Kenneth held leadership roles at Genentech from 1994 to 2011. He led the medical and scientific strategies for its Immunology, Tissue Growth and Repair drug portfolio. He served in a number of key leadership positions in research and development, including Senior Vice President Clinical Development, Inflammation, Vice President Immunology, Tissue Growth and Repair (ITGR), Vice President Development Sciences and Vice President Research Operations and Pathology. He also served as Senior Vice President and Head of Clinical Development and Product Development Strategy in Asia-Pacific for Roche in Shanghai, China.
Kenneth has served on the board of directors of Achaogen, Inc., since 2011. He served as Achaogen’s Chief Executive Officer from 2011 until 2017, and as its Chief Medical Officer from 2011 to 2014. He has served on the board of directors of Zymeworks, since February 2017. He served on the board of directors of Relypsa from 2014 until 2016, when it was acquired by Galenica AG.
Kenneth has an M.B. Ch.B. (Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery) degree from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Glasgow, U.K. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (FRCS, Glasg), and a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists (FRCPath). Dr. Hillan has authored dozens of scientific publications and is a named inventor on almost 50 issued patents.
Jennifer has considerable drug development experience and has most recently worked as a consultant and advisor to biotech CEOs and investors on their drug development strategies. She has been the Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President of Research and Development at Loxo Oncology where she oversaw the clinical development of Vitrakvi (Trk inhibitor). Prior to that she was a Senior Group Director at Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, where she oversaw the Erivedge (hedgehog), Zelboraf (b-RAF), and Cotellic (mek) clinical development programs among many others.
She received her undergraduate degree from Caltech, her MD and PhD degrees from Georgetown, and completed her internal medicine residency at the University of California Davis, her medical oncology fellowship at the National Cancer Institute, and was a Senior Investigator at the Cancer Therapeutics Evaluation Program at NCI and an attending physician in breast cancer at the National Institutes of Health and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. She has co-authored papers appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Cancer Discovery, Journal of Clinical Oncology, and Nature Reviews Cancer.
Merrill began her career as a biostatistician in Genentech’s Product Development organization. She expanded her business expertise with leadership roles in both the company’s Commercial organization and Pipeline and Portfolio Planning. Merrill was also the Director of Business Operations within Genentech’s Research and Early Development (gRED) group.
Merrill received her Ph.D. in Biostatistics from UC Berkeley, and an M.P.H. in Epidemiology & Biostatistics, also from UC Berkeley. Her undergraduate studies were at the University of Maryland, College Park where she received a B.S. in Biology.
Most recently, Dr. Gentleman served as Senior Director of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at Genentech. Prior to this role, he was the head of the computational biology department at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Dr. Gentleman served as a professor at Harvard University, the University of Auckland, and the University of Waterloo.
He has been awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award, a recognition for Open Access in the Life Sciences presented by the Bioinformatics Organization and is a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).
Dr. Gentleman, along with Ross Ihaka at the University of Auckland, is also recognized as one of the originators of the R programming language, a widely-used programming language software environment for statistical computing and graphics. Dr. Gentleman was one of the founders of the Bioconductor Project.
Dr. Gentleman earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from The University of British Columbia and holds a Doctor of Philosophy, Ph.D., in Statistics from the University of Washington.
For 14 years Scheller was Executive Vice President and Head of Genentech Research and Early Development, and a member of both the Genentech and Roche executive committees. Prior to joining Genentech, Scheller was a professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University (1982-1994), and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the Stanford University School of Medicine from 1994 to 2001. Scheller has been an adjunct professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UC San Francisco since 2004. He is a member of the board of trustees at the California Institute of Technology.
Scheller’s research elucidating the molecular machinery and regulatory mechanisms that underlie the release of neurotransmitter earned him the 2013 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the 2010 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, and the 1997 US National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology.
Scheller is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Scheller holds a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology and a postdoctoral fellow in Molecular Neurobiology at Columbia University at the College of Physicians and Surgeons.