With a rare combination of deep scientific knowledge and engineering expertise, Dr. Elvis Wianda is BenchSci’s chief data officer, responsible for creating, managing, and evolving BenchSci’s data pipelines.

Elvis was a Ph.D. student when he met his fellow co-founders at the University of Toronto, and once he heard the scope and magnitude of the problem they were trying to solve, he was hooked. As a co-founder, he designed and developed the architecture for collecting the vast amount of training data that powers our machine learning models.

He currently leads a team of engineers in building even more robust data pipelines to accurately and efficiently retrieve information on biomedical concepts from various data sources, including academic publications and patent data.

Brian obtained his BS in biology from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Before joining BenchSci at the beginning of 2020, he was Senior Director of Imaging Solutions at E-Research Technology supporting global clinical Phase 1- IV studies. Prior to that, he held numerous leadership and sales roles. Brian was a high-performing District Sales Manager and Sr. Executive Sales Representative while at Eli Lilly where he earned the distinguished honor of being named to President’s Council.

As VP of the Key Accounts team at BenchSci, Brian works with cross-functional partners to support key strategic customer accounts. He manages the direct, face-to-face relationships with pharmaceutical executives and their teams while acting as quarterback for internal teams to ensure we are able to deliver on our promise to accelerate life-saving research and bring novel medicines to patients, faster.

Since earning his MBA from the Dauch College of Business, Ashland University, and BSc from the University of Akron, Chad has enjoyed a successful career spanning over 15 years. In that time, he has been acknowledged as a sales professional and leader, helping healthcare, IT, and clinical trial software companies achieve their commercial goals. As an accomplished Sales Executive and National Account Leader at GE Healthcare, Chad was recognized as the #1 sales executive in back-to-back years and received the Commercial Hero Award, a global designation provided by the CEO.

As VP of Sales at BenchSci, Chad is responsible for shaping, training, and leading the sales team to achieve exponential commercial business goals. Chad guides his team to build strategic relationships with global pharmaceutical accounts, confirming BenchSci as an innovation partner.

As SVP of Product and Science, Casandra has been instrumental in developing BenchSci’s product vision to accelerate preclinical drug discovery by empowering scientists in leading research laboratories with cutting-edge deep learning technology.

Having experienced the frustrating research challenges preclinical scientists face while doing her Ph.D. research in virology at the University of Toronto, she joined BenchSci in 2017 as a scientific associate.

Casandra leads BenchSci’s Science and Product teams focused on helping research scientists perform more successful experiments to accelerate the pace of therapeutic discoveries. Working closely with leadership and scientists across top pharmaceutical companies, Casandra translates organizational research challenges into impactful solutions through new data initiatives and the expansion of platform applications.

Casandra is equally passionate about diversity in STEM, acting as a mentor and empowering women leaders in tech as the executive sponsor of BenchSci’s first ERG, BenchShe+.

Bryn has a BComm from Rotman Commerce at the University of Toronto and holds the CPA, CMA designation. Working at BenchSci since 2018, Bryn has built out the financial reporting and forecasting practice in addition to providing financial visibility around key opportunities and ensuring BenchSci has the capital to scale rapidly.

Before joining BenchSci, Bryn spent three years at Wave, where he supported the company’s rapid growth through multiple equity funding rounds, built robust forecasting processes, developed reporting and control systems for complex financial products, and led external financial statement audits.

Prior to that, Bryn was at Anthem Entertainment, where he worked on over $100M transactions as part of the Acquisitions department and launched Anthem Digital, spearheading Anthem’s reach in acquiring digital IP and closing the first direct licensing agreement with YouTube for an independent music publisher.

Craig is an experienced technologist, accomplished engineering leader, and proven product architect with over 20 years of experience. He studied electrical engineering and computer systems at the University of Queensland, and has previously held roles as Principal Engineer at both VMware and Sun Microsystems. His hands-on experience ranges from firmware, to operating systems, client applications, enabling backend services, and all levels in between.

