Dr. Kosaraju has spent her career building companies and driving innovation in infectious disease and computational biology. She was most recently Co-Founder & CEO of Variant Bio, a venture-backed company specializing in genomics and therapeutic development, and an executive with SIGA Technologies, an antiviral drug developer that successfully advanced antiviral drug candidates to market.

During her tenure, SIGA achieved FDA approval for a novel smallpox antiviral and worked in partnership with the CDC, BARDA and DoD to deliver 2 million courses to the US Strategic National Stockpile. Dr. Kosaraju was a White House appointee in the Pentagon, serving as the Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. In this capacity, she provided executive leadership in the management of a $50 billion Military Health System that included healthcare for military service members, biodefense, and international humanitarian assistance.

She received the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service, the highest non-career civilian honor given within the Department of Defense. She has been a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Materials Technical Advisory Committee for the Department of Commerce, co-founded the Alliance to End Biological Threats, and is a Lecturer at Stanford's Center for Biosecurity and Pandemic Resilience. She received her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and her B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford University.

Dr. Collins is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science, a Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, and a member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology faculty. He is also a core founding faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Between his three laboratories at MIT, the Wyss Institute, and the Broad Institute, he oversees the research of more than 30 postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. Collins’ numerous honors include a Rhodes Scholarship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and an NIH Director's Pioneer Award.

He is an elected member of all three national academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and the World Academy of Sciences. Dr. Collins earned an AB in Physics from the College of the Holy Cross and a PhD in Medical Engineering from the University of Oxford. He has decades of experience in antibiotic discovery and the application of machine learning techniques in biotechnology.

His work has led to important discoveries related to how antibiotics kill bacteria, including research showing that many common classes of antibiotics induce bacterial cell death via a common “oxidative damage” pathway; the paper describing this is the most highly-cited antibiotics study of the last decade.

Dr. Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University, and directs Phare’s computational and experimental work. He was previously a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Collins Lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He received his BHSc in 2011, graduating summa cum laude, and his PhD in Antimicrobial Chemical Biology in 2016, both from McMaster University.

His research applies a combination of chemical biology and machine learning to develop novel antibacterial therapies with expanded capabilities over conventional antibiotics. Amongst his numerous antibiotic projects, he recently led the study published in Cell that resulted in the identification of antibiotic Halicin, a first new antibiotic scaffold discovery in 20+ years. This study shows how a trained deep neural network can predict antibiotic activity in molecules that are structurally different from known antibiotics, among which Halicin exhibits efficacy against broad-spectrum bacterial infections in mice.

Stokes is the recipient of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Master’s Award, the Colin James Lyne Lock Doctoral Award, and was ranked first of just 23 elite postdoctoral scholars to be awarded the prestigious Banting Fellowship.