Scientist to CEO

Abraham Heifets, Ph.D., is co-founder and chief executive officer of Atomwise, Inc., a company using artificial intelligence to help discover new medicines. The company grew out of Dr. Heifets’ doctoral work as a Massey Fellow at the University of Toronto and the Ontario Brain Institute, where he used machine learning to help plan organic syntheses, a long-standing challenge in chemistry. Previously, Dr. Heifets researched high-performance data processing at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center and contributed to the artificial intelligence system of the world-champion robotic soccer team at Cornell University. He has presented his work at the National Institutes of Health, the American Chemical Society, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and he is author on 19 papers, patents, and patent applications. In 2006, Dr. Heifets was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and a Master’s in Engineering from Cornell University.

Andrea Ippolito is a lecturer in the Engineering Management Program at Cornell University as well as the founder and Director of Women Entrepreneurs Cornell (W.E. Cornell). Additionally, she is currently the founder and CEO of SimpliFed, a company supporting every family on the baby-feeding journey.

Prior to joining Cornell, Ms. Ippolito served as the Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs Innovators Network within the VA Center for Innovation. She completed her M.S. in Engineering and Management at MIT. Prior to MIT, Ms. Ippolito worked as a research scientist within the Corporate Technology Development group at Boston Scientific. She obtained both her B.S. in Biological Engineering in 2006 and Master’s of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering in 2007 from Cornell University.

Jake Becraft, Ph.D., is co-founder and chief executive officer of Strand Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company developing the first platform for making programmable, long-acting mRNA drugs capable of delivering precise, potentially curative treatments with a single dose. That platform originated inside MIT’s Synthetic Biology Center, where Dr. Becraft led a team of colleagues in developing the world’s first synthetic biology programming language for mRNA. For his work at Strand to apply this platform to real-world disease applications, Dr. Becraft was named to the MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 List and as a Termeer Fellow by the Termeer Foundation. Currently, he serves on the boards of Strand and Starlight Ventures, as well as the executive board of Public Health United, a nonprofit helping scientists communicate their research for maximum impact. Dr. Becraft holds a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering and Synthetic Biology from MIT and a B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Piraye Beim, Ph.D., is founder and chief executive officer of Celmatix, Inc., a preclinical-stage women’s health biotech focused uniquely on ovarian biology. During her doctoral work at Weill Cornell and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Dr. Beim was on the front lines of precision medicine in oncology and witnessed its transformative effect on the standard of care. Under her leadership, Celmatix pioneered breakthroughs in decoding the genomic drivers of ovarian function and health, and completed development of its ovarian health platform, which has yielded unprecedented insight into the key molecular drivers of ovarian function and reproductive health conditions. Dr. Beim is a Healthcare Innovators Fellow at The Aspen Institute and was named to Crain’s 40 Under 40 as well as Fortune magazine’s Top 15 Founders Disrupting Their Industries. She holds a Ph.D in Molecular Biology/Mammalian Embryology from Weill Cornell Medical College and completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of Cambridge (U.K.).