Shannon Mumenthaler, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California. She is also the Laboratory Director for the Ellison Institute, which is a translational institute that bridges research and innovation by bringing together researchers, patients, and physicians dedicated to improving human health. Although Dr. Mumenthaler’s primary scientific training is in cell biology, she applies a unique multidisciplinary approach toward her research program, partnering with mathematicians, clinicians and engineers to explore critical areas in cancer. Her overall research interest focuses on the importance of the tumor microenvironment in influencing tumor progression and treatment response. She is developing physiologically-relevant model systems that capture the microenvironmental context of a tumor and coupling these preclinical models with microscopy-based imaging pipelines to provide deeper insights into the evolving tumor.

Heba is a Sir Henry Wellcome Research Fellow at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford. Before joining Oxford, she obtained her PhD at the Institute of Cancer Research in London with Prof Chris Bakal. She has extensive expertise in biomedical imaging and high throughput screening. Her focus is on developing machine learning approaches for automated and comprehensive analysis of large-scale genetic and drug screening datasets. For example, she developed KCML to predict gene functions based on phenotypic screens based on siRNA and CRISPR screens.  She has also developed several new image analysis and deep learning algorithms. These include a profiling of vascular network  morphology and single cell detection in wound healing assays.

She is an active member of the Early Career Section committee at the Royal Microscopy Society where she participated in setting up the committee and promoting ECR in microscopy career progression.

David is president of The Exeter Group, a life-sciences commercialization consultancy he founded in 1992. Seconded from Exeter, Dr. Becker recently served as Commercial Lead at ExpressCells, a genetic engineering start-up focused on producing custom cell lines for drug discovery, toxicology, and other biologic research. Prior to joining ExpressCells, he was managing director of Catalysis Partners, providing strategic solutions in drug development and commercialization to small life sciences companies. He is a board-certified internist.

Todd Shelper is a research fellow at the Menzies Health Institute Queensland, working on cell-based therapies for The Spinal Injury Project. He obtained his PhD from Griffith University in 2014 with his project focusing on the development of more physiologically relevant in vitro 3D pancreatic cancer models for use in anti-cancer drug discovery programs. During his time at Griffith University, he has worked on commercial anti-infective high throughput screening and lead optimisation projects. He is actively involved in developing primarily imaging-based assays and has run numerous HTS and HCS campaigns across a range of biology including oncology and parasitology. Todd is currently investigating the therapeutic potential of transplanting olfactory glia in pre-clinical spinal injury models. He has been a board member with the society for 3 years and participated in educational seminars and event planning at the annual SBI² meetings.

Over the past 24 years Don has worked at multiple major pharmaceutical companies involved in early stage research with a focus on use and application of high content imaging (HCI) to drive and support target-based drug discovery programs. Most recently, as the director of Functional Genomics for the Pfizer Oncology Integrative Biotechnology (IBT) Group , he implemented HCI for target identification in early stage drug discovery, for in vitro and in situ functional and phenotypic characterization, as well as for providing technical and strategic guidance for new assays and innovative applications for all oncology programs moving towards IND filing. Additionally, he initiated application of both machine learning and AI technology to help validate and screen images for repurposing of HCI data for drug screening applications.

Jim is a Principal Scientist in the Global Pathology and Investigative Toxicology group in Drug Safety R&D at Pfizer where he has been since 2000. Since receiving his BSc in Biology from Old Dominion University in 1986, he has worked 10 years in academic research (University of Virginia) and 20+ years in biopharma research (Pfizer, Wyeth) in a wide variety of research fields including neuroscience, deafness, cardiovascular/metabolic diseases, and oncology. The Investigative Tox group is a small team that does deep dive investigations into specific toxicity issues and builds safety de-risking models for programs across all therapeutic areas. As the imaging technical expert, he specializes in imaging-based assays for target identification/evaluation, drug activity/biodistribution/cell viability/toxicity. He has expertise in all phases of histotechnology (cell/tissue processing, sectioning, staining, immunohistochemistry); microscopy (fluorescence, confocal, live cell, multidimensional, 3D, HCS); in vitro assays (intracellular trafficking, endocytosis, angiogenesis, ROS, wound healing, NETosis, transfection, knockdown); and image analysis on cells or tissue using multiple platforms. His recent work has focused heavily on building 3D organoid and multi-physiological-system (MPS) models for safety and tox endpoints. He has been a member of SBI2 since 2015 and find it to be an invaluable resource for networking and keeping up with the latest HCS advances and technology.