SLAS Mentor Program

Ginger Cooper is an experienced business leader with Artificial, a digital lab software company. Cooper has more than 20 years’ experience in the life sciences industry across varying leadership roles in M&A integrations and strategy, developing markets, deploying new business models, change management initiatives and building world-class teams. Nick-named “Robot Princess” among her peers, her past roles in lab automation have included field service, sales, sales management and business development.

Maciej Grajewski, Ph.D., developed his current company, SG Papertronics B.V., while completing his Ph.D. at the University of Groningen. Grajewski was also a board member of the RUG Post-Doc Council during this time and helped develop a networking and collaboration community for early-stage professionals. He was also a finalist at two distinguished emerging technology competitions: RSC Emerging Technologies (London, U.K.) in 2018 and Falling Walls (Berlin, Germany) in 2018.

Zack Gurard-Levin, Ph.D., served as chief scientific officer at SAMDI Tech, Inc. from June 2016 through its acquisition by Charles River in 2023 where he is now a Science Director. He brings more than 15 years of multidisciplinary research experience with expertise in chemistry, biochemistry, cellular biology and drug discovery research. Gurard-Levin was a pioneer user of SAMDI technology and co-developed SAMDI as a high-throughput, label-free solution for drug discovery research.

Prior to SAMDI Tech, Gurard-Levin was a research scientist at the Institut Curie in Paris, France, leading epigenetics drug discovery and diagnostics projects in oncology. He has also authored numerous peer-reviewed articles and has been awarded multiple research grants. Gurard-Levin has a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Institut Curie.

Finally, Gurard-Levin is a member of the SLAS Board of Directors and balances his work-life through spending time with family and friends, going to the gym, playing music, and creative writing.

Christian Parker, Ph.D., received his first degree from Edinburgh University followed by a Ph.D. with Prof. Steve Halford, at the University of Bristol. He then studied transposition at Yale University with Nigel Grindley before he joined Proctor & Gamble Pharmaceuticals. In 1999, Parker joined the high-throughput screening group of Pharmacia in Kalamazoo before joining the Lead Discovery Group of Novartis in Cambridge, MA in 2003. In 2005, he transferred to the Cell Based Screening group in Basel, Switzerland and finally, in 2009, he set up a high-throughput biology laboratory supporting target discovery projects.

Jonathan Wingfield has 30 years of experience working in pharma, with 11 years in academic prior to his roles in pharma. He joined AstraZeneca in 2000, as part of a team responsible for delivering automation solutions and technology into the disease area teams post HTS. He then established a lead generation automation team within the oncology department which evolved into a centralised biochemical screening team in 2006. The centralised team utilized leading edge technology to deliver high quality data to global projects, this included delivery of acoustic droplet ejection technology. When the discovery sciences function was established within AstraZeneca, he moved into a science role supporting biochemical SAR. Wingfield remained interested in landing value-added landing technologies and worked on the acoustic mass spectrometry collaboration between Labcyte and AZ which won the SLAS Innovation Award in 2015. This project generated a significant amount of external interest, and Wingfield has continued to work extensively to generate external collaborations between pharma and academia.

Aleksandra Wlodarczyk is the Head of Business Development EMEA & APAC at 20/15 Visioneers. She has more than 15 years of international team management experience in academic and CROs R&D and industry environment. She is a graduate of the biotechnology faculty at the Lodz Technical University with a specialization in technical biochemistry and molecular biology and earned an applied doctorate in environmental microbiology from the INSA Lyon and Bayer Crop Science. She cooperated closely with the Embassy of France in Warsaw, focusing on mentoring Ph.D. candidates during their thesis in France. She has been a mentor for nearly five years at My Job Glasses, an online platform connecting professionals from sectors of interest. Within her role at 20/15 Visioneers, she focuses on scientific informatics, the life and materials sciences industry and innovation.