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington Medical School Faculty in 1982. Beginning in 1985, he founded the Immunology and Diabetes Research Programs at the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason (BRI), which now includes >200 staff with an annual budget of $26 million. Ongoing projects in Dr. Nepom’s laboratory are focused on identifying and understanding molecular and genetic mechanisms triggering of autoimmune disorders, particularly type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis, and on improving experimental therapies for prevention, intervention and transplantation. Dr. Nepom serves on numerous editorial boards and professional advisory boards relating to molecular immunology, autoimmunity, and immunotherapy. He is past president of FOCIS, the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies, which is the international federation of 40,000 scientists and physicians created to understand and treat immune- based diseases. Dr. Nepom has published over 300 scientific papers in the area of immunology, genetics and autoimmunity.

Assistant Professor, Genome Sciences, University of Washington

Jay Shendure is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. Dr. Shendure’s research group is broadly interested in developing new experimental methods and computational tools for the parallelized interrogation of biological systems. In 2009, with collaborators at UW, his group was the first to demonstrate that the massively parallel sequencing of the 1% of the human genome that is protein coding, also known as the “exome”, could be used to cost-effectively identify genetic mutations causing human disease. As an M.D., Ph.D. student in Dr. George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Shendure helped develop polony sequencing, one of the first examples of “next generation DNA sequencing” methods that are now bringing the cost of human genome sequencing close to $1,000. Dr. Shendure conducted his undergraduate studies at Princeton University and received his Ph.D. and M.D. from Harvard Medical School.

Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, University of Washington and Associate Member, Program in Immunology, Clinical Research Division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Dr. Warren’s laboratory and clinical interest is the cellular and molecular dissection of antitumor immune responses, so that these immune responses can be exploited to clinical advantage. In particular, the research in his laboratory is focused on the mechanisms and target molecules associated with the graft-versus-tumor (GVT) reaction that occurs after allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation for hematologic malignancies and selected solid tumors. His lab has extensive experience with the characterization and manipulation of human CD8+ and CD4+ T cells, as well as with the identification of antigens recognized by CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) clones using a variety of techniques, including cDNA expression cloning, genetic linkage analysis, and peptide elution/HPLC fractionation. In the clinical realm, Dr. Warren have several years’ of experience serving as the Principal Investigator on an IRB- and FDA-approved Phase I clinical trial of adoptive therapy with CD8+ minor histocompatibility antigen-specific CTL clones for the treatment of acute leukemia or high-grade myelodysplasia that recurs after HLA-identical allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation. He is an Attending Physician on the Allogeneic Transplant Service at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

Professor at the University of Texas/MD Anderson Cancer Center

Dr. Yee received his Doctor of Medicine from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, and has gone on to evaluate immunotherapy methods of melanoma and ovarian cancers. He holds memberships with the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Association of Immunologists, and the Society for Biological Therapy. His research has won various awards including the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award, the Cancer Research Institute Investigator Award, the Cancer Research Institute Melanoma Initiative Clinical Trials Grant, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Pilot Research Grant, and the Damon Runyon Walter Winchell (Eli Lilly) Clinical Investigator Award. His research was among the first to show that adoptive T-cell therapy holds great promise for treating melanoma, a potentially fatal form of skin cancer.

President and CEO, Sloan Valve Company

Graham is President and CEO of Sloan Valve Company, a 104 year-old family owned manufacturer of commercial plumbing products. Engaged in a co-leadership structure with his two brothers, Graham oversees Sloan’s Global Supply-Chain and Operations as well as the Human Capital Management processes. He is active in many business and industry groups, is a LEED Accredited Professional, and a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Past President and Chief Executive Officer of Calistoga Pharmaceuticals

Carol has over 22 years of experience in commercial and drug development roles at large and small biopharmaceutical companies. Notable during her career was her role as the Rituxan Development Team Leader at Biogen Idec. Carol led the Rituxan team when oncology sales first surpassed $1 billion and the rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis development programs were designed.

Executive Vice President LRP Publications

Matthew Kahn is the Executive Vice President of LRP Publications, a multi-channel business information company, where he oversees the operations of the magazine division. His areas of expertise include sales and sales management, marketing/communications, interactive strategy, strategic planning, financial analysis/forecasting, business management and business processes design. He holds a BA in Business Management from Cornell University.

