SynBioBeta Speaker
Nicole Sonnert
Playground Global
Investment Associate
Nicole is an associate on the engineered biology investment team at Playground, where she identifies groundbreaking companies and helps support portfolio companies.Originally from Cambridge, MA, Nicole completed a dual degree engineering program at Mount Holyoke College and Dartmouth College, studying Biomathematics and Chemical Engineering. Afterward, she joined Adimab, L.L.C. as part of the antibody discovery team, contributing to partner campaigns including molecules that have reached the clinic.Nicole continued her academic journey at Yale University, earning a Ph.D. in Microbiology and a certificate in Physics and Engineering Biology as both a Gruber and NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Her work focused on mapping direct interactions between human proteins and bacteria from the microbiome, with her dissertation research published on the cover of Nature.Her interest in venture capital was sparked through a fellowship with Canaan Partners, and she served on the board of the Yale Biotech Club, where she directed venture capital programming.When not working, Nicole likes to spend time outside and making art.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
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Nicole
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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?
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