Appendix C
Workshop Planning Committee Biographies

Alex John London (Co-Chair) is the K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies, co-lead of the K&L Gates Initiative in Ethics and Computational Technologies, Director of the Center for Ethics and Policy, and Chief Ethicist at the Block Center for Technology and Society at Carnegie Mellon University. An elected Fellow of the Hastings Center, Professor London’s work focuses on ethical and policy issues surrounding the development and deployment of novel technologies in medicine, biotechnology and artificial intelligence, on methodological issues in theoretical and practical ethics, and on cross-national issues of justice and fairness. His book, For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics, is available

from Oxford University Press and is also available as an open-access title. Professor London is a member of the World Health Organization Expert Group on Ethics and Governance of AI, a co-leader of the ethics core for the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING), a member of the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, and a member of the board of directors for Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research, and he has served on the board of the International Association of Bioethics and the American Society of Bioethics. From 2022 to 2023 he was a member of the U.S. National Academies’ Committee on Creating a Framework for Emerging Science, Technology, and Innovation in Health and Medicine, whose report titled Toward Equitable Innovation in Health and Medicine: A Framework, was published in 2023. From 2016 to 2017 he was part of the U.S. National Academies’ Committee on Clinical Trials During the 2014-15 Ebola Outbreak.

Valda Vinson (Co-Chair) is the Executive Editor for the Science journals. In this role she oversees research content strategy and editorial policy, at Science, Science Signaling, Science Translational Medicine, Science Immunology, and Science Robotics. She started her career in publishing when she joined the Science staff in 1999 as an Associate Editor handling research papers in the areas of structural biology, biochemistry, and biophysics. In 2013 she became Deputy Editor, overseeing research content in the areas of cellular and molecular biology and biomedicine, and in 2018 was appointed Editor, overseeing research content in the life sciences and social sciences at Science. She earned an M.Sc. in chemistry from the University of Natal, South Africa, in 1987 and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1992. Her postdoctoral studies were also undertaken at Johns Hopkins University, where she focused on structural and biochemical studies of cytoskeletal proteins. Before joining Science, she spent 2 years as a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

Simone Bianco is Vice President of Hybrid AI and Physics Based Modeling at the Altos Labs Institute of Computation. Prior to joining Altos he was a research staff member and manager of the Department of Functional Genomics and Cellular Engineering at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He is an expert in computer-driven design of biological systems. Dr. Bianco has contributed to the design of vaccines, antivirals, antimicrobials, and immunotherapies, and holds several patents in synthetic biology. He is founding Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation Center for Cellular Construction, which aims to transform cell biology into an engineering discipline. Dr. Bianco is a TED speaker with more than 1 million views, recipient of IBM’s Outstanding Research Achievement Award, and an honorary visiting lecturer for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, for his standing in the field of dynamical systems and commitment to education.

Sarah R. Carter is the Principal at Science Policy Consulting LLC where she focuses on societal and policy issues related to the bioeconomy, including government oversight and regulation, industry practices, responsible innovation, and biosecurity. In recent years, she has supported the Nuclear Threat Initiative on projects related to DNA synthesis screening and the implications of artificial intelligence (AI), including biological AI models, for biosecurity. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, where she works on issues related to the broader bioeconomy, including U.S. government policy for biotechnology and biomanufacturing and its intersections with environmental sustainability. Previously, she worked in the Policy Center of the J. Craig Venter Institute and at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is a former American Association for the Advancement of Science Science and Technology Policy Fellow and a former Mirzayan Fellow of the National Academies. She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, and her bachelor’s degree in biology from Duke University.

Héctor García Martín is a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Director for Data Science and Modeling at the Joint BioEnergy Institute Biofuels and Bioproducts Division. Dr. García Martín works at the intersection of machine learning, synthetic biology, and automation, trying to make biology as predictable as physics. His research has provided some of the first examples of the use of machine learning to guide synthetic biology, and has been featured in top media outlets such as NPR. Dr. García Martín obtained his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and his B.S. in physics from the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU). Dr. García Martín has previously been part of a National Academies’ Meeting of Experts for the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology.

