Leadership Team - Health Technology Innovations, Inc.

Tuan Phamdo

Founder & CEO

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Tuan leads strategy and execution. He founded HTI after spending a successful 26-year career with Intel Corporation that culminated with an inspiring partnership with Oregon Health & Science University that resulted in the launch of the Cancer Cloud Collaborative initiative. He has solid expertise in program management, product marketing, and engineering management. He is a former member of the Oregon Engineering Technology Industry Consortium (ETIC) and holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Boston University.

Justin Kollman, PhD

Chair, Science & Technology Advisory Board

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Dr. Kollman is Chair of HTI’s Science & Technology Advisory Board and technical lead on cryo-EM services offerings. Dr. Kollman is currently Associate Professor, Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington. Justin holds a PhD in Biology from the University of California San Diego and completed a Postdoc in Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California San Francisco. He is currently a Director at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Cryo-EM center at the University of Washington where his lab focuses on the structural biology of complex self-assembling protein structures, including metabolic enzyme polymers and force-generating bacterial nanomachines. Dr. Kollman has made numerous contributions to the field of X-Ray Crystallography and Cryo-EM and has held many positions on national committees such as the Advisory Board of the Centre for Cellular Evolution at McGill University, User Review committee at the Pacific Northwest Center for Cryo-EM, User Review Committee at the National Center for CryoEM Access and Training, and Instructor of CryoEM at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories.

Jeff King, PhD

Chief Scientific Officer

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Dr. King is CEO and co-founder of Virogenomics BioDevelopment, Inc.(VBD) a biotechnology research and development company that collaborates extensively with scientists at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) that are developing technology with potential commercial applications. Prior to founding VBD Dr. King was Director of Bioinformatics and later COO and CEO of Virogenomics, Inc. At Virogenomics and VBD Dr. King has had collaborator or PI roles on over $17 M in non-dilutive SBIR and STTR awards for diagnostic and drug development projects. Dr. King was Senior Manager of Lead Validation at Rosetta Inpharmatics (acquired by Merck in 2001) and was Manager of Compound Profiling at Acacia Biosciences. Dr. King received a B.S. degree in engineering physics from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. degree in biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to working in the biotechnology industry, he was an Assistant Research Molecular Biologist at the University of California, San Francisco and a Human Frontier Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Kennedy Brown

VP Marketing & Business Development

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Kennedy heads HTI’s marketing, partnering, and business development efforts. He has over 27 years of product management, marketing, go-to-market, and sales leadership roles in the computer, healthcare & life sciences, and other industries. He recently led HTI’s cryo-EM services offering strategy, marketing, and business development. He also led HTI’s branding and communications, commercialization strategy, and partner engagements for the company and for CryoDiscovery(tm), its AI/ML-based software for cryo-EM automation receiving National Science Foundation (NSF) Phase I and II SBIR awards. Previously, Kennedy was President of an AI solution provider startup company that developed custom AI/ML solutions for Enterprise companies in the Health and Life Sciences, Retail, and Manufacturing industries. He spent years with Fortune 100 computer industry leader Intel Corporation where he led global Xeon EX server product line management & marketing, competitive and performance marketing, and go-to-market / business development for Data Center / Cloud / Big Data Analytics / IoT in its two largest sales regions, the Americas and EMEA. Kennedy holds an MS in Industrial & Management Systems Engineering from Arizona State University and a BS in Industrial & Systems Engineering from San Jose State University.

Narasimha Kumar

VP Research & Development

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Kumar leads cryo-EM image processing algorithm and product development with experience in machine learning frameworks, methodologies and workflows. He is the Principal Investigator for HTI’s CryoDiscovery(tm) grant awards, including NSF Phase 1 STTR and Oregon Innovation Council Awards. Kumar held numerous technical leadership positions during 36 years at Intel Corporation, including software and system developer, systems architect, and senior project manager. He developed real-time operating systems, wireless video streaming, using video compression algorithms and real-time wireless packet video transmission. The wireless streaming protocol, called Miracast, has been adopted in the computer industry and built into an OS. Kumar holds degrees in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and computer science from the University of Texas at Arlington.

Shiva Aditham

VP Operations

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Shiva leads all operations and finance execution. An expert systems architect and integration specialist, with more than 25 years of experience in the computer industry, including Intel Corporation. His experience includes hardware and software development, engineering management and new technologies enabler (InfiniBand, PCI Express). Shiva also is a technical editor and contributor to multiple technical standards organizations and has defined and delivered compliance and interoperability methodologies. As a successful entrepreneur he founded the technology company Roseport Technologies, LLC and is currently launching and guiding other start-ups. He holds a masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Andhra University, Waltair, India.

