CDD Life Sciences Community Event - South San Francisco 2026

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Join us in South San Francisco for our upcoming Life Sciences Community Event, a full-day, in-person event designed to bring together the community for a day of learning, discussion, and connection.

This free event will take place at the Hangar in South San Francisco and feature a series of talks from guest speakers, along with a panel discussion focused on real-world experiences and insights. We’ll wrap up the day with a happy hour, giving attendees time to continue the conversation in a more relaxed setting.

Whether you’re a long-time CDD Vault user, new to the platform, or simply interested in data sciences, informatics, and innovation in the life sciences, this event is an opportunity to connect with peers, exchange ideas, and strengthen our Bay Area biotech community.

 

Speakers & Panelists

Brendan Wee Senior Engineer, Calico Life Sciences, Talk: CDD Vault and Drug Discovery Engineering at Calico

Brendan Wee is a Senior Software Engineer at Calico Life Sciences, where he architects the informatics infrastructure powering the company’s small molecule and peptide discovery pipelines. He specializes in building automated, API-driven ecosystems around CDD Vault that seamlessly connect internal machine learning models with global CRO operations. By eliminating data silos, his work ensures that high-fidelity, centralized data accelerates the Design-Make-Test-Analyze (DMTA) cycle for novel therapeutics.

 

Charlotte Bani, Account Manager, Optibrium, Talk: StarDrop: From Data Sharing to Real-Time Design Collaboration

Charlotte is an Account Manager at Optibrium, working closely with customers to help them get maximum value from StarDrop in their discovery workflows. She brings a strong understanding of customer needs and the practical challenges teams face, helping connect StarDrop’s capabilities to real scientific and project outcomes.

 

 

Chris Moxham,  Founder, CEO & CSO Transcripta Bio, Talk: Transcripta Bio: Revolutionizing Drug Discovery via the Transcriptome

Chris Moxham, Ph.D. is the co-founder and CEO of Transcripta Bio, a platform biotech discovering small molecule drugs and novel biological mechanisms using transcriptomics, advanced screening, and AI. Chris has more than two decades of experience driving innovation across drug discovery and development. Over the course of his career, he has advanced more than a dozen molecules into the clinic, developing innovative data-driven platforms and technologies that accelerated timelines and expanded therapeutic opportunity across oncology, neuroscience, diabetes, and other disease areas.

 

 

Lewis Whitehead VP of Discovery, Acelot, Talk: One Battle After Another

Lewis works for Acelot, a South San Francisco biotechnology company focused on small molecule drug-discovery for challenging therapeutic targets. He is an extroverted introvert, quiet, measured, pragmatic & astute in his approach to pharmaceutical discovery. He lives on Boston's North Shore, comes from Liverpool's Left Bank & should be a former Premier League footballer.

 

 

Mick Kappler, Head of Research Informatics, IDEAYA Biosciences, Co Presenter: Michael Boag, Principal Machine Learning Engineer & AI Strategist, Utiliware Talk Title: Improve ADMET predictions with Confidence and Margin

Strategic Scientist, Informatics Leader, and Team Motivator - Driven research informatics leader focusing on application of technology to business functions in multiple industries.  Diverse experience in colossal pharmaceutical corporations, a biotechnology startup, and a cutting-edge software company. Service-oriented planner with skills to foster trust, manage relationships, and execute large complex projects or routine tasks.

 

Pat Walters, Ph.D., is the Chief Scientist at OpenADMET and an Adjunct Professor at UCSF. With more than 30 years of leadership experience at Vertex and Relay Therapeutics, he is a recognized expert in cheminformatics and AI applications in drug discovery. Pat is the author of Deep Learning for the Life Sciences and the 2023 recipient of the ACS Herman Skolnik Award. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and a B.S. from UC Santa Barbara.

 

Alex Clark, Research Scientist, CDD, Talk: Small molecules, bigger molecules, and biologics - all unified in CDD Vault

Alex Clark has been building cheminformatics and computational drug discovery software products since the early 2000's, after spending a decade learning to be a scientist the hard way: running reactions at the lab bench.
Since switching to informatics full time, he has worked on most areas of contemporary chemistry software, whether it be 2D or 3D, large scale (cheminformatics) or small scale (quantum chemistry), big molecules (proteins) or small molecules (drugs). He has a persistent interest in the interface between scientists and software, which continues to challenge our industry, and has done much work on visualization techniques, electronic lab notebooks, and reimagining traditional software for new platforms like mobile, cloud and web. He publishes regularly in the scientific literature, and has maintained a large number of collaborations since becoming an entrepreneur in 2010. 

Kellan Gregory is CDD’s Head of Products. He has a degree in Chemical Engineering with an emphasis in biotechnology from Tufts University. Kellan was co-author in an HIV study with Dr. Paul A. Volberding, and interned with BioRad and Libraria.

Dr. Peter Gedeck holds a Ph.D. in chemistry. He is a scientist in the research informatics team at Collaborative Drug Discovery and develops novel technologies to be incorporated into CDD Vault. His research interests include the application of statistical and machine learning methods to problems in drug discovery. Prior to CDD, he worked for twenty years as a computational chemist in drug discovery at Novartis in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Singapore. Peter also teaches at University of Virginia's School of Data Science. Peter’s specialty is the development of machine learning algorithms to predict biological and physicochemical properties of drug candidates. 

Panel Discussion :

Moderator: Janice Darlington,