Feilim Mac Gabhann is a tenured Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and a core faculty member of JHU’s Institute for Computational Medicine. He is also co-Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Computational Biology, a leading journal in the field, and aided in the development and adoption of the journal’s code availability policy to increase transparency and reproducibility. He has extensive experience in ethics education, including developing multiple interdisciplinary ethics courses, and leading annual sessions for Institute faculty and trainees on the subject of Ethics in Computational Medicine. He also serves on the Ethics Sub-Committee of the Biomedical Engineering Society and worked on the first major revision of the Society’s Code of Ethics since 2004. Dr. Mac Gabhann’s laboratory is in the area of computational systems pharmacology, using complex mechanistic computational simulations to test and optimize treatments for multiple human diseases including cancer, peripheral artery disease, endometriosis, and HIV. He has published more than 80 research papers and has served as Director of two Ph.D. programs. He received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from University College Dublin and his doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Jaspreet Pannu is Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University and Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. She was previously a medical specialist at Google, where she worked on artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled diagnostics. She now conducts research on technology and policy approaches for global health security, including at the intersection of AI and biology. She is a member of the Nuclear Threat Initiative Bio’s AIxBio Global Forum Working Group on Evaluations, Capability Horizon Scanning and Risk Assessment, as well as the Frontier Model Forum’s working group on AI-Bio Safety Evaluations. Dr. Pannu is a board-certified internal medicine physician and completed her M.D. and residency training at Stanford University with global health training at Mulago Hospital, Uganda.

Amina Ann Qutub is an Associate Professor at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), the Burzik Professor of Engineering Design, Assistant Director of Strategic Partnerships and research thrust lead of the MATRIX Artificial Intelligence Consortium, and Director of the UTSA–UT Health Joint Graduate Group in Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Qutub is pioneering methods at the interface of computer science, biology, and engineering to study the design of human cells, and to help eradicate diseases affecting cells of the brain and vasculature. She directs the Quantu Project, a nationwide study to optimize brain health over a lifespan using an integration of biosensing technology, AI, and experimental neurogenesis bioassays. Dr. Qutub also co-leads the iRemedyACT project to develop AI tools that can minimize time to treatment and optimize care for trauma patients. Dr. Qutub is an AIMBE Fellow, National Academies’ Keck Future Initiatives Awardee, The Health Cell Honoree, and National Science Foundation CAREER Awardee. Dr. Qutub received her B.S. in chemical engineering from Rice University and Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and San Franciso. She completed her postdoc at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Qutub is a member of the National Academies’ Standing Committee on Advances and National Security Implications of

Transdisciplinary Biotechnology and co-chaired the 2024 National Academies’ Artificial Intelligence and Automated Laboratories for Biotechnology: Leveraging Opportunities and Mitigating Risks and Transformative Science and Technology for Assessing and Strengthening Individual-to-Population Resilience Under Societal and Environmental Stress workshops. She also is a co-founder of a biotech startup PaloBio, Inc., and a frequent keynote speaker in precision health events including Health Cell State of the Industry and TEDx.

Richard Sever is Assistant Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and Co-Founder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv. Dr. Sever studied for his undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford, graduating with first class honors in biochemistry. He subsequently obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, researching signal transduction pathways at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Dr. Sever trained as a scientific editor, working first at Current Opinion in Cell Biology and then Trends in Biochemical Science. He later served as Executive Editor of Journal of Cell Science at The Company of Biologists, before joining Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2008. He launched the journals Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology and Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine, for which he serves as Executive Editor, and has also edited several books, including the textbook Signal Transduction and Career Alternatives for Biomedical Scientists. In 2013, Dr. Sever co-founded the preprint server bioRxiv, followed by medRxiv in 2013. The servers have become essential resources for biomedical researchers and played a critical role during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Sever is a widely acknowledged expert on scientific publishing and a frequently invited speaker at academic, industry, and government conferences. In 2022, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Cold Spring Harbor School of Biological Sciences in recognition of his work to promote scientific communication.