Tasuku Kitada, Ph.D., MBA, is the Co-Founder, Board Director, President, and Head of R&D at Strand Therapeutics, a Boston-based clinical-stage biotechnology company developing programmable mRNA medicines for cancer and autoimmune diseases. He oversees the development of Strand’s Signal Stack platform, which applies computational design principles to enable tissue-selective and precisely controlled therapeutic protein expression using AmpliScript self-replicating RNA and EverScript circular RNA technologies.Dr. Kitada’s work increasingly focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence and computation with synthetic biology, including the use of data-driven models to design, optimize, and predict the behavior of complex RNA regulatory systems and therapeutic payloads. Prior to co-founding Strand, he was a biotech investment analyst at Candriam Investors Group, a global asset management company based in Brussels.He holds a B.S. in Biophysics and Biochemistry from the University of Tokyo, a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from UCLA, and conducted postdoctoral research at MIT’s Synthetic Biology Center. He also holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.