We are delighted to announce that Rob Chess, Mark Pegram and Michael Jewett have joined BigHat’s advisory board.

Rob Chess is a serial entrepreneur in the life sciences field and is currently the Chairman of Nektar Therapeutics, (NASDAQ:NKTR), as well as the Lead Director of Twist Biosciences (NASDAQ:TWST) and a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His previous experience includes Cofounder and President of Penederm (Acq. by Mylan Laboratories), start-up CEO and Chairman of OPX Biotechnologies (Acq. by Cargill), Co-founder and Chairman of Biota Technologies. Rob also served as a White House Fellow and Associate Director of the White House Office of Economic and Domestic Policy. In addition to his entrepreneurial endeavors and activities at the Stanford GSB, Rob is a trustee of Caltech and Chairman of the Caltech Board Technology Transfer Committee, and on the boards of Bio Ventures for Global Health. He previously served on the Biotechnology Industry Organization where he was the chairman of the Emerging Companies Section and co-chairman of the Intellectual Property Committee. Rob received a BS in engineering from Caltech and an MBA from Harvard.

Mark Pegram, MD, is the Suzy Yuan-Huey Hung Endowed Professor of Medical Oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He currently serves as the Associate Director of Clinical Research at the Stanford Comprehensive Cancer Institute (SCCI). He also serves as the Associate Dean for Clinical Research Quality at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and is the Medical Director of the Stanford Clinical Translational Research Unit – a unit specializing in first-in-human phase I clinical trials. Previously, he also served as the Co-Director of the Translational Oncology Research Program as well as the Director of the Breast Oncology Program at the Stanford Cancer Institute. He has authored more than 150 publications in medical oncology, hematology, and biosimilars across different cancer types. Dr. Pegram received his medical degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed his residency at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He concluded his training with a fellowship at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.

Michael Jewett is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Director of the Center for Synthetic Biology at Northwestern University. He is the recipient of the NIH Pathway to Independence Award, David and Lucille Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and a Camille-Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, among others. He is the co-founder of SwiftScale Biologics (Acq. by Resilience), Stemloop Inc., and Design Pharmaceuticals, among others, and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Tierra Biosciences. Dr. Jewett is a Fellow of AIMBE, and AAAS, and previously was a guest professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). Amongst his many honors, he was the 2018 Co-Chair of both the Genome Engineering for Materials Synthesis for DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research and Future Directions Workshop on Synthetic Biology for Energy/Power, for the Office of Secretary of Defense’s Basic Research Office in partnership with the UK Ministry of Defense. Dr. Jewett received his PhD in 2005 from Stanford University, completed postdoctoral studies at the Center for Microbial Biotechnology in Denmark and the Harvard University Medical School.

We are extremely delighted and honored to have such distinguished luminaries in the field on our advisory board and look forward to their guidance and experience in helping us advance our mission of developing next-generation therapeutics.