Applications

Monday, September 26 • 3:00 - 5:00 p.m.

The internet of things (IoT) and AI offer substantial value for research and development, drug discovery and life sciences manufacturing. This session will discuss the application of IoT/AI tools and techniques and provide specific attention to efforts in wet lab automation and high-throughput screening. Attendees can expect to learn about how these applications intend to increase efficiency in routine and novel laboratory functions, supply greater control over equipment operation and pave the way for more real-time analysis and data exploration.

Session Chairs:

Sree Vadlamudi, Ph.D. (Iktos AI)
Vadlamudi leads strategic business development outreach, alliance management and marketing and communication activities at Iktos AI. He has authored multiple patents and publications and has been an invited speaker at many international conferences. Sree obtained an M.B.A. from Lancaster University and holds a Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the Institute of Chemical Technology. 

Devin Wakefield, Ph.D. (Amgen)
Wakefield is a scientist on the research biomics and bioassay technology teams at Amgen in South San Francisco.
Wakefield joined Amgen in 2018, having earned his B.S. in chemistry from San Diego State University in 2010 followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. in chemistry and chemical biology from Cornell University in 2013 and 2015, respectively. Since joining Amgen, he has leveraged his imaging and programming expertise to develop a handful of bespoke image analysis algorithms and engineer a cloud-based deep learning application to enable novel approaches to image analysis on a wide range of microscopy datasets.

Speakers:

Ian Kerman, M.S. Biology, M.S. Computer Science (LabVoice)
Kerman serves as the director of customer success at LabVoice, a company that provides a voice assistant designed specifically for laboratory use. He has over 10 years of experience ranging from pipetting in an academic biology lab to developing code in an enterprise software company. Kerman obtained his M.S. in biology from the University of California San Diego, followed by his M.S. in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

Steven Van Helden, Ph.D. (Pivot Park Screening Centre)
Expanding HTS Hitlist – An in Silico Data-Mining Tool to Report on Qualitative Gene-Compound
Relationships of HTS Hits and Their Corresponding Nearest Neighbours
Van Helden is the founder of Pivot Park Screening Centre, where he currently serves as the CTO.
He is a successful research project manager with over 25 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Van Helden's educational background consists of chemistry, expertise broadened to biology, lab automation, robotics and IT applications, he obtained his Ph.D. in 1992 from Utrecht University. 

Jie Li, Ph.D. (Mammoth Biosciences)
Reinforcement Learning with Real-time Docking of 3D Structures to Cover Chemical Space
Jie (Jerry) Li is a 5th year Ph.D. student from the Teresa Head-Gordon Lab in University of California, Berkeley. During his Ph.D., he has developed several machine learning models that encompass multiple fields of theoretical and computational chemistry, including predicting NMR chemical shifts of crystaline small molecules and aqueous proteins, developing equivariant message passing neural networks for molecular energies and forces prediction and designing generative model - reinforcement learning workflows for proposing small molecule inhibitors that have strong interactions with a given protein. He is broadly interested in applying cutting edge AI technology to solve chemical biology questions that are difficult to tackle.

Henry Dodkins, Ph.D. (ViQi Inc)
While Dodkins was completing his Ph.D. at the University of Oxford, and his postdoc at the University of California, Dodkins applied machine learning to exoplanet imaging with single-photon cryogenic-detectors. At ViQi, Inc, he develops machine learning algorithms for high-content virology assays. A unique accomplishment of Dodkins' is that he jointly owns the Guinness World Record for Most Skateboard Heelflips in One Minute.

Paul Jensen, Ph.D. (University of Michigan)
Learning to Solve Biological Puzzles with Automated Experiments