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SynBioBeta Speaker

Alexandra de Paz

Genoa Ventures

Senior Associate

Alexandra is an Associate at Genoa Ventures where she leverages her synthetic biology background and experience in technology transfer supporting university startups. Prior to joining Genoa, Alexandra was a Research Associate with the Chicago Biomedical Consortium (CBC) where she supported the translation and commercialization of innovative academic projects across the Chicago ecosystem into biomedical products and startups. While at the CBC, Alexandra also interned as a Venture Fellow with Action Potential Venture Capital, GSK's venture capital fund focused on bioelectronic medicines. Prior to the CBC, Alexandra was the Associate Director of New Ventures at the Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO) at Northwestern University. In this role, Alexandra broadly supported faculty-led startups and commercialization of university research and led various commercialization education and entrepreneurial training programs. Alexandra managed a $10M university gap fund called the N. XT fund, which provides pre-seed funding to promising early-stage research-based startups at Northwestern. Alexandra also spearheaded and led FoundHer, an initiative aimed at amplifying, supporting, and cultivating first-time women scientist entrepreneurs. Alexandra continues to support women founders today through the Equalize program, where she serves as Co-Chair of the Training & Education Committee. Equalize is designed to take national action around the disparity of women academic inventors forming university startups. Alexandra completed her synthetic biology-focused Ph. D. as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in Keith Tyo's lab at Northwestern as part of the Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences (IBiS) graduate program. Alexandra also received a certificate from Kellogg's Management for Scientists and Engineers program. Prior to joining Northwestern, Alexandra obtained a B. S. in Interdisciplinary Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Florida.

Sessions Featuring

Alexandra

This Year

TBD

Session lineup still growing

Featuring

Speaker Coming Soon

Fireside Chat

12:00 AM

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8:30 AM

Human Health

From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology

Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?

Featuring

Speaker Coming Soon

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