Team

Alex Rives

Head of Science

Alex Rives is head of science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, leading its work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biology. Alex was a founder and chief scientist at EvolutionaryScale, a public-benefit company developing AI to accelerate scientific discovery in biology, and delivering transformative AI systems and applications to benefit the global scientific community. Rives is a core institute member at the Broad Institute, and an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He will continue to be affiliated with Broad Institute and MIT. As a scientist, Rives has done pioneering work in artificial intelligence for biology. He started and led the Evolutionary Scale Modeling, or ESM, project at Meta’s fundamental AI research lab, which developed the first large-scale transformer language models for proteins. The ESM models are widely recognized as a breakthrough in artificial intelligence for biology, and opened the field of language modeling in biology. These models are used by scientists worldwide, enabling applications including designing therapeutic proteins such as antibodies, predicting the effects of mutations in the human genome, illuminating evolutionary history, discovering new proteins, and creating models of the cell. Rives earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and biology from Yale University and a doctorate in computer science from New York University.

Marc Malandro

Executive Director, Biohub

Marc Malandro is the executive director of Biohub. Marc is also the chief operating officer of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, where he started as vice president for science operations, a role in which he helped build the science programs and team. Before that, he served at the University of Pittsburgh as Vice Chancellor for Technology Management and Commercialization and Founding Director of the Innovation Institute, whose mission was to create, support, and sustain a culture of innovation, entrepreneurship, and collaboration on campus. Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh, Malandro co-founded Sagres Discovery, a systems-biology company focused on understanding the molecular basis of cancer. Malandro received his B.S. and M.S. in Biological Sciences and D.Sc. from Youngstown State University and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Florida College of Medicine.

Andrea Califano

President, Systems Biology, Head of Biohub, New York

Andrea Califano serves as president, systems biology and head of Biohub, New York. Prior to joining Biohub, Andrea has been is the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, with cross-appointments in Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, Biomedical Informatics, and Medicine. From 2013 to 2023, he was the Founding Chair of the Department of Systems Biology and Director of the JP Sulzberger Columbia Genome Center. In 1986, after completing a doctoral thesis in physics at the University of Florence, Italy, and postdoctoral training at MIT, Dr. Califano joined the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where, in 1997, he became program director of the IBM Computational Biology Center. In 2000, he co-founded First Genetic Trust Inc. to pursue translational genomics research. Finally, he joined Columbia in 2003. Califano is an internationally recognized pioneer in the reverse engineering and interrogation of gene regulatory networks. He has discovered a new class of Master Regulator proteins representing the regulatory bottleneck responsible for canalizing the effect of mutations and aberrant endocrine and paracrine signals into the transcriptional state of cancer cells. As a result, Master Regulators have emerged as highly conserved non-oncogene dependencies that are independent of the specific mutational landscape of different tumors in the same subtype. This novel discovery framework has helped elucidate key mechanisms underlying tumorigenesis and drug sensitivity and their translation has resulted in several clinical trials, from breast and pancreatic adenocarcinoma to neuroendocrine tumors, sarcomas, and glioblastoma, including an innovative N of 1 trial enrolling across 18 distinct malignancies. Califano is very active nationally, serving on numerous editorial and scientific advisory boards, including for The MIT Koch Cancer Center, Cancer Genetics Inc., Dana Farber Cancer Center, OHSU Brenden-Colson Center for Pancreatic Care, the WIN consortium, the German Cancer Center (DKFZ), DOE-NCI Cancer Moonshot project, as well as of the Pershing Square and Damon Runyon Foundations. He has served as chair or co-chair of many international conferences and meetings, including the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR); the RECOMB-ISCB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges; Keystone Conferences; as well as several special conferences of the AACR on genomics and cancer systems biology. Califano has received several awards and recognitions, including the 2015 and 2022 NCI Outstanding Investigator Award, the 2019 Ruth Leff Award in Pancreatic Cancer, and the 2023 NCI Alfred G. Knudson Award in Cancer Genetics. He is a Member of the National Academy of Medicine and a Fellow of the AAAS, the International Society of Computational Biology, and the IEEE; he is also Co-founder of DarwinHealth Inc. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research Academy.