He joined BenchSci as Principal Engineer in 2020 to guide the company’s evolving technical architecture and implementations, and to mentor its growing team of engineers. Promoted to Chief Architect Officer in 2021, Craig is responsible for the architecture of BenchSci’s AI-powered applications that decode unstructured scientific data to help scientists design and run more successful experiments.

Eran Ben-Ari is a technology leader with 15 years of experience successfully leading product, design, and engineering teams by combining a constant pursuit of people development, customer obsession, and commercial growth.

Prior to joining BenchSci in June 2021, Eran led product and engineering teams of over 120 people. He was General Manager at Koru, an OTPP-owned venture incubator driving innovation, and Chief Product Officer at Top Hat and Kik Interactive. Earlier in his career, he was VP of Product at Rounds Entertainment (acquired by Kik), VP of Marketing & Growth at Hola (acquired by EMK Capital), and VP of Product at Kampyle (acquired by Medallia).

His vast expertise in improving product development processes, building high-performing cross-functional teams, and increasing product launch velocity will be integral as BenchSci advances towards its vision of bringing novel medicines to patients 50% faster by 2025.

With a background in neuroscience, Luigi has spent two decades helping life science research and healthcare institutions develop and adopt innovative technologies to improve patient care. Luigi has held senior leadership positions across start-ups, SMEs, and large multinationals, such as Olympus and GE Healthcare. He was a commercial leader for Healthcare IT and Executive Director of Innovation, where he drove product development and clinical collaborations. At BenchSci, Luigi leads the commercial business with a focus on working with pharmaceutical R&D executives to apply BenchSci’s technology to help drive the speed and success of the research organization.

Luigi is a graduate of GE’s executive development programs and is frequently a lecturer on innovation across pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. He holds a Master’s in both physiology and neuroscience, as well as an Honours BSc Specialist degree in human biology, all from the University of Toronto.

Vanessa brings over ten years of experience growing, scaling, and optimizing global departments and aligning and leading world-class HR teams. Holding both an MBA and a Master’s in psychology has enabled Vanessa to contribute in a unique, multi-faceted way to a wide range of businesses along her career path.

After working for Yahoo! in Paris and London, she moved to Montreal to work in the visual effects and in-flight entertainment industries. Vanessa is the former Global VP of People, Places, and Technologies at AlayaCare. She led a team of 20+ people who supported vital aspects of the business, including internal solutions, IT, talent acquisition, and people operations. Before AlayaCare, Vanessa held a senior HR leadership role at Shopify.

Vanessa has demonstrated that she is business-driven with a global acumen and growth mindset while thriving on change throughout her career.

With an MSc in virology and a Ph.D. in epigenetics from the University of Toronto, Tom’s research focused on the molecular mechanism of repressive genetic bookmarking during cellular division and the potential application of reversing these bookmarks as an alternative therapeutic approach to treating cancer.

While at the University of Toronto, Tom had an ambitious idea to reduce the number of failed experiments but knew he needed AI, data, and business knowledge. So he recruited a computer programmer, a data scientist, and an entrepreneur, and together they created BenchSci.

Since 2015, Tom has provided the vision and leadership for BenchSci’s R&D efforts, including directing the creation of BenchSci’s bioinformatics ontologies and patent-pending machine learning models. As the head of BenchSci’s R&D team, Tom has extensive experience in bench research, bioinformatics, and machine learning.

Liran was born in Israel and was an army commander in the Israeli Defense Force. After achieving his law degree and selling his first startup, he immigrated to Canada to do his MBA at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. While at Rotman, he worked in the Creative Destruction Lab, which revived his entrepreneurial fire. He met three Ph.D. students—all immigrants like him—who were working to discover how AI could solve the declining productivity of drug discovery due to avoidable inefficiencies in preclinical research. Together, they founded BenchSci in 2015.

As CEO, Liran strives to inspire team members to be the best version of themselves and positively impact the world.

Liran is a 2021 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist and is passionate about using AI to exponentially increase the speed and quality of life-saving research.