2023 SPARK
GLOBAL TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH BOOTCAMP & CONFERENCE

Michael is Director of Biotechnology for the Stanford University Byers Center for Biodesign. He is also co-founder and serves as Chairman of the Board of Tarsus Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: TARS).   Michael is also co-founder, former CEO, and serves on the board of Presidio Medical.  Previously, he was co-founder and served as Chairman of Oyster Point Pharma, Inc. (NASDAQ: OYST). Prior to this, he was Vice President, Neurostimulation for Allergan (an AbbVie company), after serving as co-founder and CEO of Oculeve, Inc., which was acquired by Allergan, plc.  Michael received a BE degree from Vanderbilt University and MS and PhD degrees from Case Western Reserve University. He is a graduate of the Stanford University Biodesign Fellowship and Vision Research Fellowship.  He has more than 50 issued US patents and numerous patent applications and peer-reviewed publications.

Kevin Grimes, MD is Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology and Co-director of the SPARK Program at Stanford. While a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Stanford, he obtained an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was selected as a White House Fellow and served as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense. After 15 years in the biotech industry, he returned to Stanford. SPARK’s mission is to advance promising discoveries to patient care; to educate faculty and trainees regarding the translational process; and to identify more efficient approaches to bring new therapies to patients. The SPARK methodology has been adopted by over 50 academic institutions world-wide. Grimes teaches graduate student courses on drug discovery and development and continues to teach and practice internal medicine. He received the David Rytand Award for Excellence in Clinical Teaching and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

Jeewon Kim received her undergraduate degree at Seoul National University in Korea and worked at Daesang Ltd, a Food and Drug company in Korea. She did her doctoral work at UC Berkeley in the lab of Dr. Marc Hellerstein, where she developed a stable isotope biomarker to detect early phases of colon cancer. She subsequently worked as a consultant for startup company Kinemed Inc. Then as a postdoctoral fellow, she began drug development work in Dr. Daria Mochly-Rosen’s lab at Stanford, studying the roles of different protein kinase C (PKC) isozymes in breast and prostate cancer. While in Dr. Mochly-Rosen’s lab, she worked to develop small peptides as anticancer drugs. This work has resulted in multiple publications and review papers and identified the roles of PKCs in cancer proliferation, angiogenesis, migration and metastasis. She then worked at the Stanford Cancer Institute Transgenic, Knockout and Tumor model Center (TKTC) as a group lead and preclinical oncology facility manager. She is currently a program manager and associate director of business development at SPARK since 2019.