Laura Schulman
I love the food world. All of it. I love the passionate people who put their hearts and souls into building brands. The immense talent I get to know and work with – industry veterans, dietitians, chefs, start-ups, non-profits – and individuals who have a common interest in creating a more exciting, more diverse and more sustainable food system for the future.
I have spent more than two decades in this world, and where I am today is truly the best part of the journey. I started my own firm in 2019 with the goal of doing what I do best, enjoying my work and making an impact. I learned so much working at the best global PR firms in the world (Weber Shandwick, Edelman, Burson Marsteller) on best-in-class clients including PepsiCo, Quaker, Campbell Soup Company, Oreo, Kraft, ADM, Cherry Marketing Institute and National Confectioners Association. And, it’s how I met my co-founder Etienne Hernandez – Medina who I’m proud to be partnering with on food forward work.
In my most recent role as an SVP, Partner at FleishmanHillard, I built and ran the Chicago office’s multi-million-dollar Food & Nutrition practice from the ground up. I started Food Futures Strategies. Now it was time to build something of my own. I created Crave It PR with my co-founder, colleague and friend Etienne Hernandez-Medina, the CEO of H+M Communications, to put game-changing brands front and center in today’s food culture, and grow their relevance and revenue in new, exciting ways.
Xiaozhang Zheng
Profile
Accomplished drug discovery leader with twenty years of pharmaceutical industry experience in the discovery and early development of small molecule therapeutics in oncology, inflammation, CNS, and other therapeutic areas. Ability to successfully deliver projects to achieve research and company goals including clinical trials, IND-enabling studies, and partnerships.
Education
Ph.D. , Medicinal Chemistry, University of Tennessee, Memphis, TN
Dissertation: Novel Antithrombotic Compounds: Synthesis, Stereochemistry, and Structure-Activity Relationships of Antiplatelet 3-Carbamoylpiperidines
Patents & Publications
Over 40 published patent applications and 20 US granted patents
37 publications
Tasuku Ishida
Tasuku Ishida completed his M.S.(2002) and Ph.D.(2005) at the University of Tokyo supervised by Prof. Shu Kobayashi. After obtained Ph.D. degree, he joined Eisai Co,. Ltd. as a medicinal chemist to develop new chemical entities in neuroscience area. In 2011, he was assigned to H3 Biomedicine Inc. in Massachusetts, US, which is one of Eisai’s subsidiary, as a senior investigator to construct diversity-oriented synthesis (DOS) library. After coming back to Japan in 2015, he joined Oncology Business Group as a senior scientist to develop novel cancer therapies. In 2019, he moved to the UK for the collaborative project between the Prof. Alessio Ciulli group and Eisai to develop novel types of protein degraders.
Shaomeng Wang
I have been working on the discovery and development of novel small-molecules therapeutics for more than 20 years. One area of my research has been focused on targeting protein-protein interactions which regulate apoptosis, including the PPIs between the anti-death Bcl-2 and pro-death Bcl-2 members, the MDM2-p53 PPI, and the PPI of IAP proteins with Smac. My research in targeting apoptosis has resulted in the discovery and advancement of 8 compounds into Phase I/II clinical development targeting Bcl-2/Bcl-xL, MDM2 and IAP proteins. In more recent years, I have expanded my research program to target a number of PPIs, which regulate epigenetics, including histone readers, writers and erasers, and have advanced several classes of compounds into advanced preclinical development. To accomplish our goals of discovering highly optimized compounds suitable for clinical development and rapidly advancing them into clinical development, I have established extensive collaborations with basic scientists, translational scientists and clinical investigators at UMCCC and in other institutions. I have co-founded five UM start-up companies to help us to bring our drugs into clinical development and marketplace. I have published 300+ peer-reviewed papers and an inventor of 50+ issued US patents and hundreds of international patents. I was elected as Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2014 and as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2019, was induced into Hall of Fame of the Division of Medicinal Chemistry of American Chemical Society in 2020. I was the 2014 University of Michigan Distinguished Innovator.
Shanique Alabi
Shanique Alabi is a 6th year PhD candidate in the Pharmacology Department at Yale University. She is performing her PhD studies in the lab of Professor Craig Crews. Her work involves studying PROTAC induced degradation of kinases implicated in cancer. She is also interested in better understanding PROTAC mechanism of action and selectivity.
Rhamy Zeid
Rhamy Zeid leads the target biology group at C4 Therapeutics, a biotech company that is developing a new class of small molecules that direct the machinery of the ubiquitin-proteasome system to selectively degrade disease-relevant proteins for therapeutic benefit. His group uses a chemical biology approach to characterize the mechanistic and phenotypic consequences of targeted protein degraders towards clinical utility. Before joining C4 Therapeutics, Rhamy received his PhD from Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Dr. James Bradner, where his work focused on the characterization and disruption of cis regulatory elements towards therapeutic application. Previously, Rhamy spent time in both pharmaceutical and academic environments as a drug discovery biologist focused on the development of novel therapeutics in oncology.