About Wilson
Over 9 years of research experience in rational enzyme design and genomic mining of novel enzyme functions. Wilson received his B.S. in biochemistry from Brigham Young University Hawaii in 2012 before going on to obtain his PhD degree in bio-organic chemistry at UC Davis in 2017. Prior to his founding of Digestiva in 2018, Wilson was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis where he developed the foundational technologies that are used today in Digestiva. During his research career, he had successfully developed innovative solutions to rapidly identify target enzyme activities for various biotechnological applications, resulting in multiple patent applications and publications in high-profile journals.
About Justin
Dr. Siegel is an Associate Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry & Molecular Medicine, at UC Davis in the Genome Center. He received his B.S. in Biochemistry from UC Davis in 2005 and his Ph.D. in Biomolecular Structure and Design from the University of Washington in 2011, after which he returned to UC Davis to begin his research lab. His scientific focus in the design and discovery of enzymes of interest to modern society.
Through strong industrial and cross-disciplinary collaborations Dr. Siegel has engineered enzymes for a wide range of applications, from treating human diseases such as Celiac Disease to the development catalysts for the productions of fuels and chemicals. In recent years Dr. Siegel has begun to explore in greater depth the application of enzymes within the food systems to promote health and sustainability. Dr. Siegel has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.
Beyond academic science, Dr. Siegel is deeply engaged with the translation of research. He is the founder of four companies (with more on the way), is the Director of Business Development for the Rosetta Commons (Rosetta Commons is the central hub for over 150 developers from 23 universities and laboratories to contribute and share the Rosetta source code, a predictive protein modeling software suite), and is the Faculty Director of the Innovation Institute for Food and Health (IIFH) at UC Davis. As the Faculty Director of the IIFH he has led efforts getting the institute off the ground to build a platform to accelerate the innovation cycle and facilitates deployment of products or processes that enable safe, sustainable, and secure nutrition for all.
About Bruce
Dr. German is a Professor of Food Science and Technology at the UC Davis Robert Mondavi Institute where he is the John E. Kinsella Endowed Chair in Food, Nutrition and Health. Dr. German also previously served as senior scientific advisor at the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. Dr. German’s laboratory group focuses on research seeking to understand how to improve foods and their ability to deliver better health.
About Glenn
Dr. Nedwin has more than 30 years experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. He has held industry-influencing scientific and corporate management positions, most notably as President of Novozymes, Inc. and Executive Vice President of the Genencor Division of Danisco (recently acquired by DuPont). At Genencor, he was responsible for the $330M+ Technical Enzyme Business Unit and was a member of the Danisco Leadership Forum. While with Genentech, Dr. Nedwin was a co-inventor and key team member that discovered TNF-alpha and -beta, among other human cytokines.
Dr. Nedwin brings to Digestiva substantial domestic and international experience with start-up, growth, and global organizations in the areas of new market identification, innovation, R&D, P&L, sales, and marketing.
About Carl
Carl Schramm is a professor economist and entrepreneur. Schramm is a University Professor at Syracuse University and the former President and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation.
Recognized internationally as a leading authority on innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth, Schramm was appointed as chairperson of the Department of Commerce's Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economic Advisory Committee, in 2007.
Before joining the Foundation in 2002, Schramm enjoyed a successful career in the healthcare industry. He was a co-founder of HCIA, Inc. and Patient Choice Health Care, and he founded Greenspring Advisors, a consulting and merchant banking firm in the health information and risk management industries. Schramm also served as executive vice president of Fortis (now Assurant) and as president of its health insurance operations. While there, he developed several innovations, including transition coverage for recent college graduates.
Trained both as an economist and lawyer, Schramm began his career on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and emerged as a respected thinker in healthcare finance, regulation, and insurance. He founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Care Finance and Management in 1980, the first such research center in the nation. While at Hopkins, he led the country's only post-doctoral training program in health finance, sponsored by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In 1987, he chaired the American Assembly on Health Care Costs and edited its volume, Health Care, and Its Costs. He left Johns Hopkins to head the Health Insurance Association of America, which developed a number of industry-wide innovations in health insurance.
Besides many leading academic journals, Schramm's work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Newsweek. He is a contributing editor of Inc. magazine. Schramm's books, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, with Robert Litan and William Baumol (Yale University Press, 2007) and The Entrepreneurial Imperative (HarperCollins, 2006),Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do are regarded as emerging classics, providing new insight into the American and international economies.
In addition to his graduate fellowships (New York State Regents and Ford Foundation), Schramm received two consecutive NIH Career Scientist Awards and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine. He is a Batten Fellow at the Darden School of the University of Virginia, a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He received the George Eastman Medal from the University of Rochester in 2005.
About Howard
Howard-Yana Shapiro has been involved with sustainable agricultural and agroforestry systems, plant breeding, molecular biology, and genetics for over 40 years. He has worked with indigenous communities, NGO’s, governmental agencies and the private sector around the world. He is a Senior Fellow at UC Davis, College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, involving graduate student and post-doctoral students exclusively. A former Fulbright Scholar, Ford Foundation Fellow, in 2007, Howard was made a Distinguished Fellow of the World Agroforestry Centre and authored the IAASTD chapter on Biotechnology and Biodiversity. He was a member of the National Research Council Committee on Citrus and Greening, a founding member of the Keystone Roundtable on Sustainable Agriculture, co-chair of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd World Congress of Agroforestry and is Chairperson of the External Advisory Board of the Agriculture Sustainability Institute at UC Davis. In 2009, he was named recipient of The Award of Distinction from The College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, UC Davis.
Howard led the global effort sequencing, assembling, and annotating the Theobroma cacao genome, and initiated the Arachis genome. He founded the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC) and the African Plant Breeding Academy (AfPBA) in 2011. The effort will sequence, assemble, and annotate 101 key food cultivars, which are the backbone of African nutrition. Additionally, the AfPBA will train 150 African scientists in modern breeding technology for discovery and translation of new nutritionally improved varieties. Currently there are 80 crop breeding programs in process with 47 genomes complete.
In October of 2017, Howard launched the Foldit Aflatoxin Puzzle with 460,000 gamers to redesign and improve enzymes to degrade the aflatoxin. He has been interviewed and published extensively in print, on the radio and television including the BBC, New York Times, Financial Times, NPR, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal to name just a few.