Thomas C. Ransohoff, M.S
Thomas C. Ransohoff, M.S is currently Co-Head, Biologicals Franchise at National Resilience, Inc. (“Resilience”) and has over 30 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry. Mr. Ransohoff’s areas of expertise include development and scale-up of biopharmaceutical processes; separations and purification technologies; cGMP manufacturing; and management of technology-based start-up ventures. Before joining Resilience, Mr. Ransohoff was a Managing Director at BDO and its precursor BPTC, a leading CMC consulting firm that he helped build over a 20 year period. Prior to that, he held senior level positions at TranXenoGen, Dyax, Repligen, and Xoma. He is also a co-founder of several successful start-ups, including 4th Dimension Bioprocess, Tarpon Biosystems and BioFlash Partners. He serves on a number of scientific and professional advisory boards and holds a Bachelor’s degree from MIT and a Master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, both in Chemical Engineering.
Rod Rietze, Ph.D.
Dr. Rod Rietze is co-founder and CEO of iVexSol (intelligent Vector Solutions), Inc., a burgeoning viral vector manufacturer founded on a transformative technology that enables the production of stable lentiviral vectors at any scale. Prior to iVexSol, Rod was the Director of Strategic Development and Innovation at Novartis Cell and Gene Therapy (Cambridge, MA), where he supported the clinical development of a number of next-generation cell and gene therapies, including Kymriah™, the first FDA-approved CAR-T cell-based gene therapy.
Before joining Novartis, Rod led research and development teams of both small molecule and cell-based therapeutics at Pfizer Regenerative Medicine (Cambridge, UK) and TxCell SA (Sophia Antipolis, France). During his tenure in academia, Rod co-founded the 400-member Queensland Brain Institute (Brisbane, Australia), where his lab focused on harnessing the regenerative capacity of resident neural stem cells as a means to treat age-related cognitive decline. His work was featured on the front covers of Nature and Science, and received numerous awards including Science Magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year”.
With over two decades of technical, operational, and strategic leadership experience in the development of novel therapeutics, Rod remains passionate about discovering and delivering innovative technologies and medicines to transform the treatment of disease. He holds a BSc and MSc from the University of Calgary, Canada, and a Ph.D. from The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (University of Melbourne, Australia).
Bert Frohlich, Ph.D.
Bert Frohlich is a Ph.D. biochemical engineer with over 25 years of experience in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries; he has been consulting through his own company, Biopharm Designs LLC, for the last four years. Although most of his experience is in the biopharmaceutical CMC space, he served most recently as Vice President of Engineering and Commercialization at BlueNalu Inc., a startup company in the new cell-based meat area. Before becoming a consultant, he held director-level positions at Shire, Amgen, EMD, and Acambis (now Sanofi) and worked as a senior engineer at Genzyme, Biometics, and Roche in process/facility design, bioprocess development, and manufacturing technical services. Over the course of his career, Bert introduced a variety of products to manufacturing through the scale-up and tech transfer of cell culture and other processes. In addition to advising on strategic direction in process and manufacturing technology, he now also helps clients design and implement high-level business processes, including cost modeling and quality-by-design, towards improving work efficiency, costs, timelines, and product quality.
Rajeev J. Ram
Rajeev J. Ram has worked in the areas of physical optics and electronics for much of his career. In the early 1990’s, he developed the III‑V wafer bonding technology that led to record brightness light emitting devices at Hewlett-Packard Laboratory in Palo Alto. While at HP Labs, he worked on the first commercial deployment of surface emitting lasers. In the early 1990’s, he developed the first semiconductor laser without population inversion, semiconductor lasers that employ condensation of massive particles, and threshold-less lasers.
Since 1997, Ram has been on the Electrical Engineering faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He has served on the Defense Sciences Research Council advising DARPA on new areas for investment and served as a Program Director at the newly founded Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy. At ARPA‑e, he managed a research portfolio exceeding $100M and consulted with the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the White House.
His group at MIT has developed record energy-efficient photonics for microprocessor systems, microfluidic systems for the control of cellular metabolism, and the first light-source with greater than 100% electrical-to-optical conversion efficiency. His group’s work on small-scale solar thermoelectric generation is being deployed for rural electrification in the developing world as SolSource and was recognized with the St. Andrews Prize for Energy and the Environment.
Ram holds degrees in Applied Physics from California Institute of Technology and Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
