Team

Jonathan Hirsch - Founder and President

Jonathan founded Syapse after observing first-hand the information management inefficiencies in biology-based research and product development. At Syapse, Jonathan works closely with our customers, helping translate their scientific and business needs into a suite of software solutions that enable data-driven R&D. Earlier in his career, Jonathan worked in Neuroscience Commercial Development at Abbott Laboratories, where he developed strategies to fund drug development through partnerships and private equity financing. While at the University of Chicago, Jonathan served as the Business Development Manager for three startup biotechnology companies, securing successful partnerships with commercial and government entities.His research at the Center for Molecular Neurobiology at the University of Chicago helped establish the effect of exercise on promoting hippocampal neurogenesis and combating Alzheimer's disease. Jonathan received an M.S. in Neuroscience from Stanford University, and an A.B. in Biology and Political Philosophy from the University of Chicago.

Tony Loeser - Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer

Tony has been working with knowledge representation and reasoning technologies since 1996. Prior to co-founding Syapse, Tony’s experience with biological data included six years at Ingenuity Systems, where he was responsible for the architecture of the software and structured content. Tony also was a Senior Research Software Engineer developing tools for building applications based on ontologies at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research and previously served as Lead Knowledge Architect at Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons. Before Science Commons, Tony was Vice President of Engineering at Tumri, applying semantic technology to targeted internet advertising, and spent two years at Stanford's Knowledge Systems Lab studying ontology-based simulation. Tony received an M.S. in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University, and an A.B. in Physics and Mathematics from Harvard University.

Glenn Winokur - Co-founder and CEO

Glenn, a 25+ year veteran of the software industry, has been instrumental in the building of several successful software companies. In addition to Glenn’s role at Syapse, he is an investor and/or advisor to leading cloud, SAAS, and collaboration software companies including Jive, Puppet Labs, Cloud Sherpas, SchoolMessenger, and DotNetNuke. Earlier in his career, Glenn was co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of NetIQ, a leading supplier of security, system management, and web analytics software. He led NetIQ from initial product launch in 1996 to IPO in 1999 (NTIQ) to $300 million in annual revenue in 2003. Prior to NetIQ, Glenn has held executive positions in sales and business development at several enterprise software companies, including Frame Technology (Adobe), Documentum (EMC) and Ingres. Glenn received a B.S. in Business Administration and Marketing from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and is a frequent guest lecturer, mentor and advisor at both the University of Illinois and Stanford University.

Advisors

David Webb - Adjunct Professor, The Scripps Research Institute

Dr. Webb joined Celgene - San Diego in September, 2003 as Vice President, Research and retired in June, 2011. During this time, the Research Division has placed six drugs into clinical development, four of which are still in clinical studies in the areas of cancer and inflammation/autoimmunity. Between 1995 and 2003, he held a series of senior management positions in several biotechnology companies where he developed and led drug discovery programs focused on inflammation, asthma, cancer and diabetes. These included Syrrx, which he joined in 2001 as Vice President of Drug Discovery; OSI Pharmaceuticals (Corporate Vice President, Drug Discovery 1999-2001) and Cadus Pharmaceutical Corporation where he was Vice President of Research and Chief Scientific Officer at from 1995 to 1999 and adjunct professor of Microbiology and Immunology at New York Medical College. From 1987 to 1995, Dr. Webb was at Syntex, Inc where he held the positions of Distinguished Scientist and later, Director, Institute of Immunology and Biological Sciences and was a Consulting Professor of Cancer Biology at Stanford University. Dr. Webb was a member of the Department of Cell Biology at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology from 1973 to 1987 and was Adjunct Professor of Human Genetics at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Webb was a member of the Board of Directors of Axiom Biotechnologies, Inc. from 1998 to 2000 and a member of its Scientific Advisory Board from 1999-2002. He has published over 200 peer reviewed publications and abstracts and has served on numerous editorial boards in the field of Immunology. In addition he has been a member of Study Sections for NSF, ACS, NIH and the VA. Dr. Webb received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University and was a Dernham Junior Fellow in Cancer Research at UCSF before joining the Roche Institute.

Andy Palmer - Startup Specialist, Big Data & Life Sciences

With a proven track record of seven successful startups including two IPOs in the past 20 years, Palmer has specialized in accelerating the foundation and growth of early-stage companies that span enterprise software, the Internet, ecommerce, and biotech. Palmer was co-founder and founding CEO of Vertica Systems (acquired by HP). Prior to Vertica, Palmer was the senior vice president of operations and CIO for Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI) and has held executive positions at Bowstreet (acquired by IBM), pcOrder.com and Trilogy.

