Vsevolod Katritch, PhD
Professor, Quantitative and Computational Biology, Chemistry and Pharmacology
Co-Director, Center for New Technologies in Drug Discovery and Development
University of Southern California
Dr. Vsevolod “Seva” Katritch is a computational biologist and computational chemist focused on deciphering the molecular function and structural pharmacology of membrane proteins, specifically the superfamily of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). He also develops new physics-based and AI-based technologies for discovery of new ligands and potential drugs for GPCRs and other clinically relevant targets, exploring giga- and terra-scale chemical spaces. His work has led to 8 patents and more than 140 papers, most recently introducing a modular V-SYNTHES approach to giga-scale screening and a review on computer-driven drug discovery, both published in Nature. He is named among Web of Science’s Highly Cited Researchers in two categories: pharmacology/toxicology and biology/biochemistry.
Dr. Katritch graduated and received a Ph.D. in biophysics and molecular biology from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, followed by postdoctoral training at Rutgers University and The Scripps Research Institute. Before joining USC in 2015, he served as a director of computational chemistry at SIGA Technologies and held research faculty positions at the University of California, San Diego, and The Scripps Research Institute.
Elizabeth Tseng, PhD
Associate Director of Product Marketing, Pacific Biosciences (PacBio)
Liz Tseng received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington. She began her PacBio career as a bioinformatics scientist where she developed algorithms for analyzing PacBio Iso-Seq (full-length RNA-Seq) data. She later transitioned to product marketing and is now managing PacBio’s RNA and gene therapy applications.
Charvi Nanvati, Ph.D
Director of Clinical Pharmacology and Oncology, Pfizer
Charvi Nanavati is Director, Clinical Pharmacology at Pfizer where she leads the clinical pharmacology strategy and model-informed drug development approaches for oncology programs. Previously, she was at Ionis Pharmaceuticals where she was a Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacometrics Lead for RNA based therapies across cardiovascular, oncology and rare diseases. She has also worked at Halozyme Therapeutics where she led the development and implementation of mechanism-based modeling and simulation for characterizing the subcutaneous delivery of monoclonal antibodies and different combination therapies in oncology. She was member of the first leadership team of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Women in Pharmaceutical Sciences Community (WIPS) and has served as its’ Vice-Chair, Chair, and Past-Chair and currently serves on the AAPS Student Program Support Committee. She has mentored several graduate and undergraduate students for their academic research projects and industry internships and continues to do so at Pfizer. She received her Bachelors in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, India and her Masters and PhD. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York with an emphasis on Pharmacokinetics/Pharmacodynamics and Systems Pharmacology.
Kapil Gadkar, Ph.D.
Distinguished Scientist & Senior Director at Genentech
Kapil Gadkar is currently a Distinguished Scientist, Senior Director, and the Head of the Modeling and Simulation Group in the Department of Preclinical and Translational Pharmacokinetics at Genentech. Kapil Gadkar earned his PhD in Chemical Engineering from UC-Santa Barbara. He has spent 20+ years developing and applying mathematical models to support drug development. Dr. Gadkar has been working at Genentech from 2011-2019 and then 2023 onwards, where he and his team have worked in a wide range of therapeutic areas including Immunology, Oncology, Ophthalmology, Cardiovascular disease, and Neuroscience. Between 2019 and 2023, Dr. Gadkar was at Denali Therapeutics where he supported the discovery and development of drug therapeutics towards defeating neurodegeneration. He also has a keen interest in teaching and takes every opportunity to lecture in topics related to Modeling and Simulation in Drug Development to undergraduate and graduate students in short courses and workshops.
Purvesh Khatri, Ph.D
Associate Professor of Medicine, Research Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection, Stanford University
Co-founder Inflammatix, Inc.
Dr. Khatri is an electronics and communications engineer turned software engineer turned computational systems immunologist. He is an associate professor in Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection and Division of Biomedical Informatics Research in Department of Medicine at Stanford University. His research focuses on developing novel methods for leveraging heterogeneity present across independent cohorts to better understand human immune system for developing novel diagnostics and therapies for inflammatory diseases including autoimmune and infectious diseases, organ transplant and cancer