Leadership
Soheil Shams, PhD
Soheil Shams is a pioneer in applying artificial intelligence and computational methods to genomics. He founded BioDiscovery in 1997 and led the company for 24 years, growing it organically into a global leader in clinical genomic interpretation software before its $100M acquisition. He later served as Chief Informatics Officer of Bionano Genomics and then founded TESA Research, where he applies machine learning and AI to challenging problems in cancer treatment. Soheil holds a PhD in AI and Computer Engineering from USC and has extensive research experience in neural networks, machine learning, optimization, and computer vision.
Megan Roytman, PhD
Megan Roytman has 13 years of experience developing genomics software, with a focus on statistical methods and algorithms for analyzing complex biological data. She worked at BioDiscovery and Bionano Genomics, translating advanced analytical methods into practical tools for genomic research. Megan holds a bachelor’s and MEng degree from MIT in computational biology and a PhD in bioinformatics from UCLA.
Viren Wasnikar, MS
Viren Wasnikar has 26 years of experience in the field of genomic analysis developing real world clinical applications from the early days of microarray to next-gen sequencing, optical genome mapping and other multi-omics data. Viren has led software development teams as Director at BioDiscovery and VP of Software Engineering at Bionano. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science with a focus on machine learning from the University of Texas.
Ivan Wick, BS
Ivan Wick has been building high-performance computing applications in the genomics and machine learning fields for over 20 years. He has worked as a software engineer and analyst on multiple interdisciplinary teams including 7+ years at BioDiscovery, a prior co-foundership pioneering the use of machine learning in cybersecurity, and contributions to open source projects for scientific computing. He holds a BS in Computer Science with a specialization in Bioinformatics from UC San Diego.