Matthew Cooper - Co-founder, Carmenta Bioscience

Matthew is the co-founder of Carmenta Bioscience, a Stanford diagnostics company addressing unmet medical needs in maternal and fetal health. Prior to Carmenta, Matthew spent 2 years as Syapse’s Chief Science Officer, helping define the initial product requirements of Syapse Discovery. Matthew joined Syapse from Roche, where he was Head of Non-Clinical Safety Information and sat on Roche's global informatics steering team. He is also currently an advisor to Stanford's SPARK program and Stanley Prusiner at the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases. Matthew was Roche's Advisory Committee member to the Critical Path Institute Predictive Safety Testing Consortium, and Chair of its Data Analysis and Management Working Group. Prior to Roche, Matthew co-founded the Biomarker Development & Validation department at Biogen-Idec, where he led the Transcript Profiling & Computational Biology group. Matthew received an MBA from Columbia Business School and the Berkeley Haas School of Business, a Ph.D. in Toxicology from the University of Kentucky, and a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Tulsa. Matthew is also a Diplomat of the American Board of Toxicology.

Richard "Chip" Hay - Director of Corporate Relations, Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering

Chip Hay is a software industry executive with twenty years experience in growing enterprise software firms. He is currently the Director of the Office of Corporate Relations at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University. As Vice President of Marketing and Industry Development, he was a key member of the founding management team of Documentum (now EMC) and led its growth strategy focused on the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries. Recently, Chip was Senior Vice President of Marketing and Customer Care at Code Green Networks and, prior to that, Vice President of Worldwide Industry Marketing at Business Objects. Chip received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University, where he taught and conducted research in the social sciences and at the Kellogg School of Management.

David Hodgson - Chief Technology Officer, Wellness FX

Dave has more than 18 years of leadership experience in delivering enterprise class software and content solutions in life sciences and medicine. Previously he was CTO at Tethys, leading commercial operations and information functions in diagnosing those most at risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes. Prior, he built very, very large databases at Roche, Pfizer and Incyte that created clinical trial candidates from data mining, influenza resistance trends in real time, and toxicology guidance from text analytics... David advises a number of Bay Area startups and non-profit foundations.

Heinz Roggenkemper - Executive Vice President, Development, SAP Labs

Heinz Ulrich Roggenkemper serves as an Executive Vice President for Development of SAP Labs. Mr. Roggenkemper has worked at SAP since 1982, joining SAP Labs as a Systems Consultant. His career with SAP took him to SAP International in Switzerland, followed by SAP America in the United States. He returned to SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany in 1990 where his responsibilities included the development of application link enabling (ALE) and Internet applications. He moved back to the United States to work at SAP Labs in 1997. He serves as a Member of Advisory Board of Verari Systems, Inc. Mr. Roggenkemper holds advanced degrees in mathematics and philosophy from Freiburg University, Germany.

Rudy Potenzone - Founder, SciencePoint Solutions

Rudy is a seasoned IT veteran in designing, delivering and deploying novel and integrated software and content solutions across the life science, biological, and chemical industries for over 25 years. Rudy was previously the Worldwide Pharma Industry Strategist for Microsoft where he worked with customers, partners, and the Microsoft product teams on current and future strategic directions. Rudy served as Senior Vice President of Business Development at Ingenuity during the development of IPA 3.0, and Vice President of Scientific Applications at Accelrys, where he led the original design and early development of QUANTA and CHARMm. He also ran Research and Development at MDL during the early development of DiscoveryGate and Isentris, and Research and New Product Development at Chemical Abstracts during the creation, development, and launch of SciFinder and SciFinder Scholar. Rudy was the President of Lion Biosciences US, and the Vice President of Enterprise Solutions at CambridgeSoft, in charge of their Electronic Lab Notebook. Other products that Rudy was involved with include ChemLAB, and the NIH/EPA Chemical Information System. Rudy holds a Ph.D. and MS in Macromolecular Science from Case Western Reserve University and a B.S. in Biophysics from the University of Pittsburgh.

Mark Tuttle - Director of Interoperability, eHealthTrust

Mark has worked on biomedical terminology projects for more than 25 years beginning at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), where he became the lead extramural architect for the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. While teaching in the computer science department at UC Berkeley, Mark co-founded Apelon, a pioneer in biomedical terminology projects at the National Cancer Institute, Veterans Administration, Department of Defense, and Health and Human Services. Mark is currently Director of Interoperability at eHealthTrust, and is on the staff of the Center for Bioinformatics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Mark has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Dartmouth, and studied in the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at Harvard.