Business Advisors
Umair A. Khan
Umair co-founded Clickmarks in 1999 and served as its Chairman and CEO until it was sold to Semotis in 2005. Umair was also Founder and Chairman of Wordwalla, a venture-backed Silicon Valley company providing multilingual software solutions for web and mobile. Umair also co-founded Chowk, a niche web portal focusing on South Asia. He has over twenty five industry patents granted or pending in Computer System Design and Architecture, including four from his work as a Lead Engineer at Intel Corporation.
Umair received a BS in Mathematics with Computer Science (1992) and an MS in Computer Engineering (1995) from MIT, where in 1991 he was elected Institutional Nominee by the Department of Mathematics, as one of six distinguished scholars in Mathematics.
Karoly Nikolich
Dr. Karoly Nikolich currently serves as Consulting Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and prior to that served as the Executive Director of the Neuroscience Institute at Stanford University. Dr. Nikolich has over 20 years of biotechnology industry experience and is an expert in central nervous system therapeutics. Dr. Nikolich's industry experience includes founding AGY Therapeutics in 1998. AGY has been dedicated to the discovery and development of therapies for neurological and psychiatric diseases. Prior to founding AGY, Dr. Nikolich served as Vice President of Research at Lynx Therapeutics, Inc., a genomics company. Earlier, he worked in the research division of Genentech, Inc. for 12 years, where he initiated, established and directed Genentech's neuroscience research program and participated in product development.
Parag I. Shah
Mr. Shah heads Hercules Technology Growth Capital's Life Science investment activities. He has spent the last 9 years providing structured debt capital to companies at various stages in their lifecycle (start-up to public). During the last six years, he has focused exclusively on the Life Sciences industry. Mr. Shah founded Imperial Bank's East Coast Region Life Sciences Practice in 2000 and was a Senior Vice President and the Group Head of this Practice. In 2001, Imperial Bank was acquired by Comerica Bank and Mr. Shah remained as the head of the Practice at Comerica.
Science Advisors
Richard P. Junghans
Dr. Junghans, M.D., PhD. is the chief of the division of Surgical Research and an Associate professor of Surgery and Medicine at Boston University School of medicine. He also is the director of the biotherapeutics development lab at the Roger Williams medical center. In his long and distinguished career his major research interests have been in antibody function, immunotherapy of cancer and gene therapy. His publications lists more than 70 papers.
Gerald B. Pier
Dr. Pier has a long track record of studying mechanisms whereby bacterial pathogens cause disease and definition of immune protective mechanisms relevant to prevention of bacterial infection. He is a professor in the department of Medicine at Harvard Medical school.