Jane Myles has focused on improving clinical trials and patient experience for more than 25 years. Her passion is driving innovation into the trial design and execution to get medicines to patients faster. Ms Myles switched from molecule focus to portfolio focus about 13 years ago, first focused on patient recruitment, then patient voice and input, then patient facing technology and its adoption. She can merge them all together in her current role as Chairperson for Curebase’s Strategic Advisory Board, building DCT technology and services to drive access and inclusion to trials.

Ms Myles is also a Program Director for the Decentralized Trials & Research Alliance (DTRA). She worked at Roche / Genentech for 17 years in many roles, including operational program manager for hematology ultimately working on driving patient-facing technology into global trials. In prior lives, she held various roles in DCT optimization at LabCorp and ran global trials at Lilly and Sanofi. She’s a Canuck who loves San Francisco and the ocean.

Trained as a neuroscientist, Rohit Nambisan is a product executive with experience leading product development organizations in pharma, medical devices, personalized medicine, health IT, healthcare data and analytics, and AI. Prior to co-founding and leading Lokavant, Mr Nambisan was most recently the Head of Digital Product at Roivant and the Head of Product at Prognos Health. Mr Nambisan holds an MS in Management and Engineering from MIT, an MA in Neuroscience from Boston University, and a BA in Cognitive Neuroscience from UC Berkeley.

Josh has more than 17 years of experience in software engineering, systems integration, and data science. He has spent the last 12 years in healthcare working to lower costs and improve patient outcomes. During that time, he has served in several senior leadership roles, leading technical strategy and implementation for remote patient monitoring, chronic care management, population health, revenue cycle, and automation initiatives. Josh is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology where he studied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Rita McGrath is a best-selling author, a sought-after advisor and speaker, and a longtime professor at Columbia Business School. Dr McGrath is one of the world’s top experts on strategy and innovation and is consistently ranked among the top 10 management thinkers in the world, including the #1 award for strategy by Thinkers50. Dr McGrath’s recent book on strategic inflection points is Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). She is the author of four other books, including the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).

Since the onset of the pandemic, she has created workshops, strategy sessions and keynotes, applying her tools and frameworks to strategy under high levels of uncertainty to specific issues organizations are facing. As Rui Barbas, the Chief Strategy Officer for Nestle USA said, “You were incredibly insightful and, despite the virtual setting, there was lots of engagement and comments from leaders sharing eye-opening observations and building on your examples throughout. You delivered the inspiration and illustration desired and it was exactly the right focus and challenge for this team. Appreciate your time throughout the process to align on content and delivery. The future-focus theme was the perfect close to our leadership summit.”

Dr McGrath’s work is focused on creating unique insights. She has also founded Valize a companion company dedicated to turning those insights into actionable capability. You can find out more about Valize at www.valize.com

Dr McGrath received her PhD from the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and has degrees with honors from Barnard College and the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. She is active on all the main social media platforms, such as Twitter @rgmcgrath. For more information, visit RitaMcGrath.com.

While Lucinda Orsini holds a professional medical degree, she has spent most of her ~20-year career in health economics and outcomes research. Dr Orsinis has worked in the pharmaceutical industry at Bristol-Myers Squibb and subsidiaries in Global HEOR focused on oncology and immunotherapy leading and publishing on patient reported outcomes, health economic modeling and real-world evidence studies – both prospective and retrospective in many different tumor types. Dr Orsini also worked on the team that launched nivolumab, one of the first marketed immuno-oncology treatments. After BMS, she led HEOR efforts at Parexel – a full-service contract research group, managing a team of ~30 modeling, biostatistics, and RWE scientists supporting HTA efforts for clients in the pharmaceutical space. Currently, Dr Orsini is Vice President for Value and Outcomes Research at COMPASS Pathways – a mental healthcare company dedicated to delivering evidence-based innovative treatment to people with serious mental illnesses. She is responsible for all the health economic and outcomes research efforts for the company.

Doug Palmer is devoted to innovating and translating novel immunotherapies to treat metastatic cancer. In his two decades at the NCI with Steve Rosenberg and Nick Restifo, Dr Palmer’s work helped to uncover the mechanisms of immune maturation, T cell-host interactions, cancer targeting, and T cell exhaustion. Dr Palmer was fortunate to translate this work into the clinic where he led one of the first CRISPR gene editing clinical trials in the US in neoantigen-specific TIL. Currently, as the Executive Director of Immuno-Oncology at AstraZeneca, Dr Palmer leads efforts to improve the clinical line of sight, drive back translation, and enhance data access and centricity.

With an eminent career spanning over two decades in the pharmaceutical industry, Rajesh Patel has been a driving force in the realm of Clinical Data Management (CDM) and Clinical Operations (ClinOPs). His expertise and leadership in these areas have been honed through significant roles at esteemed big and small pharmaceutical companies as well as Functional Service Provider (FSP) organizations. Demonstrating a keen understanding of drug development processes, Mr Patel has successfully led end-to-end CDM efforts, delivering high quality study outcomes while fostering strong partnership and adhering to regulatory standards.

