Our Team

Dr. Avnur is chief scientific officer at Quark Venture Inc. Prior to joining Quark, she was the global head of academic innovation at Roche Partnering from 2009 to 2016 where she was responsible for creating relationships with the world’s leading academic institutions and world-class innovators. Dr. Avnur has helped create nine startup companies and was named global head of neglected diseases at Roche Partnering from 2010 to 2012. Before she took on partnering roles, she worked in diagnostic and pharmaceutical research and development for nearly 20 years. She held numerous positions progressing from scientist and manager to holding global responsibilities. She oversaw the advancement of compounds from the bench into the clinic and was involved in the design and execution of early clinical studies that characterize the pharmacodynamics and clinical effects of a number of compounds. Dr. Avnur received her Ph.D. in cell biology from the Weizmann Institute and completed postdoctoral training in cancer biology at Stanford University.

Dr. Bakhoum is a co-founder of Volastra Therapeutics and serves on its board of directors. He is both a practicing radiation oncologist who specializes in the treatment of breast cancer and a leading investigator into the role of chromosomal instability in tumor evasion. The Bakhoum Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) has pioneered the development of cell- and animal-based models to explore the role of CIN in therapeutic resistance and metastasis. He obtained his M.D., Ph.D. at Dartmouth Medical School, where his graduate research focused on understanding the basic mechanisms of chromosome segregation during cell division. He subsequently completed an internship at Mount Auburn Hospital of Harvard Medical School and his residency training in radiation oncology at MSKCC. While a resident, he conducted research under the mentorship of Dr. Lewis Cantley at Weill Cornell Medicine, focusing on the role of chromosomal instability in tumor metastasis and the generation of a cytosolic DNA response.

Dr. Dochez is a managing partner at DROIA Genetic Diseases and a partner at DROIA Oncology Ventures. He is also a co-founder of various biotech companies including Montis Biosciences, Pharvaris and Vico Therapeutics. Prior to joining DROIA, Dr. Dochez was chief executive officer of Tusk Therapeutics from May 2015 until its acquisition by Roche in September 2018. He joined Tusk from Prosensa Holding N.V., where he served as chief business officer and senior vice president of business development for seven years until its acquisition by BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. He has held multiple leadership roles in business development for TiGenix and Methexiz, and has also served as a consultant for Arthur D. Little. He currently serves on the board of directors for Erytech, Vico Therapeutics and Montis Biosciences. Dr. Dochez holds a PharmD degree and a postgraduate degree in business economics from the University of Leuven in Belgium and an MBA from Vlerick Management School in Belgium.

Ms. Peterson is an operating partner at Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R). Prior to joining CD&R in 2019, she was group worldwide chairman of Johnson & Johnson, where she led the consumer and medical devices businesses and was responsible for the corporation’s global supply chain, technology strategy and operating infrastructure for six years. Ms. Peterson has also served as chief executive officer of Bayer CropScience AG, chief executive officer of Bayer Medical Care and president of Bayer HealthCare AG’s Diabetes Care Division. Outside of CD&R, she is a member of the Microsoft board of directors, is chairman of the board of the American Academy in Berlin and is on the board of trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study, the world-renowned center for science and humanities research in Princeton, NJ. She received her bachelor’s from Cornell University and her MPA from Princeton University.

Ms. Schulman is a managing partner at Polaris Partners, where she focuses on investments in healthcare companies. She joined Polaris in 2014 and manages the LS Polaris Innovation Fund, which was formed in 2017. She currently serves as executive chair of SQZ Biotech, as well as Lyndra Therapeutics where she was co-founder and the company’s initial chief executive officer. Ms. Schulman represents Polaris as a director of Cyclerion, DewPoint Therapeutics and Kallyope, in addition to Volastra, and serves on the board of directors of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. Prior to Polaris, she was on the general counsel of Pfizer, was president of Pfizer Nutrition and became the president of Pfizer Consumer Healthcare after working on its sale to Nestle for $11.85 billion in 2012. She is also a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. Ms. Schulman is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wesleyan University and earned her J.D. from Yale Law School.

