Adam Wierman is the Carl F Braun Professor in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) at Caltech. He served as Department Chair of CMS from 2015-2020 and as Director of the Information Sciences and Technology initiative from 2016-2025. He received his Ph.D., M.Sc., and B.Sc. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007, 2004, and 2001, respectively, and has been on the faculty of Caltech since 2007. Adam works to translate research from his group to industry in areas such as decarbonizing cloud computing, smart power grid development, and applying AI to science by working with partners such as Amazon, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, PIMCO, Southern California Edison, VMWare, and Facebook.

Adam’s research strives to make the networked systems that govern our world sustainable and resilient. He develops new mathematical tools in machine learning, optimization, control, and economics and applies these tools to design new algorithms and markets that can be deployed in data centers, the electricity grid, transportation systems, and beyond. He is best known for his work spearheading the design of algorithms for sustainable data centers, which has led to significant industry adoption (e.g. through the startup Verrus). He is a co-author of a book on “The Fundamentals of Heavy Tails.” Currently, his work focuses on the interface of machine learning and control, with applications to sustainability.

Dave Schaffer is the Hubbard Howe Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Bioengineering, and Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Dave also serves in leadership roles working with entrepreneurial scientists to solve the biggest challenges facing society as Director of QB3, Bakar Labs, and Bakar Fellows Program. He received a B.S. from Stanford University in 1993 and a Ph.D. from MIT in 1998, both in chemical engineering. He then conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies before joining Berkeley in 1999. There, he applies engineering principles to optimize gene and stem cell therapies, work that includes developing the concept of applying directed evolution to engineer targeted and efficient viral gene therapy vectors as well as new technologies to investigate and control stem cell fate decisions.
Dave has published >250 papers, has advised >110 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, is an inventor on >50 patents, and developed technologies that have generated nine potential new drugs that are being tested in human clinical trials, including two phase 3 trials. In addition, he has co-founded seven companies from his lab, including 4D Molecular Therapeutics (NASDAQ FDMT), Ignite Immunotherapies (acquired by Pfizer), Rewrite (acquired by Intellia), and, most recently, Vivere Oncotherapies.

Barbara Wold is Bren Professor of Molecular Biology at Caltech. Barbara is a genome scientist whose research focuses on the discovery of how gene activity is encoded in the DNA and the development of the technologies needed to figure that out. She and her research group use genomics to understand the basis of cell identity, how it is disrupted in disease, and how it can be engineered. Her group is also active in building international functional genomics databases and computational resources. Barbara served as the director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech from 2001–11, was the founder, in 2012, of the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Genomics, and from 2019-2023 she was the Director of Caltech’s Merkin Institute for Translational Research. She earned her Ph.D. from Caltech and joined the faculty in 1981.

Barbara has published more than sixty papers in the areas of developmental biology and genetics. Throughout her career, she has focused on exploring the architecture and logic of gene regulatory networks, in an effort to understand the mechanisms that drive cell state transitions in the development and differentiation of individual cells. In particular, she has investigated the ways in which these differentiation mechanisms are encoded in DNA. Much of her recent work focuses on biological information processing, developing and using new techniques such as ultra-high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques to computationally model the inputs and outputs of gene networks. Barbara’s goal is a deep understanding of biological circuit design and the mechanisms of genetics and cell development. Her lab has recently been concentrating on human disease genomics and, in particular, is looking into diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, and musculoskeletal disorders.