SciFri-01: Stay Humble, Start a Company: A scientist’s guide to translating technology to the marketplace for profit, not fun.

Friday, October 9 | 9:00am - 9:30am

Yolanda Fintschenko, PhD

Yolanda Fintschenko, PhD, is Executive Director of i-GATE Innovation Hub, an economic development nonprofit, that supports science and technology startups in the Tri-Valley through a hard tech and life sciences incubator for early stage founders, Daybreak Labs, and the Startup Tri-Valley Initiative, that supports companies of all stages in the areas of women’s health, frontier technology, life sciences, and artificial intelligence. She began her career as a scientist and manager at Sandia National Laboratories, later moving into commercialization, marketing, and sales leadership roles with Thermo Fisher Scientific, LabSmith, Fixate.IO, and FounderTraction. Her technical expertise is in microfluidics; she founded the Gordon Research Conference on the Physics and Chemistry of Microfluidics, holds six patents, co-edited Microscale Analytical Systems, and has authored 41 publications, presentations, and book chapters. She earned her BS in Chemistry from Trinity University and her PhD in Bioanalytical Chemistry from the University of Kansas, and currently serves as a City of Livermore Planning Commissioner.

SciFri-02: An Entrepreneurial Journey to Help Improve the Quality of Life of Patients.

Friday, October 9 | 9:30am - 10:00am

Belinda Pastrana

Belinda Pastrana, Ph.D., has more than 35 years of experience in molecular biophysics and biochemistry with a comprehensive understanding of protein development and characterization. She is the Chief Scientific / Technology Officer, co-founder and Board member of Protein Dynamic Solutions, Inc. (PDS), currently located in San Juan, Puerto Rico. PDS is focused on the development and commercialization of a State-of-the-Art ProteinMentor® platform technology that delivers unprecedented level of understanding of multiple Critical Quality Attributes (CQAs) to de-risk pre-clinical candidate selection, accelerate speed to market, and enable AI and deep machine learning (DML) for predictive results, while ensuring quality, safety and efficacy of drug products for patients worldwide. The development of the platform technology was achieved through Quality by Design (QbD) with multiple collaborations with key opinion leaders from emerging Biotech, global Biopharma, NIST and the FDA. Dr. Pastrana is an inventor with multiple granted patents, an I-Corps graduate and has been awarded the highly competitive NSF SBIR phase I to phase IIB series of non-dilutive funding. She has a post-doctorate in molecular biology and pharmacology from Mayo Clinic and Foundation and holds a PhD in biophysical chemistry from Rutgers University. Dr. Pastrana is also a tenured faculty from the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez Campus with more than 65 peer-reviewed publications, invited book chapter, a resolved high-resolution protein-target complex structure. She has numerous awards among them the Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar and the Distinguished Women in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in Puerto Rico with more than 150 national and international invited lectures and panels, as well as a track record of training the next generation of biopharma professionals that have resulted in more than 205 presentations at dedicated conferences.