Mr. Vitorovic is the co-founder and managing director of Vida Ventures. Prior to founding Vida Ventures, Stefan was an investment professional at Third Rock Ventures, an early-stage life sciences venture capital firm. At Third Rock, Stefan focused on new company formation, due diligence, portfolio company financings, and partner development. He was part of the founding team of Decibel Therapeutics, a hearing-focused drug discovery and development platform company. Before Third Rock, Stefan was an investor at TPG Capital, where he focused on majority, control stakes in healthcare companies. Stefan worked on a variety of equity and debt financings, including Aptalis Pharma and Biomet. Prior to TPG, Stefan was an investment banker at Credit Suisse’s healthcare banking group focused on life sciences M&A and new equity issuance.

Stefan received his B.S. with Honors in Biological Sciences at Stanford University. He completed his M.S. in Biology at Stanford, where he conducted biomedical research in the lab of Dr. Helen Blau at Stanford Medical School. Stefan later received his MBA from Harvard Business School. Stefan currently serves on the Board of Directors for Praxis Precision Medicines (“PRAX”), Volastra Therapeutics, and Tectonic Therapeutic. He was previously a Board Director or Observer at Kyverna Therapeutics, Oyster Point Therapeutics (“OYST”), Dyne Therapeutics (“DYN”), and Sutro Biopharma (“STRO”).

Dr. Bakhoum is a co-founder of Volastra Therapeutics and serves on its board of directors. He is both a practicing radiation oncologist who specializes in the treatment of breast cancer and a leading investigator into the role of chromosomal instability in tumor evasion. The Bakhoum Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) has pioneered the development of cell- and animal-based models to explore the role of CIN in therapeutic resistance and metastasis. He obtained his M.D., Ph.D. at Dartmouth Medical School, where his graduate research focused on understanding the basic mechanisms of chromosome segregation during cell division. He subsequently completed an internship at Mount Auburn Hospital of Harvard Medical School and his residency training in radiation oncology at MSKCC. While a resident, he conducted research under the mentorship of Dr. Lewis Cantley at Weill Cornell Medicine, focusing on the role of chromosomal instability in tumor metastasis and the generation of a cytosolic DNA response.

Dr. Baltimore is President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, where he was previously president for nine years. Dr. Baltimore has been involved in the development of American biotechnology since his involvement in the formation of Collaborative Genetics in the 1970s. He has helped found numerous companies, most recently Calimmune and Immune Design, and presently serves on the board of directors at Appia Bio and Regulus Therapeutics as well as at the Broad Institute. He is also a member of numerous scientific advisory boards, including Amgen, the Broad Institute, Ragon Institute, and Regulus. Dr. Baltimore has served as president and chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was named a fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research. In 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research into viral replication that provided the key to understanding the life cycle of retroviruses. He earned his Ph.D. from Rockefeller University.

Dr. Cantley is a co-founder of Volastra and a world-renowned biologist and biochemist. He is celebrated, in particular, for his discovery of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) signaling pathway in the 1980s. Dr. Cantley’s lab at Weill Cornell Medical College investigates cancer metabolism and phosphoinositide signaling and was the first lab to identify the link between chromosomal instability and cytosolic DNA signaling in cancer metastases.

Dr. Compton is the dean of the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, where he also serves as the senior associate dean for research and professor of biochemistry. His research focuses on understanding how cancer cells acquire abnormal chromosome numbers and how those alterations influence cancer cell growth. He has published more than 70 articles, and images of his work have been displayed on the cover of 15 different journals. Dr. Compton serves on national committees with the American Society for Cell Biology and American Association of Medical Colleges, reviews grant applications for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Cancer Society and is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2013, he earned a MERIT award from the NIH to provide long-term support for his research program. Dr. Compton was recruited to the faculty at Dartmouth in 1993 and, prior to becoming the dean, served as the biochemistry course director. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

Dr. Elemento is a distinguished researcher developing new methodologies for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer by combining ultrafast DNA sequencing, proteomics, high-performance computing, mathematical modeling, and artificial intelligence/machine learning. His lab at Weill Cornell Medical College includes examination of how genes are regulated in cancer cells, determination of whether 3D chromatin architecture can predict where mutations are most likely to occur, and investigation of mutated genes and their mediation of genome-wide, epigenomic patterns.

Dr. Evan is the Sir William Dunn professor and chair of the department of biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), then Royal Society Napier professor at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, and distinguished professor of cancer research at UCSF from 1999-2010, moving to Cambridge, U.K., in 2009. He earned his Ph.D. in molecular immunology from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, U.K.

Dr. Kapoor is the director of the Pels Family Center for Biochemistry and Structural Biology and head of the Selma and Lawrence Ruben Laboratory of Chemistry and Cell Biology at Rockefeller University. He is a leading chemical biology researcher, focused on using chemistry-based approaches to decipher cellular mechanisms, such as cell division and cancer. His research has led to first-in-class drug-like chemical inhibitors for several targets, including molecular motor proteins, cell cycle and cytoskeleton regulators and ribosome assembly factors. He currently serves as a member of the editorial boards of several scientific journals, review panels for research funding agencies and advisory boards of biotechs and research institutes. He is also associate director of The Tri-Institutional Program in Chemical Biology. He began his career at Rockefeller University as an assistant professor and head of the laboratory of chemistry and cell biology. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University.

Dr. Pellman is the Margaret M. Dyson professor of pediatric oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the associate director for basic science at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. His laboratory works to understand cell division and how cell division errors drive rapid evolution of the genome. His group has uncovered mechanistic explanations for catastrophic mutational processes underlying genome alterations in cancer. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Damon Runyon Scholar Award, the Stohlman Scholar Award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America, the E. Mead Johnson Award and an NIH MERIT Award. He was elected to the Association of American Physicians and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received his M.D. from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Saccomano is an experienced research and development leader with a over 35 years track record in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, including twenty years of experience at the executive level in R&D organizations. During this time he has guided drug discovery programs from idea to registration, developed and managed enabling drug R&D technologies and has built and effectively managed alliances and partnerships between public and private sectors. Most recently he was the Chief Scientific Officer of Pfizer’s Boulder site.    Prior to Pfizer, he was the Chief Scientific Officer for Array Biopharma. DR. Saccomano received his PhD in organic chemistry from Columbia University.

Dr. Varmus is the Lewis Thomas University professor of medicine at the Meyer Cancer Center of Weill Cornell Medicine. He is also a senior associate member of the New York Genome Center, where he helps to develop programs in cancer genomics, and an adjunct professor at the Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York. Previously, Dr. Varmus was the director of the National Cancer Institute, the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and director of the National Institutes of Health. He was co-recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of the genetic basis of cancer. He is a member of the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine, is involved in several initiatives to promote science and health in developing countries and serves on advisory groups for several academic, governmental, philanthropic and commercial institutions. These positions currently include co-chair of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s LifeSci NYC initiative and member of advisory boards for Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Broad and Crick Institutes, the global health program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and three biotechnology companies. Dr. Varmus is the author of approximately 400 scientific papers and five books, including a 2009 memoir entitled The Art and Politics of Science. He was a co-chair of President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a co-founder and Chairman of the Board of the Public Library of Science and chair of the Scientific Board of the Gates Foundation Grand Challenges in Global Health. He received his M.D. from Columbia University.

Dr. Vousden is chief scientist at Cancer Research UK (CRUK) and group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Prior to joining the Francis Crick Institute, she was director of the CRUK Beatson Institute in Glasgow. She has strong ties with the National Cancer Institute, where she previously served as director of the Molecular Virology and Carcinogenesis Section at the ABL-Basic Research program and chief of the Regulation of Cell Growth Laboratory. She spent the first part of her career at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences. She is a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research. She is the recipient of numerous awards and in 2010 was appointed a Commander of the British Empire for her services to clinical science. Dr. Vousden received her Ph.D. in genetics from Queen Mary College at the University of London.