SynBioBeta Speaker
Maria Thacker-Goethe
Georgia Life Sciences
President & CEO
Maria Thacker-Goethe is President & CEO of Georgia Life Sciences and a national leader in building and scaling the life sciences workforce. With nearly two decades of experience, she works at the intersection of industry, policy, and education to strengthen the U.S. bioeconomy and ensure communities are prepared for the future of biotechnology.Since becoming CEO in 2019, Maria has helped drive significant growth in Georgia’s life sciences sector by aligning industry needs with workforce development, fostering public-private partnerships, and advancing policies that support innovation and access. She plays a key leadership role in the Life Sciences Workforce Collaborative, where she works with partners across the country to develop scalable workforce strategies and expand bioliteracy.Maria is also a passionate advocate for patient-centered innovation, with her work shaped by both personal experience and long-standing engagement in public health and rare disease advocacy. She serves on multiple national and regional boards and has been consistently recognized among Georgia’s most influential leaders.At SynBioBeta, Maria brings a systems-level perspective on how bioliteracy, workforce development, and cross-sector collaboration can serve as strategic drivers of U.S. competitiveness in the global bioeconomy.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Maria
This Year
Session lineup still growing
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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
