31. Drug discovery for neurodegenerative diseases, Victor Hanson-Smith, Comp. Bio., Verge Genomics

Victor Hanson-Smith is the Head of Computational Biology at Verge Genomics and is one of the world's leaders in mathematical modeling of eukaryotic genome evolution and function. He has co-authored 13 publications in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature and Science, and his work has been featured in the NYTimes and The Washington Post. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon, and completed an NIH post-doctoral research fellowship in Evolutionary Genomics at UCSF. Additionally, he is a full-stack software engineer with 17 years experience building web applications, supercomputing simulations, and genomics pipelines.