Commercialization Consultant for the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association (WBBA)

Stewart is an entrepreneur and is the founder and former President and CEO of Targeted Genetics Corporation. Prior to forming Targeted Genetics, from 1981-1992 she held various positions at Immunex Corporation, ending her tenure there as Vice President, Corporate Development and President, CEO and Board Member of Receptech Corporation. She held the position of CEO since the company’s inception until November 2008. She raised over $350 million to fund the company’s research programs. The company is currently developing lead products in ocular disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. Stewart has considerable experience in the areas of biopharmaceutical fundraising, business development, corporate governance, and general executive management.

Partner, Freshford Capital Management

Josh Rosen is currently a Partner at Freshford Capital Management, a long/short hedge-fund focused on small and midcap equities. Prior to Freshford, Josh was Partner at RLR Capital Partners, a long-dominated hedge fund focused on small and mid-cap equities. Josh began is hedge fund career at Kensico Capital Management. Josh earned his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania as well as his MBA from the Wharton School of Business. Josh also held positions in the Strategy and Investments Group of Time Warner, helped start an online education company, and began his career in corporate communications consulting at Kekst & Company.

Co-founder & CTO, Duetto Research

As Chief Technology Officer of Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, Craig helped design and build the leading database and application of platform-as-a-service. His areas of expertise include metadata driven software designs, transactional and analytical databases, distributed systems, and on-demand application delivery. He holds a BA in Applied Mathematics and MS in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Chief Executive Officer and President, Adaptive Biotechnologies Corporation

Mr. Robins is a Cornell University honors graduate, with a major in entrepreneurship and business. He obtained his MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with a major in finance and concentrations in marketing and operations. Prior to business school, after a corporate finance position at Bank of America, Mr. Robins opened the West Coast office of Wasserstein Perella’s software and internet services group before moving to the operating side to run the West Coast office of a publicly traded online health insurance company, HealthAxis.com. Post Wharton, Mr. Robins has held positions as Vice President of Operations for Pulte Homes (NYSE:PHM) and Chief Operating Officer for Connaught Real Estate Finance, an opportunistic hedge fund.

Vice President of Business Development, Oncology

Ms. Rubinstein is in charge of managing and increasing pharmaceutical companies’ adoption of immunoSEQ in clinical trials in the Oncology field and developing strategic relationships for clinical applications of the technology. Prior to joining Adaptive, she spent eight years in the Worldwide Commercial Development Group at Pfizer Oncology. Most recently, she was the global lead for strategic communications and stakeholder relations for the entire portfolio of 20+ compounds. A veteran in the healthcare field, Ms. Rubinstein has held various positions at Johnson & Johnson and Morgan Stanley’s Global Health Care Group. An undergraduate from Wharton, she earned her MBA from Harvard Business School. She also is currently the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors for The Valerie Fund, a pediatric oncology organization that funds psychosocial services for children with cancer and blood disorders at eight centers in NJ and NY.

Senior Vice President of Translational Medicine

Dr. “Lanny” Kirsch received his M.D. from Harvard University Medical School and subsequently completed his Residency at Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts and his Fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Kirsch also completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in molecular genetics in the laboratory of Dr. Philip Leder at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Subsequently Dr. Kirsch spent over 20 years at the NCI as a basic researcher, attending physician, and, ultimately, Chief of the Genetics Branch within the Center for Cancer Research. The research interests of Dr. Kirsch have been focusedon cancer specific genetic instability and cancer genetics. In 2005 Dr. Kirsch joined the biotech/pharma company, Amgen, as an Executive Director heading the Oncology Research group at Amgen Washington in Seattle. During the next six years the Amgen Washington group was responsible for bringing a number of different therapeutic targets and modalities to Phase 1 trial evaluation. It also provided basic research support for many projects in late stage clinical development or marketed. Since the beginning of 2012 Dr. Kirsch has been an independent consultant to the biotech/pharma industry with extended assignments focused on the development of antibody therapeutics and molecular diagnostics.

Senior Vice President of Operations

Dr. Rieder leads Adaptive’s production, research and development, and bioinformatics teams. Prior to joining Adaptive, he was a Research Professor in human genomics at the University of Washington. While working with Dr. Debbie Nickerson at the University of Washington’s Department of Genome Sciences, Dr. Rieder pioneered research in large-scale, next-generation sequencing, which has led to a better understanding of the link between disease, genetics and environment. He was co-Principal Investigator on numerous large-scale National Institute of Health (NIH) grants over the past 10 years, and was also Technical Director of the Northwest Genomics Center, one of the premier Next Generation Sequencing facilities in the country. Dr. Rieder earned his Ph.D. in cardiovascular physiology from the Medical College of Wisconsin, and completed his postdoctoral fellowship in Genome Sciences at the University of Washington.