SynBioBeta Speaker
Jim Cooper
Unfinished Ventures
Director
Jim Cooper builds and interrogates the machinery of startups, innovation ecosystems, policy, and capital. Australian, but splits time between California and Sydney, working across venture, commercialization, and ecosystem design. He teaches innovation at the University of California, works with several accelerators including LARTA, Beanstalk and StartBlue, is Senior Board Advisor to Software Australia, Advisory Committee Member of Houser Labs, External Industry Advisor to the California State University Biotech program, and currently works as Cofounder & Director of Unfinished Ventures, an innovation advisory firm based in Sydney—three decades in: 300+ startups advised, mentors across a dozen accelerators (and ran one) and university innovation programs, and has a bias toward being useful; Trying to understand why sensible things don’t happen, and why the opposite usually does.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Jim
This Year
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Business of Biology
Beyond Geopolitics: Collaboration and Competition in the Global Biology Innovation Landscape
Biology innovation is becoming both more global and more fragmented at the same time. As synthetic biology, AI-driven drug discovery, and biomanufacturing scale worldwide, nations and companies are simultaneously competing for technological leadership while relying on cross-border collaboration to accelerate discovery. Export controls, data governance, regional funding strategies, and national bioeconomy agendas are reshaping how partnerships form, yet science, talent, and innovation networks remain deeply interconnected. This session explores how the global biology ecosystem is evolving beyond traditional geopolitics. Leaders from industry, startups, academia, and investment will examine how collaboration and competition coexist across the US, Europe, China, and emerging innovation hubs.
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Business of Biology
Beyond Geopolitics: Collaboration and Competition in the Global Biology Innovation Landscape
Biology innovation is becoming both more global and more fragmented at the same time. As synthetic biology, AI-driven drug discovery, and biomanufacturing scale worldwide, nations and companies are simultaneously competing for technological leadership while relying on cross-border collaboration to accelerate discovery. Export controls, data governance, regional funding strategies, and national bioeconomy agendas are reshaping how partnerships form, yet science, talent, and innovation networks remain deeply interconnected. This session explores how the global biology ecosystem is evolving beyond traditional geopolitics. Leaders from industry, startups, academia, and investment will examine how collaboration and competition coexist across the US, Europe, China, and emerging innovation hubs.
Session lineup still growing
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
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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
