“I’m excited to be helping BenchSci scale and grow their team and technology platform. We’ve learned from the pandemic that it’s critical to invest in technology that helps speed up our scientists as they research and test new health innovations.”

Jean-Michel Lemieux has worked in tech for almost 30 years, building software and then building teams and companies. Educated at the University of Ottawa, he was a founding member on the Eclipse platform and open-source teams. He then led and grew the engineering organizations at Atlassian and Shopify and prepared both companies to scale and IPO. He is a published author, investor, and advisor and has a passion for community and education, co-founding Canadian Tech @ Scale which brings together tech leaders from across Canada, and DevDegree.ca, an accredited work-integrated computer science degree.

Richard Zemel is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he has been a faculty member since 2000. Before that, he was an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Psychology at the University of Arizona and a Postdoctoral Fellow at both the Salk Institute and Carnegie Mellon University. His research contributions include foundational work on systems that learn useful representations of data without any supervision, methods for learning to rank and recommend items, and machine learning systems for automatic captioning and answering questions regarding images. Zemel holds B.Sc. degrees in history and science from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Toronto. He is also a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and serves on the Executive Board of the Neural Information Processing Society, which organizes the premier international machine learning conference.

Milind Kamkolkar is the Chief Digital & Data Officer at Cellarity. There, he leads the implementation of machine learning science in a digital biology landscape to explore new clinical hypotheses that can alter cell behaviors. Milind joined Cellarity from Sanofi, where he was the first Enterprise Chief Data Officer in the pharmaceutical industry. His focus at Sanofi was transforming the organization from a data-generation organization into a data-driven organization to empower patients and increase Sanofi’s value to customers. He drew his approach from his tenure at Novartis, where he was the Global Head of Data Science and AI in Digital Medicines. Kamkolkar has served as a board advisor and mentor to numerous startups, founders, and VC firms focused on entering the life science space through digital, data, or AI. He holds a B.Sc. from the University of Sydney and an M.S. from Thomas Jefferson University.

“BenchSci plays an important role in curating and contextualizing healthcare data to increase productivity in the preclinical research process, and I look forward to supporting Liran and his team as they scale the business and team.”

Jessica Neal is a Venture Partner with TCV, working closely with the investment team and portfolio companies. TCV co-led BenchSci’s Series C $63 million funding round with Inovia Capital earlier this year. An experienced operational leader who has built teams and cultures at scale, Neal was most recently the Chief Talent Officer at Netflix. She spent over 11 years there, helping to scale the team and culture to pivot from shipping physical DVDs to streaming content globally. Previously, Neal was the Chief People Officer for Scopely and the Head of People for Coursera.