Mike Shirazi

General Partner

Pursuit Ventures

John Almasan

Senior Managing Director, Head of AI & Emerging Tech

TIAA

Dr. John Almasan is an accomplished technology executive with over 20 years of experience leading global tech teams and building large-scale data, AI, and cloud platforms for prominent companies such as TIAA, McKinsey & Co., American Express, Bank of America, and Nationwide Insurance. With deep expertise in multi-cloud big data engineering, machine learning, and data science, John is a hands-on practitioner and passionate about enabling the acceleration of AI adoption.

As an adjunct professor at various universities and a member of Arizona State University's Executive Board of Advisors, John is committed to preparing the next generation to meet the future's skillset needs and demands. He focuses on employee cross-training and actively engages in teaching and mentoring students in the field.

John holds two master's degrees in Engineering and Statistics, a Doctor of Business Administration, and has over 20+ patents credited to his name. He has received several awards throughout his career for his contributions to the technology industry.

Peter Clark

Head of Computational Science & Engineering

Janssen R&D

Peter Clark, PhD is the Head of Computational Science & Engineering within the Therapeutics Discovery (TD) organization of Janssen R&D, where he leads a dynamic, interdisciplinary team of scientists focused on accelerating the research and development of protein based therapeutics through the design and implementation of disruptive computational approaches and platforms. Prior to joining Johnson & Johnson, Peter served as the Director of Bioinformatics at the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine, where he worked closely with academic and commercial collaborators on the design, optimization, and evaluation of various gene therapy platform technologies from early research and development through commercially partnered IND enabling clinical studies. Peter is also a clinically trained molecular pathologist (The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) with extensive experience in the design, validation, and implementation of diagnostic and prognostic next generation sequencing (NGS) assays within a clinical, CAP/CLIA certified laboratory setting. During his clinical molecular pathology fellowship at CHOP, Peter co-developed and commercialized the first to market, high resolution, next generation sequencing based HLA genotyping assay and was subsequently awarded the Scholar of the Year award by the American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics (ASHI) in 2015 for his contributions to the field of solid organ and bone marrow transplantation. Peter earned his B.Sc. and Ph.D. from Drexel University, School of Biomedical Engineering prior to completing a postdoctoral fellowship at The Center for Computational Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University.  Peter’s diverse expertise in computational science, engineering, clinical molecular genetics, computational biology, and translational research has led to the publication of over 30 peer-reviewed scientific publications as well as two book chapters, several issued patents and three biotechnology spin-off companies.