BIOGRAPHIES

Keynote Speaker | Panel Moderator | Panel Speakers

Keynote Speaker

From the Inside Looking In

Lydia Villa-Komaroff, Ph.D., CEO, Cytonome, Inc.

Lydia Villa-Komaroff began her research career under the tutelage of David Baltimore and Harvey Lodish at MIT, and received a Ph.D. in Cell Biology in 1975. Her varied and active professional life includes research positions at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Cold Spring Harbor, Children's Hospital in Boston, and Cytonome, Inc.  In 1996 she moved to full time administration; from 1998 to 2003 she was Vice President for Research at Northwestern University in Illinois and from 2003 to 2005 she served as Vice President for Research and Chief Operating Officer of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge.  In 2003 she was appointed to the Board of Directors of Transkaryotic Therapies, Inc (TKT), a biopharmaceutical company that developed products for the treatment of rare diseases.  She became non-executive Chair of the Board in January 2005 and guided the deliberations and process that led to the sale of TKT for $1.6B.  She joined Cytonome, Inc as Chief Scientific Officer in 2005 and became CEO in 2006.    

She is a member of the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Hall of Fame and a fellow of the Association for Women in Science.  She has served on review committees for the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.  She was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Assessing the System for Protecting Human Research Subjects, the National Research Council Committee on the Structure of NIH, the congressionally mandated National Science Foundation Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering, as well as the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for the Biology Directorate, which she chaired from 1997 to 1998.  She was a member of the National Advisory Neurological Disorders and Stroke Council from 2000 to 2004 and was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001.  She is a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science and has been both a board member and vice president of the organization.  She is a member of the Minority Affairs Committee of ASCB and has served as chair.  She became Chair of the Board of Trustees for Pine Manor College in May 2007.   She is currently serving on the National Academies of Science and National Academy of Engineering Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and the National Research Council Committee on Underrepresented Groups and the Expansion of the Science and Engineering Workforce Pipeline.

Panel Moderator

Carolyn Cho, Ph.D., Head, Systems Biology Technologies, Pfizer, Cambridge, MA

Dr. Cho works at Pfizer Research Technology Center in Kendall Square, Cambridge.  Following her training at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Physics BSc, MSc),University of Toronto (Biological Physics PhD), and Princeton University (Molecular Biology, Post Doc), she went on to computer-based modeling at SmithKline Beecham (now GSK), Physiome Sciences (became Predix and now Epix Pharmaceuticals), Biosystemix, and Novartis.  She has also helped organize national and local-area scientific meetings.  She is currently serving as the MASS AWIS Chapter Treasurer for her second term. 

Panel Speakers

Tsvetelina Lazarova, Ph.D., Director of Chemistry and Co-Founder, MedChem Partners

In 2006, Dr. Lazarova co-founded Medchem Partners, a Boston based medicinal chemistry service provider offering comprehensive medicinal chemistry support to biotech and pharmaceutical companies and academic laboratories engaged in research and drug discovery. This company offers services in all aspects of medicinal chemistry, from strategic planning to hit evaluation, and validation to pre-clinical development. Before establishing MedChem Partners, Dr. Lazarova worked at several biotech companies in the Boston area including ARIAD, Cubist, Daiamed, Enanta and conducted medicinal chemistry research in a variety of therapeutics areas.    She received her B.A. degree in chemistry from Harvard University, a masters degree in organic chemistry from MIT and a PhD in organic chemistry from University of California, Los Angeles.

Jennifer Rocklein-Canfield, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Chemistry, Simmons College, Boston, MA

Dr. Rocklein-Canfield received her B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Maryland and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from SUNY at Stony Brook in 1996.  She followed this with a postdoc at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in infectious disease.  She has been on the faculty at Simmons College since 1999, where she received tenure in 2006.  She is currently serving on the Women in Cell Biology Committee of the American Society for Cell Biology, and is on sabbatical in Marc Vidal's lab at the Dana Farber.  Jennifer is married with 3 children (all boys who play Hockey), is herself a rabid soccer player and coach and lives 35miles away from Simmons in Littleton, MA.

Jennifer Hobin, Ph.D.  Science Policy Analyst, Office of Public Affairs at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) 

Jennifer A. Hobin’s responsibilities at FASEB, include developing policy recommendations and communications materials on issues related to scientific training and career development, clinical research, and teaching evolution. Prior to joining FASEB, she was a Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Graduate Fellow at the National Academies’ Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, where she contributed to the widely circulated report on maximizing the potential of women in academic science and engineering, Beyond Bias and Barriers. She earned a PhD in biopsychology from the University of Michigan with studies describing the neural circuits mediating the context-specific expression of Pavlovian fear memory. As a representative to the University of Michigan psychology faculty, Jennifer assisted in the developing an introductory course for incoming doctoral students and a policy for improving the mentoring relationship between graduate students and their faculty advisors. She has a BA in psychology from Stony Brook University, serves on the policy committee for the National Postdoctoral Association, and is Vice President for Programs of the Washington DC Metropolitan Chapter of the Association for Women in Science.

Martha Vokes, Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA

Martha Vokes graduated from the University of Arizona (Tucson) in 2002 with a Bachelor of Science in Molecular and Cellular Biology. Her undergraduate research focused on studying gene expression in developing vasculature. After moving to Boston in 2003 and joining the Forsyth Institute as a research technician studying bone resorption, she completed a Master of Science degree in Bioinformatics from Boston University creating, for her thesis project, a custom, web-accessible database to catalogue images and meta-data. Then, as the Technical Director of the Genomics Core at the Joslin Diabetes Center, she prepared and analyzed large microarray datasets. She is now working with the Broad Institute’s Imaging Platform and consulting with the Harvard University Genome Modification Facility on building an interactive ordering system/data management tool.

Victoria M. Richon, Ph.D., Senior Director of Cancer Biology and Therapeutics, Merck Research Laboratories, Boston

Victoria Richon joined Merck Research Laboratories-Boston as Senior Director of Cancer Biology and Therapeutics following Merck's 2004 acquisition of Aton Pharma, Inc. Dr. Richon was a co-founder at Aton and served as Executive Director of Biology. She currently heads MRL Boston's Department of Cancer Biology and Therapeutics. Dr. Richon was a leading member of the scientific group that discovered the first histone deacetylase inhibitor approved for the treatment of cancer.  She received her B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Vermont in 1981, her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Nebraska in 1986, and was a post-doc at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center from 1986 until 1989.