Keynote Speaker Bios

Ahmar Zaidi, M.D.

Ahmar Zaidi, M.D., will open the conference with “The Sickle Caste: Lessons from Sickle Cell Disease on the State of Healthcare and Racial Disparities.” Zaidi is a pediatric hematologist who spent several years at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan, where he helped care for over 800 patients with sickle cell disease. He currently serves as Senior Medical Director, Clinical Development for Agios Pharmaceuticals. Along with numerous publications and clinical trial experience, he has worked tirelessly as an advocate for sickle cell disease patients, fueled by a belief that medical misinformation and disinformation steadily contribute to poor outcomes in sickle cell disease patients. He co-founded and hosts the sickle cell educational podcast, Cheat Codes; and has been an advocate for social media as a tool for patient and physician education. He has served as the Chair of the Hematology Anti-Racism Task Force for the American Society of Hematology and as the Chair of the Board for The Sickle Cell Reproductive Health Directive.

Jesse Boehm, Ph.D.

Jesse Boehm is the Chief Science Officer of Break Through Cancer, a novel foundation dedicated to urgently reimagining how we cure cancer by harnessing the power of extraordinary partnerships. Break Through Cancer unites leading cancer institutions jointly focused on overcoming barriers impossible for any single organization to solve leveraging the pillars of “radical collaboration.”

Boehm also leads a research group at MIT’s Koch Institute focused on bringing the power of functional genomics to bear on living samples from cancer patients with particular emphasis on rare and underrepresented tumors. The team partners with patients across the country, enabling them to donate living tissue for research, creates organoid and cell models and leverages these living tissues to make precision functional genomics possible for individual cancer patients.

Before transitioning to MIT, Boehm previously spent 14 years in the Broad Institute’s Cancer Program, most recently as an Institute Scientist and Scientific Director of the Cancer Dependency Map project. As the Director of the Broad’s Cancer Model Development Center (part of the National Cancer Institute’s Human Cancer Models Initiative), he led his laboratory in developing a scalable capacity to convert patient tumors into organoids and other cell models.

Jesse received his BS in biology from MIT and his Ph.D. from Harvard University, Division of Medical Sciences at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.