Hepregen

Sangeeta Bhatia, M.D., Ph.D., Chair, SAB
Dr. Bhatia is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Bhatia is also an associate member of the Broad Institute, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and a biomedical engineer at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in the Division of Medicine. She is a recipient of the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship and the Global Indus Technovator Award. She is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is the co-author of the first undergraduate tissue engineering textbook. The research in her laboratory is focused on the applications of micro- and nanotechnology for tissue repair and regeneration. She received her Sc. B in biomedical engineering from Brown University, her M.D. from Harvard Medical School, her M.S. in mechanical engineering and her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Neil Kaplowitz, M.D.
Dr. Kaplowitz is the director of the USC NIDDK-sponsored Research Center for Liver Diseases. He holds two endowed chairs, the Brem Professor of Medicine and the Budnick Chair in Liver Diseases, and is chief of the division of Gastrointestinal and Liver Diseases. He is also professor of Physiology & Biophysics and Pharmacology & Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Keck USC School of Medicine. He was a faculty member at UCLA for 15 years, rising to the rank of full professor and then moved to USC in 1990 as program director. Dr. Kaplowitz has received a number of important honors and distinctions including election to membership in the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. He is recipient of the Western Gastroenterology Research Prize, the William S. Middleton Award, the Solomon A. Berson Medical Alumni Achievement Award in Clinical Science from his alma mater, the Merit Award from the National Institutes of Health, the Mayo Soley Award from WSCI, the AASLD Distinguished Achievement Award, and the ALF Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award. Dr. Kaplowitz has made pioneering contributions that have helped to elucidate the molecular events that lead to the elimination of drugs and toxic chemicals by the liver, the role of the liver in defense, the regulation of life and death of liver cells and the importance of free radicals and the toxicity of the metabolites of oxygen in the pathogenesis of liver disease. In recent years he has focused on the role of signal transduction, ER and mitochondrial stress in the pathogenesis of liver injury. He has published more than 175 peer-reviewed, scientific articles, 120 scholarly reviews and has edited nine books related to liver diseases. Dr. Kaplowitz attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, New York University's University College and School of Medicine where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha.
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Thomas A. Baillie, Ph.D., D.Sc.
Dr. Baillie is dean of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. Dr. Baillie was most recently at Merck Research Laboratories in West Point, PA, where he was global vice president of Drug Metabolism & Pharmacokinetics until 2008. Before joining Merck in 1994, Dr. Baillie was in academia starting with postdoctoral research at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden (1973-75), Dr. Baillie held successive faculty positions at the University of London (1975-78), University of California San Francisco (1978-81), and University of Washington (1981-94). Dr. Baillie’s research interests center on the application of mass spectrometry and allied techniques to mechanistic studies on the metabolism of foreign compounds, with particular emphasis on the generation of chemically-reactive, potentially toxic products of biotransformation. He has co-authored some 250 publications, serves on the Advisory Boards of a number of journals and academic research centers, and acts as a consultant to several companies in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. He was awarded a Fogarty Senior International Fellowship from the NIH in 1988, and is the recipient of the James R. Gillette Award from the American Society for Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics (2001). Dr. Baillie was born in Scotland and educated at the University of Glasgow, where he earned B.Sc. (Hons) and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry in 1970 and 1973, respectively. He also holds an M.Sc. degree in biochemistry from the University of London (1978) and was awarded the degree of D.Sc. in chemistry from the University of Glasgow in 1992.
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Salman Khetani, Ph.D.
Dr. Khetani is a co-founder of Hepregen and is currently an assistant professor of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at Colorado State University. Dr. Khetani has over 11 years of experience studying and engineering in vitro models of animal and human liver tissues using novel microfabrication technologies and is the co-inventor of Hepregen’s human liver platform. Dr. Khetani received his B.S. degrees, summa cum laude, in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering from Marquette University in 2000, and M.S. and Ph.D degrees in bioengineering from the University of California at San Diego in 2002 and 2006, respectively. He was a Jacobs Fellow at UCSD (2000-2001) and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow (2001-2004). From 2006 to 2008, Dr. Khetani was a postdoctoral associate in the laboratory of Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia, professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and a world-renowned leader in multi-scale liver tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Dr. Khetani's research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Toxicological Sciences, Hepatology, Tissue Engineering, FASEB Journal, Nature Biotechnology, Drug Metabolism and Disposition and recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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