Women in Biotech Summit

Welcome & Introduction

Dr. Robert S. Langer is one of 12 Institute Professors at MIT; being an Institute Professor is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member. Dr. Langer has written more than 1,500 articles. He also has over 1,400 issued and pending patents worldwide. Dr. Langer’s patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 400 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies. He is the most cited engineer in history. Dr. Langer has received over 220 major awards. He is one of only 3 living individuals to have received both the United States National Medal of Science (2006) and the United States National Medal of Technology and Innovation (2011). He received his Bachelor’s Degree from Cornell University and his Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in Chemical Engineering.

“Expanding the Repertoire of Druggable Targets”

Dr. Angela Koehler is Associate Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT and an Associate of the Broad Institute. Dr. Koehler is also on the faculty at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine. She received her BA in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Reed College and her PhD in Chemistry from Harvard University where she worked with Professor Stuart Schreiber to develop novel technologies for characterizing interactions between proteins and small molecules. Dr. Koehler was a Fellow at the Broad Institute and is a Project Leader in the NCI Cancer Target Discovery and Development (CTD2) Center targeting causal cancer genes with small molecules.

"Modeling human neurological disorders and targeting disease risk genes using stem cell derived 3D co-cultures"

Dr. Li-Huei Tsai is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Director of Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. She is also an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Dr. Tsai co-founded the Aging Brain Initiative at MIT and is co-director of the Alana Down Syndrome Center at MIT. Previously, she was on the faculty in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and was named an investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Tsai received her Ph.D degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and completed her postdoctoral work with Ed Harlow’s laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Women in Biotech

Speakers TBA

“Building Biogen’s Gene Therapy for Neuroscience”

In 2019, Dr. Junghae Suh joined Biogen as head of the Gene Therapy Accelerator Unit (GTxAU) to develop transformative gene therapies for the treatment of neurological diseases. Dr. Suh received her S.B. in Chemical Engineering from MIT in 1999 and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2004. She then completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. She is a tenured member of the faculty in the department of Bioengineering at Rice University. She was awarded the NSF CAREER Award and the Outstanding New Investigator Award from the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy for her innovative work on reprogramming viruses as therapeutic platforms. Her academic work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the American Heart Association. Most recently, she was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows.