2008 SBS Awards

Tadataka Yamada, M.D.
Presenting, Perspectives on Global Health
2008 SBS Achievement Award details^

As President of the Global Health Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Tadataka (Tachi) Yamada, M.D., leads the foundation’s efforts to help develop and deliver low-cost, life-saving health tools for the developing world. He oversees the global health grant portfolio and Global Health Advocacy. Before joining the foundation, Dr. Yamada served as Chairman of Research and Development and was a member of the Board of Directors at GlaxoSmithKline. Prior to that, he was Chairman of the department of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School and Physician-in-Chief at the University of Michigan Medical Center. Dr. Yamada is a past president of the American Gastroenterological Association and the Association of American Physicians, a master of the American College of Physicians, and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science in the United States and the Academy of Medical Sciences in the United Kingdom.

Peter Ramm, Ph.D.
2008 SBS Accomplishment Award in Biomolecular Sciences & Lead Discovery details^

Peter Ramm was trained as a neurobiologist (Ph.D. Queen’s University, 1982), taught neuroscience, statistics, and experimental design, and retains tenure (on leave) at Brock University.  Dr. Ramm started working with imaging instruments in the early 1980s, when he founded Imaging Research Inc. (now part of GE Healthcare).  Imaging Research developed image analysis technologies (software and instruments) for both basic and applied research, including products for functional mapping, quantitative receptor binding assays, microscopy, and array genomics.  In the mid-1990s, Dr. Ramm refocused the company on drug discovery, developing novel systems for high-throughput screening and cell-based assays.  In 1998, Imaging Research was purchased by Amersham Biosciences.  Dr. Ramm continued in various roles at Imaging, and was also Chief Scientific Advisor, Bioassays, for Amersham.  In 2003, he left Amersham.

Today, Dr. Ramm does some intellectual property consulting and maintains a keen interest in drug discovery technologies - image-based screening in particular.  His primary interests, however, lie in aviation.  His small company restores antique aircraft, and produces video documentaries about aviation history.

Christopher K. Fuller, M.S.
Vivian Liu, Ph.D.
Eric Nehrlich, M.S.
Simon Pitchford, Ph.D.
2008 Polypops Foundation Award for the Best Innovation for Microplate Design or Application details^

Christopher K. Fuller, Project Manager at Triple Ring Technologies, has 10 years experience developing instrumentation for biological sensing and medical applications.  He led multidisciplinary teams at MDS Sciex and Signature BioScience in commercializing a cell-based spectroscopy instrument for drug discovery.  His areas of focus include product requirements definition, product verification/validation, microfabrication, biophysical system modeling, algorithm development, and prototype software development.

Prior to joining Signature, Mr. Fuller developed microfabricated sensors and sample preparation systems for pathogen detection at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  He holds six patents. He received his BSEE and MSEE degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Vivian Liu is a Senior Analyst consulting for the DNA Repair Company (DNAR), focusing on identifying DNA repair biomarkers for the prediction and prognosis of cancers.  She received her BS and MS degrees from MIT, her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard Medical School and completed her postdoctoral fellowship training at Stanford Medical School in Dr. Teresa Wang’s laboratory.  As a Senior Scientist and lead biologist, Dr. Liu piloted the first initial experiments that formed the basis of the CellKeyTM system program at Signature Bioscience and saw the project through the launch of the system at MDS Sciex.

Eric Nehrlich is currently pursuing an M.S. in Technology Management at Columbia University while working at a software startup in New York. He received a B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1994 and an M.S. in Physics from Stanford in 1998 before leaving the world of academia.  He was awarded Best Biomedical Application at the NIWeek conference in 2000 for his work developing software for a BD Biosciences digital flow cytometer. After that, he joined Signature BioScience, where he wrote the data acquisition and analysis software for the CellKey prototype system, and continued in that role until the CellKey product was launched by MDS Sciex in 2005.

Simon Pitchford is Vice President and General Manager, Drug Discovery at MDS Analytical Technologies. Since completing his schooling in physiology and electrophysiology at the University of London, Kings College (B.Sc.), the University of Bristol (Ph.D.) and University of California, San Francisco (Post-doc), Dr. Pitchford has held a number of customer-facing positions at some of the leading instrumentation organizations providing innovative technologies to the drug discovery and screening industries.  These include Molecular Devices Corporation, Applied Biosystems and Signature Bioscience, Inc. In 2003, Dr. Pitchford joined MDS Sciex in conjunction with the acquisition of the cellular detection systems (CDS) technology from Signature Bioscience and served as Vice President of Marketing, Sales and Service until the acquisition of Molecular Devices in March 2007.