Description:

Reflections on the Intersection of Tech and Bio in Academia and Industry

Mark DePristo
CEO and Founder, Ember AI 
BA Northwestern (2000); PhD Cambridge (2004) 

Talk 11:00 AM-12:00 PM 
Networking Reception 12:00 PM-1:00 PM

Over the past 25 years, my work has sat at the intersection of computation and biology across academia, industry, and big tech. I’ll start with my undergrad AI work at Northwestern, then my PhD in protein structure prediction, and then move through my time at Harvard as an experimentalist studying protein evolution. 

From there, I’ll discuss my shift into next-generation sequencing and genome technology at the Broad, and then my move to Google, where I helped launch and grow the company’s biology efforts and became an early adopter of deep learning in the life sciences. That work ultimately led me to found BigHat Biosciences in 2019, raising more than $150M to build an AI-enabled protein design platform. Most recently, I’ve founded a deep tech venture studio focused on creating and scaling new companies at this same intersection of disciplines.

Throughout the talk, I’ll highlight how I’ve chosen problems to work on, the areas that have proven most impactful, and the key lessons learned along the way. We’ll close with an extended Q&A and open discussion.

Mark DePristo was the founding CEO of BigHat Biosciences from 2019 to 2025, a Bay Area startup developing safer, more effective antibody therapies for patients using machine learning and synthetic biology. Mark founded and led the Genomics team in Google Brain, was Vice President of Informatics at SynapDx, and co-director of Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute. He has a BA in Computer Science and Math from Northwestern University, a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, and was a Damon Runyon Fellow at Harvard University in evolutionary biology. Dr. DePristo's academic articles are widely published and have received over 149,000 citations.