THE
Team
We are a highly multidisciplinary team of biologists, data scientists, engineers and MBAs, passionate about transforming and accelerating infectious disease diagnostics – from days down to minutes.
Kwangmin Son, PhD
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Kwangmin trained as an engineer working at the interface of mechanical and biological engineering at MIT, where he earned his PhD before becoming an entrepreneur. Kwangmin brings strong expertise in combining microbial imaging and microfluidics, and he has been leading PhAST’s business, financing and corporate development strategies. He aspires to contribute to fight the spread of antibiotic resistance through PhAST’s AI diagnostic technology.
Roman Stocker, PhD, Prof. ETH
Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer
Roman pioneered single-cell imaging approaches to study microorganisms. A professor of engineering at ETH Zurich, formerly on the faculty at MIT, Roman published over 110 papers, including more than 25 in Nature, Science and PNAS, on computer vision applied to bacteria, the quantification of microbial phenotypes from single-cell imaging, and innovative microfluidic technology for microbiology. His work has been recognized by numerous major awards, including an NSF CAREER award and an Investigator award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Roman’s vision is that creative diagnostic technology will be a major asset in our fight against antibiotic resistance, in developed and developing countries alike.
Team
Sankha (Bobby) Basu, MD, PhD
Chief Medical Officer
Vicente Fernandez, PhD
Vice President of Data Science
Yongkyu Kim, MS
Head of Asia Operations
William Shubert
Head of Software
John (JT) Sauls, PhD
Head of Engineering
Steven Smriga, PhD
Senior Scientist
JongBae Kim, PhD
Head of Clinical Microbiology - Asia
Andrew Anctil, MS
Data Scientist I
Jordan Bell, PhD
Product Development Engineer
Jack Furci
Software Engineer I
Sandro Giacomuzzi, MS
Senior Machine Learning Specialist
Selena Hansen
Research Associate II
Giulio Imbalzano, PhD
Data Scientist
Honggu Jung
Assistant Lab Supervisor
Dohyun Kim
Research Associate III
Hanjae Kim
Assay Development Engineer
Yangsook (Kimy) Kim, MS
Finance and Operations Lead
Seongwoo Kwon, MS
Research Associate III
Jeonggil Lee, MS
Research Associate II
Pietro Marino, PhD
Technical Project Manager
Lucia Marinozzi, MS
Data Scientist
Alexandra (Ali) McCully, PhD
Scientist I - Microbiology
Francesca Murabito, PhD
Data Scientist
Reed Passaretti
Software Engineer I
Ariana Paulo, MS
Research Associate - Microbiology
Matthew Phibbs, MS
Research Associate II - Microbiology
Francesca Riva, MS
Junior Data Scientist
Eunju Shim
Research Associate II
Federico van Swaaij, MS
Data scientist
Taesung Yang
Research Associate I
Rahhul Abbavaram
Software CO-OP
Jaren Adams
Software CO-OP
Advisors
Robin Patel, MD, PhD
Scientific Advisor
Dr. Patel is the Director of the Infectious Diseases Research Laboratory and the Chair of the Division of Clinical Microbiology at the Mayo Clinic. She is also the President of the American Society for Microbiology. Dr. Patel’s focus areas include diagnostic assays in clinical bacteriology, biofilm-mediated infections, novel antimicrobial agents for therapy of bacterial infections and the clinical detection and identification of bacteria and their antimicrobial resistance and susceptibility.
Sanjat Kanjilal, MD, MPH
Scientific Advisor
Dr. Kanjilal is the Associate Medical Director of Clinical Microbiology and an infectious diseases physician at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and a Lecturer in the Department of Population Medicine at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. Dr. Kanjilal’s expertise centers on improving diagnostics for bacterial infection, understanding the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance, and developing antimicrobial stewardship interventions to prevent antibiotic resistance infections.
Daniel Schoener, PhD
Scientific Advisor
Dr. Schoener has over 14 years experience in diagnostic product development leadership including roles as Director at Roche Diagnostics US and as Senior Director at PerkinElmer. At Roche, he contributed to several products, including the cobas 6800/8800 nucleic acid testing system. Dr. Schoener works as an innovation consultant and is a member of several Accelerator programs in New England, where he supports start-ups with technology strategy, product realization, and clinical study design.
Adrian Egli, MD, MPH
Clinical Advisor
Prof. Adrian Egli is Head of Clinical Microbiology at the University Hospital Basel. Prof.Egli brings broad expertise on antibiotic resistance and host-pathogen interactions, and has extensive expertise in novel diagnostic assays for rapid identification and antibiotic resistance analysis of pathogens.
Andreas Krause, PhD
AI/ML Advisor
Andreas Krause is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where he leads the Learning & Adaptive Systems Group. He also serves as Academic Co-Director of the Swiss Data Science Center and Chair of the ETH AI Center, and co-founded the ETH spin-off LatticeFlow.
Prof. Andreas Krause brings extraordinary expertise in machine learning and is a crucial advisor for the development of PhAST’s cutting-edge AI technology.
Kyoung-ho Song, MD, PhD
Clinical Advisor
Prof. Song currently serves as the Professor at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital (SNUBH) and Seoul National University College of Medicine. He has been working as an infectious diseases specialist more than ten years in the hospital, and has also participated the hospital infection control team and antimicrobial stewardship program (ASP) in SNUBH.
Jeongsu Park, MD, PhD
Clinical Advisor
Prof. Park currently serves as Associate Professor and the Chief of Department of Laboratory Medicine at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital (SNUBH). He is an active member of the Korean Society of Laboratory Medicine and the Korean Society of Clinical Microbiology.
Collaborating Institutions
