Dr. Iraklis Kourtis is an innovation-driven biomedical engineer (Swiss Institute of Technology, ETH) with over 15 years of experience in human-factors design, pharma industry, healthtech startups, and entrepreneurship. Iraklis has founded and co-founded numerous companies, including Hyalex Orthopaedics, which secured a total of $33M in series A funding. More recently, inspired by his own experience living with Crohn’s disease, he co-founded Chronicles, a digital health startup, to empower patients living with inflammatory bowel disease and revolutionize management and treatment of the condition. He is constantly assessing gaps and unmet needs to improve the quality of life of patients. He is an expert in digital health, bioengineering, drug delivery and physiology, and medical device development. He is a proud dad of two, a marathoner, and a tech gear junkie, and is happiest when outdoors.
Elena Mustatea is Co-Founder and CEO of Bold Health, a virtual care provider for digestive conditions that combines the telehealth services of a multidisciplinary GI-focused care team with digital therapeutic programs for self-management. Elena received the 21st Century Icon Innovator Technology Award and was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 List while working as a Venture Capital Investor with the leading European VC fund Atomico, where she covered digital health and software as a service amongst other verticals. She previously worked in investment banking at J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, in management consulting at Oliver Wyman, and ran a media business in university. Elena is Romanian and received her Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
Dr. Atray Dixit co-founded Coral Genomics after finishing his graduate work in 2018 with the mission of understanding and reducing variability in therapeutic response for all patients. In this role, he works with a diverse team and key external stakeholders in the healthcare system. In Aviv Regev’s lab at the Broad Institute, he focused on developing novel methods for high throughput genetic screening. In 2016, he led a team to develop Perturb-seq, a technology which allows genetically encoded perturbations (like CRISPR edits) to be screened using single-cell RNA-seq. Atray also developed new methods to enable large combinatorial screens such as Shuffle-seq. He translated the big data skills he learned through these projects during a brief externship at Apple’s Applied Machine Learning division. Atray received his BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 2012 and his PhD through MIT’s Health Sciences and Technology program.
Asaf Kraus, Dieta’s Co-Founder and CEO, is an IBS patient and an experienced data scientist. The combination of his professional experience as a data scientist and his personal struggle with digestive disease drives his passion for Dieta Health’s mission to improve digestive health using data and AI. With eight years of professional experience as a data scientist, Asaf used data to uncover valuable insights for innovative technology companies such as Uber, Accenture, and Trulia. He was afflicted with severe IBS in 2017, which changed the course of his life. While spending months consulting various GI clinicians and experimenting with dozens of complicated treatment options, Asaf observed the lack of data and personalization in modern gastroenterology. And during that journey, he began to envision an AI-driven future of gastroenterology care, which Dieta Health is now building.
Dr. Sriram Muthukumar is the CEO and Co-Founder of EnLiSense LLC, where he has raised over $1 million in non-dilutive funding from US federal government agencies towards platform development and clinical validation. Sriram has over 20 years of experience in leading teams and developing scalable processes in electronic materials, device fabrication and packaging technologies, and high-volume manufacturing methods. He is an inventor on 17 granted patents, several patent applications pending, and has authored and co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications to date. He also has an Adjunct Associate Professor position at the University of Texas at Dallas in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering doing research and development of ultrasensitive sensors for various applications, including biosensing and environmental use cases.
Sriram received his Bachelor of Technology (BTech) degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in India in Metallurgical Engineering in 1997. He went on to complete his PhD in Ceramics and Materials Engineering from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in 2003, where his doctoral research focused on thin film growth and characterization of II-VI materials for optimizing electrical and optical device performance.
After his PhD, Sriram was scouted by Intel, where he was a lead on research and development programs, especially those challenging the status-quo, i.e. disruptive technologies translation from research to development and manufacturing. A significant number of these programs involved transfer of technology from university and research stage to delivering product and technology readiness for high-volume manufacturing. He was recognized for his contributions within the company with several awards and was instrumental in several trade secrets and patent filings. He also held positions at Maxim Integrated Products and Qorvo Inc., where he was instrumental in bringing new Sensor technologies to market.
David Schoen is the Co-Founder and CEO of GI Trak. As a Crohn’s patient since he was 8 years old, David understands the frustrations of navigating through life while trying to manage and control the disease. He founded GI Trak as a way to bridge the patient-provider communication divide by providing a virtual clinic for all IBD needs. David brings with him over 15 years of business experience in management, sales, and business development. Before founding GI Trak, he co-founded higher education programs in Israel geared towards undereducated individuals to help guide and matriculate them into universities and the workforce.
In his free time, David volunteers at the Jewish Crohn’s & Colitis Support Group, which helps connect IBD patients with the proper doctors and helps guide patients through the effects of the disease. David is also an advisor of another startup, Trufyx, where he uses his experience as a founder to help advance the company through its early stages. Using his real-life experience and his vast network, David has bult a platform that is already a proven success for its users.
Dr. Avi Dukler is an entrepreneur and executive with global experience in strategy, product development, commercialization, reimbursements, and general management of worldwide teams, including Israel, Europe, and the US. Avi has managed biomarkers’ discovery, clinical development, and regulation and commercialization of two personalized medicine clinical diagnostic products. In his current role, Avi is the Managing Partner and President of Glycominds, LLC, a company that discovers, develops, and commercializes specialty high value clinical tests for inflammatory bowel diseases. Avi is also the Co-Founder and CEO of Kepler Diagnostics, Inc., an early-stage company with the mission to decentralize diagnostics and remote testing by using its proprietary Samplla device for at-home specimen collection. Avi has a PhD in Biotechnology from Tel Aviv University and is an inventor in multiple issue patents in the field.
In building Oshi Health, Sam Holliday combines his passion for redesigning healthcare around the needs of patients with a mission to increase access to the high-quality, whole-person care that two of his family members have needed to manage their digestive conditions. He has held leadership roles across healthcare technology and tech-enabled services companies focused on improving population health. These include scaling a tech-enabled diabetes management company, a data-driven health system patient acquisition platform, and population health tools for a leading electronic medical record (EMR) company.
Sam lives in New York City with his family and enjoys spending time deepening his knowledge of how our bodies and brains work and cheering on Philadelphia sports teams and NYCFC.
Vik Kashyap is the CEO and Founder at Toi Labs, a Silicon Valley-based company developing bathroom technology to improve aging. He has led companies to build products that today touch millions of consumers. Vik has been quoted or authored in Science Translational Medicine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and The New York Times. He is the author of multiple patents and an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in Northern California. He was previously an investor at Battery Ventures, where he executed and supported investments for a $1 billion technology venture capital fund and has served as an angel investor and senior advisor to multiple technology companies, including the largest enterprise software company in Japan. He is a graduate with honors from Harvard University.
Mary Pettigrew is a freelance writer/blogger from Dallas, Texas. Her writing is multigenre in nature, with a focus on poetry, prose, essay, narrative interview. She is an ambassador & patient advocate for multiple sclerosis (MS), chronic illness, IBS/D, mental illness & disability rights. In 2014, Mary founded MSpals, an online support organization which has a global outreach on Twitter, Facebook & other platforms. In conjunction with MSpals, Mary created a group geared specifically for those with chronic illness & disabilities to post/share art, music, writing, etc. The group is called “Creative Expression” & can be found on Facebook.
Mary is active with the NMSS (National MS Society), HealtheVoices, WEGO Health and other patient leader/ambassador platforms.