Joe Gray, PhD

Senior Advisor

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As a physicist and engineer by training, Dr. Gray is currently a faculty leader at Oregon Health & Science University as the Gordon Moore Endowed Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Director of OHSU Center for Spatial Systems Biomedicine (OCSSB), and Associate Director for Biophysical Oncology at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute. He is also Emeritus Professor, University of California San Francisco; and Senior Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he was previously Professor of Laboratory Medicine. For nearly 20 years, Joe was a Staff Scientist in the Biomedical Sciences Division of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He is the principal investigator of the National Cancer Institute/Integrative Cancer Biology Program Center for Cancer Systems Biology aimed at understanding and modeling of RTK signaling. The Gray Laboratory at OHSU explores mechanisms by which genomic, transcriptional and proteomic abnormalities occur in selected cancers, elucidates how these abnormalities contribute to cancer pathophysiologies and assesses the ways in which these abnormalities influence responses to gene targeted therapies. His work is described in more than 400 publications and in 73 US patents. Joe received his undergraduate degree in physics from the Colorado School of Mines and doctorate degree in physics from Kansas State University.

Leah Frye, PhD

Senior Advisor

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Dr. Frye has 40 years of experience in drug discovery with an emphasis on medicinal and computational chemistry. Currently, she is the sole owner of LLFrye Consulting. In 2001, she co-founded the therapeutics group at Schrödinger. She led the group for 18 years and rose to the level of Vice President before returning to a focus on science as a senior drug designer and scientific advisor for the team. Under Dr Frye’s leadership, the Schrödinger Therapeutics Group worked with collaborators to put numerous compounds into clinical trials resulting in 2 FDA approved drugs to date. Recently, Schrödinger has developed its own internal drug discovery pipeline and currently has 2 compounds into clinical trials. Dr. Frye left Schrödinger in 2023 to form LLFrye Consulting. Prior to Schrödinger, she was a Principal Scientist at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals and before that she was an Associate Professor of Chemistry with tenure at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Dr. Frye holds a Ph.D. in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from The Johns Hopkins University and a B.S. Professional degree in Chemistry from the University of Idaho. She was an Individual Research Service Award postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Frye is an inventor on 20 issued US patents plus a number of recent patent applications.

Gabriella Kiss, PhD

Senior Advisor

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Dr Kiss is currently the Director of Global Strategic Account at Refeyn, Inc., where she is overseeing business with large pharma and biotech companies globally as well as driving regulatory activities. Previously, she was responsible for strategic planning and setting up all aspects of pre- and post-sale activities in North America (US and Canada) for Refeyn. Prior to Refeyn, Dr. Kiss was the Product Marketing Manager at Thermo Fisher Scientific where she developed global go-to-market strategy for products in the Single Particle Analysis. She was also the Technical Consultant and Business Development for Life Sciences for the Americas. Dr. Kiss received a BSc and MSc Biotechnology, Molecular biology, and Microbiology from University of Szeged (Szeged, Hungary). Dr. Kiss was a Postdoctoral fellow in Structural Virology at Emory University in Atlanta using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET). She was involved in technology development with electron microscopy companies testing cutting edge technologies like Phase Plate and cryo-tomography. Dr. Kiss received a PhD in Molecular Virology from University of Reading (Reading, UK). Dr. Kiss has multiple Peer Reviewed Publications from her academic work.

Craig Yoshioka, PhD

Senior Advisor Cryo-EM

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Dr. Yoshioka is Co-Director of the Pacific Northwest Cryo-EM Center (PNCC), one of three national cryo-EM centers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and jointly operated by Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon. He is also a Research Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering in OHSU’s School of Medicine. Dr. Yoshioka has deep expertise in cryo-EM and has made significant contributions to the field by helping to understand the molecular and mechanical basis behind the function of several crucial biological systems, and developing or improving novel tools for cryo-EM researchers and industry partners through software engineering, image processing, and computer vision. His published work has been cited over 3,700 times. Dr. Yoshioka was Co-Principal Investigator (PI) on HTI’s National Science Foundation (NSF) STTR Phase I Award for CryoDiscovery(tm): An integrated Cryo-EM Intelligence Solution applying machine learning to the cryo-EM image processing workflow, and he previously led computing infrastructure as a scientist with a leading cryo-EM services provider where he was PI for an SBIR Phase I Award prototyping new data acquisition software to improve Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) imaging throughput and reduce costs. Dr. Yoshioka received a B.S. degree in Biochemistry from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

Santi Adavani, PhD

Senior Advisor

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Dr. Adavani is an accomplished technology leader with a demonstrated history of driving innovation and delivering impactful software products. He currently serves as the Founding Member and Head of Product at PostgresML, where he leads the development of the company’s cloud-based AI Database as a Service platform. Prior to this role, Dr. Adavani was the Founder and CTO of RocketML, where he was instrumental in driving the company’s success. He spearheaded the development of high-performance computing (HPC) MLOps products and services that specialized in solving data science problems in a variety of industries, including energy, precision medicine, financial services, and healthcare. Prior to his role at RocketML, Dr. Adavani served as Head of Defect Metrology Software Products where he led engineers in the design, development, and deployment of yield enhancement software products. He played a key role in the early detection of design-related defects, resulting in a $1 billion/year savings. In addition to his extensive industry experience, Dr. Adavani has published several papers on reputable journals like SIAM journal of Scientific Computing and has spoken at premium conferences like O’Reilly in the fields of machine learning, data science, and software engineering. Dr. Adavani has a Ph.D. in Computational Sciences and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology.