SynBioBeta Speaker
Michelle Chen
Form Bio
President, CEO and Board Member
Michelle Chen, Ph.D. is a biotech executive and industry leader with extensive experience in strategy, business and corporate development, M&A, investor relations, ventures, fundraising, and R&D. She currently serves as President, CEO and Board Member of Form Bio, the first spin-off from Colossal Biosciences, where she leads company’s efforts to harness AI for genetic medicine design and genome engineering applications.Prior to Form Bio, Michelle served as Chief Business Officer at Insilico Medicine, where she drove the company’s growth by translating cutting-edge AI technologies into high-value drug discovery and platform partnerships—unlocking billions in potential revenue.Throughout her career, Michelle has built a strong cross-functional track record spanning R&D, product management, operations, and commercial leadership. She has held key positions at Roche, Merck, BioMarin, and Agilent Technologies, and has also served as an advisor to venture capital firms and startups. Michelle has led new company formations, executed numerous M&A transactions across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and helped deliver a five-fold increase in the market capitalization of a public company within three years.Michelle earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Washington, conducted postdoctoral research at UC San Francisco, and completed Bioinformatics training at Stanford University.
All Categories
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Michelle
This Year
•
-
AIxBIO
Data Factories: Building the Infrastructure for AI-Ready Biology
Biology is entering an AI-driven era, but most experimental infrastructure still produces data designed for individual experiments, not for learning at scale. As a result, much of today’s data is useful in the moment but poorly suited for training robust, long-lived models. This session will explore what biological data matters most today, what data needs to be generated now to support future models, and how leading teams are closing that gap. Panelists will discuss how automation, metadata discipline, and standardized testing pipelines can turn artisanal lab workflows into continuous experiment-to-learning systems. The focus will be on infrastructure and experimental design, highlighting practical bottlenecks, emerging best practices, and what becomes possible when biology produces abundant, high-quality, model-ready data by default.
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Ori Zakin
BioRaptor
CEO
Building bioprocess R&D operating systems from noisy data.
Michael Koeris
DARPA
Director, BTO
Protecting National Security with Biology
Chase Olle
Robot on Rails
Founder & CEO
MIT-trained lab-robotics founder automating bench experiments at scale.
Michelle Chen
Form Bio
President, CEO and Board Member
Barry Bunin
Collaborative Drug Discovery
Founder and CEO
Invented CDD Vault, data-sharing platform for drug discovery.
•
-
AIxBIO
Data Factories: Building the Infrastructure for AI-Ready Biology
Biology is entering an AI-driven era, but most experimental infrastructure still produces data designed for individual experiments, not for learning at scale. As a result, much of today’s data is useful in the moment but poorly suited for training robust, long-lived models. This session will explore what biological data matters most today, what data needs to be generated now to support future models, and how leading teams are closing that gap. Panelists will discuss how automation, metadata discipline, and standardized testing pipelines can turn artisanal lab workflows into continuous experiment-to-learning systems. The focus will be on infrastructure and experimental design, highlighting practical bottlenecks, emerging best practices, and what becomes possible when biology produces abundant, high-quality, model-ready data by default.
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Ori Zakin
BioRaptor
CEO
Building bioprocess R&D operating systems from noisy data.
Michael Koeris
DARPA
Director, BTO
Protecting National Security with Biology
Chase Olle
Robot on Rails
Founder & CEO
MIT-trained lab-robotics founder automating bench experiments at scale.
Michelle Chen
Form Bio
President, CEO and Board Member
Barry Bunin
Collaborative Drug Discovery
Founder and CEO
Invented CDD Vault, data-sharing platform for drug discovery.
Session lineup still growing
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
•
-
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?
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
