Executive Managment Team

Colin Hill

C.E.O., President, Chairman & Co-Founder

Colin Hill brings years of hands-on scientific experience to his role, with expertise in the areas of computational physics and systems biology. Hill is a frequent speaker at international scientific and industry conferences and has appeared in numerous publications and television segments including The Wall Street Journal, CNBC Morning Call, Nature, Forbes, Wired, and the Economist. He serves as Chairman of the Board of Fina Technologies, a spin- off of GNS that applies next-generation artificial intelligence technology to real-time financial trading. He also serves on the board of directors of the New York Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR) and as a board member of AesRx, a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the development of a new treatment for sickle cell disease. In 2004, Hill was named to MIT Technology Review's TR100 list of the top innovators in the world under the age of 35. He graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in physics and earned master's degrees in physics from McGill University and Cornell University.

Iya Khalil, Ph.D.

Executive Vice President and Co-Founder

Iya Khalil oversees the application of the company's disease and drug simulation technology in alliances with pharmaceutical and biotech companies. A frequent speaker at industry events and conferences, she has extensive experience in reverse engineering and forward simulations of large-scale genetic and biochemical networks. Dr. Khalil is an inventor on a number of pending patents and has published multiple articles on in silico technologies applied to drug discovery and development. Prior to joining GNS, she worked at Cornell University, University of Washington and Abbott Labs. Dr. Khalil holds a B.S. in physics from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University.

Thomas Neyarapally

Senior Vice President, Corporate Development

Thomas Neyarapally spearheads and implements the strategic vision for the expansion, protection and monetization of Gene Network Sciences' intellectual property. He was appointed to his current position in 2008. Before joining GNS as Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Intellectual Property in 2006, Neyarapally served as an associate in the New York office of the law firm Frommer, Lawrence & Haug LLP, where he focused on transactional, product development, and litigation matters in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Neyarapally previously was an associate in the corporate department at Chadbourne & Parke, LLP, and held the position of analyst at Arthur D. Little. Neyarapally holds a J.D. and an M.B.A. from Cornell University. While attending Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management, he served as a partner with BR Ventures, the only student-run venture capital firm in the United States. Neyarapally graduated from the University of Connecticut with a B.S. in chemical engineering.

Bruce Church, Ph.D.

Vice President, Bionumerics

Dr. Church leads the design and implementation of the company's proprietary REFS network inference and forward simulation engine. An expert in computational biophysics and supercomputing, Dr. Church spent the previous decade developing global optimization methods for computational protein folding, the results of which have been published in several peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Church has been awarded and served as the principal investigator on several major grants, including a $2.5 million award from the Department of Energy. Dr. Church received a B.S. in Applied and Engineering Physics and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Paul McDonagh, Ph.D.

Vice President, Discovery Biology

Paul McDonagh directs and oversees discovery efforts at GNS. He uses supercomputing to apply computational techniques to discover new insights and networks from raw, high dimensional biological data. Before joining Gene Network Sciences, he led the computational team in the Medical Sciences organization at Amgen in Seattle, where he focused on the translation of high-throughput measurements to clinical trials. He was previously at Rosetta Inpharmatics/Merck, designing and analyzing microarray experiments. While there, he and the Rosetta team published the first genomic tiling experiments to find new genes in the Genome edition of Nature. He completed his post-doctoral work at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and the University of Washington sequencing pathogen genomes. He graduated from the University of Leicester with a Ph.D. in protein structure modeling and NMR.