Scott Fraser

President, Dynamic Imaging, Head of Biohub, San Francisco

Scott Fraser has a long-standing commitment to quantitative biology, applying the tools of chemistry, engineering, and physics to problems in biology and medicine. His personal research centers on multi-modal, multidimensional, and multiplex imaging analyses of intact biological systems, with an emphasis on early development, organogenesis, and medical diagnostics. After training in physics (BS, Harvey Mudd College, 1976) and biophysics (PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 1979), he joined the faculty at UC Irvine, and rose through the ranks to become Chair of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. In 1990 he moved to Caltech to build upon his commitment to interdisciplinary training and translational research, to serve as the Anna L. Rosen Professor of Biology, as well as the Founding Director of the Biological Imaging Center, the Caltech Brain Imaging Center and the Rosen Center for Biological Engineering. In 2012, he moved to USC to take a Provost Professorship in the Dornsife College of Letters Arts and Sciences, the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Keck School of Medicine and the Viterbi School of Engineering. He remains active in interdisciplinary research, serving as the Elizabeth Garret Chair of Convergent Bioscience for the USC campuses. In 2024, he joined the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as the Vice President of Science Grant Programs, and in 2025 advanced to be the President of the Chan Zuckerberg Imaging Institute and then the President, Dynamic Imaging, Head of Biohub, San Francisco.

Shana O. Kelley

President, Bioengineering, Head of Biohub, Chicago

Shana Kelley serves as president, bioengineering and head of Biohub, Chicago. Prior to joining Biohub, Shana has been the Neena B. Schwartz Professor at Northwestern in the Departments of Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering, and Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics. The Kelley research group works in a variety of areas spanning bio analytical technology development and has pioneered new methods for tracking molecular and cellular analytes with unprecedented sensitivity. Kelley’s work has been recognized with the ACS Inorganic Nanoscience Award, the ACS Arthur Doolittle Award, the Pittsburgh Conference Achievement Award, the Steacie Prize, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award, a NSF CAREER Award, and a Dreyfus New Faculty Award. She was also named a “Top 100 Innovator” by MIT’s Technology Review. Kelley is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the American Institute of Biological and Medical Engineering. Kelley is an inventor on over 50 patents issued worldwide and a successful entrepreneur. She is a founder of four molecular diagnostics companies, GeneOhm Sciences (acquired by Becton Dickinson in 2005), Xagenic Inc. (acquired by General Atomics in 2017), CTRL Therapeutics (founded in 2019), and Arma Biosciences (founded in 2021). She is an Associate Editor for ACS Sensors, and an Editorial Advisory Board Member for the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Nano Letters, and ACS Nano. Kelley was a member of the Executive Leadership team for Medicine by Design, a $114 million multidisciplinary, multi-institutional initiative focused on engineering approaches to regenerative medicine, and was a theme leader for the Nanomedicine Innovation Network, a government-funded effort to unite nanotechnology-focused researchers across Canada. She was also the founder and Director of PRiME, which was launched at the University of Toronto to unite the life sciences, engineering, and clinical communities.

Patricia Brennan

Vice President, Technology and General Manager, Science

Patricia Brennan serves as the vice president, technology and general manager, science. Previously, Patricia held leadership roles at Clarivate and Thomson Reuters, where she led product design, product management and platform development. She is also a product coach and advisor to individuals and organizations, where she assists them in honing and growing their product management practices. Patricia has a master's in library and information science from the Catholic University of America and a bachelor's in English literature from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Tom Sercu

Vice President, AI and Engineering

Tom Sercu serves as vice president of AI and engineering. Previously, he was co-founder and vice president of engineering at EvolutionaryScale, playing a key role in building the company. His contributions at EvolutionaryScale span across engineering, AI research, leading the company’s organization building and hiring, and setting up much of the operations. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Tom was an AI research engineer and research manager. His research expertise spans several areas of deep learning, including bridging domains by applying breakthrough neural architectures from computer vision to speech recognition at New York University and IBM Research's T.J. Watson Research Center. He later worked on the theoretical foundations of generative models, precursors to today’s generative AI era, before focusing on the intersection of foundational AI and biology. As co-leader of the protein team at Meta AI (FAIR) in New York, Tom developed with the ESM the first transformer protein language model, ESM-1, followed by ESM-1b, ESM2, ESMFold, and the ESM Atlas resource.

Salvatore Candido

Vice President and Fellow, Engineering

Salvatore Candido is an engineering fellow and vice president, technology. He was previously a co-founder and the chief technology officer of EvolutionaryScale. He has built frontier AI models in a number of domains, recently with a focus on biology, protein design, and scientific reasoning in large language models. At EvolutionaryScale, he spearheaded or made foundational technical contributions to all of the company’s flagship research efforts. Dr. Candido earned a doctorate from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for work in control systems and artificial intelligence. His previous roles include distinguished software engineering posts at Meta and Google, and chief technology officer at Project Loon. Dr. Candido was a co-lead of the AI for math and science pillar at FAIR at Meta, and was the technical lead who created the AI-based algorithms used to navigate autonomous lighter-than-air aircraft for Project Loon at Google[x]. Prior to Project Loon, Dr. Candido worked on the Google Search algorithm.