Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Inaugural Director, ARPA-H
Biography
President Biden appointed Renee Wegrzyn, PhD, as the first Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). Most recently Dr. Wegrzyn was the Vice President for Business Development at Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA), the leading horizontal platform for cell programming. ARPA-H was established in March 2022 to drive transformative health breakthroughs that cannot readily be accomplished through traditional research or commercial activity. Dr. Wegrzyn holds a PhD and BS in Applied Biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, was a Fellow in the Center for Health Security Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative (ELBI), and completed her postdoctoral training as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Heidelberg, Germany. Early in her career, she led research and development teams in private industry in the areas of biosecurity, gene therapies, emerging infectious disease, neuromodulation, synthetic biology, and diagnostics. She served as Program Manager in the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where she leveraged the tools of synthetic biology and gene editing to enhance biosecurity, support the domestic bioeconomy, and thwart biothreats. Since joining Ginkgo in August 2020, she has built out its innovation pipeline for biosecurity, developing and scaling new tools to combat infectious disease and other biological threats through broad community access.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2023 Silicon Valley
Track Chair: Cindy Lawley, Olink
- How New Public-Private Collaboratives Can Catalyze Transformative Health Breakthroughs
Chair: Keith Yamamoto, UCSF
- Douglas Friedman, Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC)
- Jay Keasling, JBEI (Joint BioEnergy Institute)
- Renee Wegrzyn, ARPA-H - Moving Sequencing into the Clinical Setting
Chair: Charles Chiu, UCSF
- Charlotte Hobbs, Rady Children’s Hospital
- Euan Ashley, Stanford University
- Sivan Bercovici, Karius
- Heike Sichtig, Foundation Medicine - Evolving Sequencing Applications: Spatial Single-Cell Multi-Omics
Chair: Michael Rhodes, NanoString
- Chrstina Curtis, Stanford - How will Cheap Genome Sequencing Impact Genomic Medicine (PANEL)
Chair: Euan Ashley, Stanford
- Shawn Levy, Element Biosciences
- Aleks Rajkovic, UCSF
- David Bentley, Illumina
- Stacey Gabriel, Broad Inst.
- Sean Hofherr, Fabric Genomics - Single-cell, Spatial, and in Situ Technologies
Chair: Dina Finan, 10x Genomics
- Carina Emery, Miltenyi Biotec - Combining WGS with a AI-based Tumor Enrichment Method
Chair: Asaf Zviran, C2I
- Multi-omics Approaches Supporting Clinical Translation
Chair: Cindy Lawley, Olink
- Erin Smith, Takeda
- Si Wu, Stanford
- Christopher Whelan, J&J - Molecular Diagnosis New standard with NGS for Neurological and Infectious Conditions
Chair: Scott Rabuka, DNA Genotek
- Forrest Wright, Quadrant Laboratories
- Frank Middleton, SUNY Upstate Medical University - PMWC Showcase
- Josh Lauer, Ultime
- Olivier Lucas, Oxford Nanopore
- Lukasz Boryn, Ardigen
