Seth Forster is passionate about making better medicines by inventing and developing new pharmaceutical products and drug delivery technology.

Seth has a BS in Chemical Engineering from Purdue, MS & PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Temple, and recently completed a MEng program in Polymer Science & Engineering from Lehigh. He has more than 19 years of experience in drug product development. He previously worked on the islatravir long-acting implant program and scale up of a tablet process for oral peptide delivery.

As a member of the Discovery Pharmaceutical Sciences group at Merck Research Laboratories at West Point, PA, he conducts early stage physical and chemical characterization of drug candidates, particularly for long-acting injectable (LAI) formulations.

Karthik is the CEO of Persist AI. A company that’s using AI x Robotics to accelerate drug formulation development. He previously received his PhD from the University of Utah, where his research focused on sustained drug delivery to the brain. Most recently he held an automation role at Zymergen, where he helped develop a modular and reconfigurable automation lab for synthetic biology. Persist AI is a venture backed company supported by YCombinator, Spero Ventures, 2048, Innospark.