Strategies for Successful Technology Translations

Speaker & Panel Moderator Michel is currently Director of Entrepreneurship and Research Translation at NTU-SCELSE, working on technology commercialization via spinoffs and industry collaborations and partnerships, strategy and corporate development. He was responsible for the development and operations, from 2019-2022, of the Singapore National Biofilm Consortium and creating partnerships in the US, UK and EU. Michel was a lecturer for the MIT-SMART ACT program where he developed and taught the course “Lab to Market”. He is co-founder and CEO of Mindsigns Health™ Inc a software brain health platform spun out of NTU. He is also advisor to a number of healthcare spinoffs involved in anti-microbials to microbiomes. Michel has held board positions with a number of technology and healthcare growth companies internationally, operational advisory roles and has managed technology & healthcare IPOs on both European markets and NASDAQ as well as M&A and investments. Michel served as Vice Chairman of the Singapore Venture Capital Association (SVCA) and was a member of the Executive Council of BioSingapore. Michel won the Highest Impact VC/PE-Backed Company Non-Executive Board Member award in 2013 from the SVCA Michel holds a B.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering (PINY) and attended General Electric’s Advanced Engineering program. Michel was a graduate of General Electric’s Edison Program. He earned his MBA from the London Business School. linkedin.com/in/michelbirnbaum

Panel Member Tarun Chopra joined L’Oréal in 2013 and is leading the research and innovation team for L’Oréal in Singapore. He is adept at identifying areas of disruptive innovation, and at creating collaborations with academics and start ups He is highly experienced in leading product oriented research. EXPERTISE: Tarun has multi disciplinary expertise across multiple scientific disciplines including chemical biology, biotechnology, and microbiology. Prior to joining L’Oréal, Tarun spent 5 years in Switzerland as a post doctoral researcher at EPFL, Switzerland working towards understanding mechanisms of metabolic regulation in bacteria Prior to the EPFL, Tarun earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Biology from the National Institute of Immunology in India and also a M.Sc. in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, India EXPERIENCE: He is currently leading research strategies and programs for R&I Singapore, particularly in the field of microbiome, longevity, agritech, and foresight functions. He is also the co-director of L'Oréal's joint laboratories with academic partners including SCELSE in NTU, NERI in NUS, and ASRL in A*STAR. Along these lines, he is spearheading knowledge and transformation initiatives with both internal and external stakeholders across the globe. ACHIEVEMENT AND INFLUENCE WITHIN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY Tarun has 3 patents to his credit and actively contributes to scientific community through publications and presentations.

Dr. Jungjoon K. Lee received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford University in 2011 under the theme of Directed Evolution, and BA/MSci degrees in Natural Science (Chemistry) from the University of Cambridge in 2005. After his Ph.D, he worked in the Future Biotherapeutics department of Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology for three years and as a research scientist at the Seoul National University's Institute of Molecular Biology & Genetics for two years conducting research in CRISPR-Cas9. After which, he joined Toolgen, a biotech company focused on CRISPR-Cas technology in 2016 where he worked in the Platform development team and published a number of papers and patents related to the CRISPR platform. His representative achievements include the development of several groundbreaking tools, such as the first Genome-wide off-target detection method for Prime Editor TAPE-seq (Nature Communications 2022), the standardized Genome-wide off-target detection method Extru-seq (Genome Biology 2023), and the high-fidelity Cas9 with high activity, Sniper2L (Nature Chemical Biology 2023). He is currently an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore.

Panel Member Dr Akbar Vahidi is a scientist-entrepreneur who received his PhD from the DEPARTMENT OF CHEMICAL & BIOMOLECULAR ENGIINERING in the National University of Singapore in 2015. He has a decade of experience in enzyme technology and biocatalysis, delivered several industrial projects to big pharma, food and biofuel companies during his career in academia. He was the lead researcher in an interdisciplinary team that invented Allozymes’ technology for faster and cheaper enzyme development. Akbar then started Allozymes as co-founder and CTO, where he is building next-generation synthetic biology platform and applying futuristic solutions to solve sustainable manufacturing problems by unlocking enzymes potential.

Speaker & Panel Moderator Michel is currently Director of Entrepreneurship and Research Translation at NTU-SCELSE, working on technology commercialization via spinoffs and industry collaborations and partnerships, strategy and corporate development. He was responsible for the development and operations, from 2019-2022, of the Singapore National Biofilm Consortium and creating partnerships in the US, UK and EU. Michel was a lecturer for the MIT-SMART ACT program where he developed and taught the course “Lab to Market”. He is co-founder and CEO of Mindsigns Health™ Inc a software brain health platform spun out of NTU. He is also advisor to a number of healthcare spinoffs involved in anti-microbials to microbiomes. Michel has held board positions with a number of technology and healthcare growth companies internationally, operational advisory roles and has managed technology & healthcare IPOs on both European markets and NASDAQ as well as M&A and investments. Michel served as Vice Chairman of the Singapore Venture Capital Association (SVCA) and was a member of the Executive Council of BioSingapore. Michel won the Highest Impact VC/PE-Backed Company Non-Executive Board Member award in 2013 from the SVCA Michel holds a B.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering (PINY) and attended General Electric’s Advanced Engineering program. Michel was a graduate of General Electric’s Edison Program. He earned his MBA from the London Business School. linkedin.com/in/michelbirnbaum