As a visionary leader, Mr Patel has played a pivotal role in transforming CDM and ClinOps through pragmatic integration of innovative technologies and the establishment of global teams, global standards and processes and reporting for data management and relevant stakeholder groups. His expertise extends beyond the traditional boundaries with published research paper, patents showcasing his contributions in scientific knowledge. Throughout his career, Mr Patel has been lauded for his commitment to excellence, championing a collaborative work environment and inspiring others within the pharmaceutical drug development research community. His dedication to advancing the field and enhancing site and patient experiences continues in his current role as an implementation lead within the Technology and Innovation group at Gilead.

Maria Perkinson brings more than 20 years of experience delivering strategic transformation solutions. Ms Perkinson has led many large-scale global initiatives within the pharmaceutical industry. She has extensive experience applying process improvement, innovation, and change management methodologies to maximize the value of an integrated digitalization strategy and solution. Coupled with her ability to bridge disparate organizations and drive unified strategies and disciplines, Ms Perkinson brings critical value as digitalization and innovation continue to play an increasingly vital role in the pharmaceutical industry.

Jane Perlmutter, PhD, is a long-term survivor of multiple cancers and an active advocate. While her advocacy is largely rooted in her own experiences, it is also informed by her formal training in cognitive psychology and experimental methods (PhD), computer and information science (MS) and business (MBA), as well as her career experiences which included many years in academia, not-for-profit R&D, corporate senior management, and independent consulting.

During her early advocacy Dr Perlmutter was a peer counselor and board member for Y-ME, as well as a grant reviewer for ACS, DOD and PCORI. More recently she focuses much of her advocacy on clinical trials, ensuring that the patient voice is considered in selection of research questions and that trial protocols are sensitive to patient issues. She is especially interested in innovative trial designs that can speed new treatments to patients who need them. Dr Perlmutter serves on the steering committees and is lead advocate on the I-SPY2 and TAPUR trials, two groundbreaking Master Protocol trials. She has been an advocate on NCI’s Breast Steering Committee and CALGB’s Breast and Health Outcomes Committees and is currently on NCI’s Cancer Imaging Steering Committee and NCTN’s DSMB and Cancer Control Executive Committee.

Dr Perlmutter has also been involved in health advocacy beyond cancer and works with many government and not-for-profit groups. She is past-chair of the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute’s (PCORI) Patient Engagement Advisory Panel and a member of their Clinical Trials Advisory Committee. She is especially passionate about developing the next generation of advocates and fostering collaboration between advocates and researchers. She has developed and delivered training for many advocacy groups and been a long-term faculty member of the ASCO/AACR Methods in Clinical Research Workshop. In 2023, Dr Perlmutter was honored with AACR’s 2023 Distinguished Public Service Award for Exceptional Leadership in Cancer Advocacy as well as ASCO’s 2023 Patient Advocate Award.

Gus Perna, the visionary leader of ‘Operation Warp Speed,’ shares the principles of leadership, teamwork, strategic planning, secure operations, and supply chain mastery that helped his team orchestrate the largest, safest, and most rapid vaccine deployment effort in global history.

Before he was named to co-lead the U.S. government’s COVID-19 response in 2020 with Operation Warp Speed, General Gus Perna served as head of the U.S. Army Materiel Command where he managed redistribution of critical munitions to the Pacific and fixed the Army’s housing crisis. As Commander of the Philadelphia Defense Supply Center, he was responsible for the fighting force’s global supply chain.

One of the military’s most skilled and most senior logisticians, General Perna worked to build manufacturing capacity and the end-to-end supply chain needed to get vaccines distributed “at warp speed.” Leveraging public-private partnerships, he accelerated the operation beyond what anyone thought possible—all while the vaccines were still in development.

General Perna retired from the U.S. Army in August of 2021 after 38 years of distinguished service in which he was awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Distinguished Service Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters, Defense Superior Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster, Legion of Merit, and Bronze Star Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster. In 2021, the association of Business Executives for National Security honored him with the Eisenhower Award.

Sridevi Rajeeve is an Assistant attending physician with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York specializing in Multiple Myeloma and Cellular Therapeutics. Dr Rajeeve completed her Internal Medicine residency training and Hematology-Oncology fellowship training at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Dr Rajeeve’s clinical and research interests span across plasma cell dyscrasias (Multiple Myeloma, Precursor states – monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS)/smoldering multiple myeloma(SMM), Amyloidosis) and lymphoid malignancies, cellular therapeutics, clinical trials, digital health technologies and care delivery transformation. She is a grant funded researcher who aims to thoughtfully design clinical trials and make cancer care more accessible to people. She has been involved with patient education groups making educational videos to simplify complex cancer-related topics to patients and caregivers.

Dr Rajeeve is a bibliophile, adores open-air theater performances, travel and an active lifestyle.

Prasanna Rao is a distinguished AI practitioner and industry thought leader with over 30 years of experience in information technology and advanced analytics. Currently serving as the Senior Director, Global Head of AI/ML for Clinical Data Sciences at Pfizer, Mr Rao brings extensive expertise in healthcare and life sciences, spanning more than a decade. Previously as a Watson Solution Architect at IBM, he played a key role in implementing AI systems for various clients. With a strong focus on driving innovation and fostering AI adoption, he collaborates with stakeholders, including vendors, SMEs, developers, and data scientists. He has presented at prominent industry conferences such as SCDM, DIA, DPHARM, SCOPE, and Tufts University CSDD, establishing a reputation as a leading authority in leveraging disruptive technologies for clinical development in the pharma industry.