AI at the Bio frontier: the power beyond the hype
AI is transforming biology — from decoding complex systems to discovering new medicines faster.
Join us for The Power of AI at the Bio Frontier, featuring leaders working at the intersection of AI, biology, and drug discovery.
Expect short talks, a lively panel, and a forward-looking conversation about what AI can already do, what’s coming next, and where the biggest opportunities lie.
Our speakers:
Fernando Garces, PhD, CEO & Cofounder of NovoFy, is a biotech entrepreneur and protein engineering expert with 20+ years of experience spanning academia, biopharma, and AI-driven drug discovery. He earned his PhD in Biotechnology from the University of Barcelona and conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute of Cancer Research and The Scripps Research Institute, where he focused on oncology targets and structure-guided protein design for HIV-1 vaccines. He subsequently held scientific and leadership roles at Amgen, Gilead, and BioMap, advancing next-generation biologics and computational protein design. Fernando previously founded and led BioGlyph, securing strategic partnerships with Gilead and Johnson & Johnson, and now leads NovoFy, where he is building AI-powered technologies for scalable protein design. He is an inventor on 20+ patents, author of 35+ peer-reviewed publications, and recipient of the Scripps CHAVI-ID Young Investigator Award.
Cristiana Carpinteiro is a Machine Learning Engineering Lead based in Portugal, with a background in Bioengineering and a career entirely dedicated to the biotech field. She currently works at Loka, an AWS Premier Partner consultancy, developing AI for drug discovery and covering challenges that span molecule screening and optimization to model training on large-scale datasets. Previously, she worked at two startups, including one building technology to detect Alzheimer's disease from blood samples. Her experience sits at the intersection of science, technology, and innovation, bridging research and engineering teams to bring ML into real-world biotech applications.
Julia Coelho is an AI and Healthcare Executive who has spent her career turning breakthrough science into solutions that improve human health. At Topcon Healthcare, she built the IDHea business, a data-sharing service for AI biomarker discovery powered by a large, curated ophthalmic real-world dataset, with partnerships spanning four continents. As Chief Commercial Officer at Unlearn.ai, she built the commercial organization and brought its AI Digital Twin technology to market. Earlier in her career, she led growth and several product launches at Cardiodx, Carl Zeiss Meditec, and Abbott Vascular. Julia holds an MBA from INSEAD and a master's degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Porto.
Angela Oliveira Pisco is the Director of Data Science at CZI, leading data efforts in the AIxBio space towards tools and models that improve understanding of health and disease. Angela holds a BSc and MSc in Biomedical Engineering and a PhD in Systems Biology. Her PhD work became the foundation of a new direction of thinking on why cancer develops resistance to chemotherapy, the major reason for treatment failure. Before CZI, she was the head of Computational Biology and ML omics at insitro, working at the forefront of building datasets and ML models to improve understanding of disease mechanisms with the goal to transform drug discovery and development. She also led the Data Science platform at CZ Biohub SF where she made significant contributions for the whole organism cell atlas projects including the first whole mouse cell atlas (Tabula Muris), the first aging cell atlas (Tabula Maris Senis), and Tabula Sapiens, one of the first Human Cell Atlas drafts.