Victor Barahona is an engineer at TARA. He received his Bachelors in Biomedical Engineering from Hofstra University. During his time at Hofstra, Victor worked in the Cell and Tissue Engineering Lab under Dr. Nick Merna, where he focused on characterizing the tissue-specific impact of fluid shear stress on mouse endothelial cells as well as developing functional ECM scaffolds with a wide range of structural, mechanical and biological properties for use in tissue engineering applications. From there, he dove into the medical device industry, completing two internships at Precipart, a manufacturer specializing in high precision production of custom mechanical components. He then worked as a Project Engineer at A.M. Surgical, a medical device manufacturer focused on upper-extremity orthopedic medical devices. There, he focused on quality control, product design & development, as well as regulatory activities for existing and new product lines.

In addition to Brooklyn, Nathan Bays lives at the intersection of biology, automation and data science. After an introduction to high-throughput screening at Exelixis in South San Francisco, Nathan became a founding member of the Automated Lead Optimization group at Merck Research Laboratories in Boston, MA. While at Merck, Nathan pioneered several platforms for drug discovery, including high-throughput flow cytometry screening for immune cell responses in whole blood. To achieve an industry-pioneering scale, Nathan developed innovations across automation, flow cytometry and data analysis. Nathan was then recruited to Eli Lilly in New York City to bring similar innovations to biomarker discovery for large molecules and help establish a small molecule discovery engine in New York City. To support immuno-oncology antibody development at Lilly, Nathan advanced quantitative flow cytometry in clinical assays to better model pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic relationships.

After enjoying a very productive decade in drug discovery, Nathan discovered a new level of scientific passion in biological engineering at Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston. Now the question of how to dramatically scale biology was truly front and center. Nathan thrived in this engineering environment with a true biological foundry dedicated to designing, building and testing new organisms at unprecedented scale and speed. At Ginkgo, Nathan lead a large assay development group to test engineered organism performance while simultaneously building a mammalian foundry to scale synthetic biology in areas like immune cell engineering, bioproduction, and environmentally-responsive ‘living therapeutics.’

TARA now provides a perfect home for Nathan in combining bioengineering with drug discovery. As Senior Director, Assay Technologies, Nathan is working to build and deploy both technical and cultural tools to maximize the expansive talent at Tara as it tackles the bold challenge of scaling the Tara platform to meet external demand and internal vision.

A Native Texan and first-generation college graduate, Nathan studied statistics at Texas A&M University, earned a B.S. in Molecular Biology from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of California, San Diego in the lab of Randy Hampton. While Nathan’s favorite hobby is avoiding hobbies, they can be found at a wide array of live music venues in New York City and beyond.

Jay Clare is the Associate Director of Business Operations at TARA. Jay has extensive experience in commercial transactions, technology development and commercialization, intellectual property and early stage company operations. Prior to joining TARA, he has been responsible for managing complex transactions, venture capital financings and engineering projects across a number of different positions. Jay received his B.Sc. (Biology) from the State University of New York at Albany and his JD from Syracuse University where he served as a Senior Research Fellow in the Technology Commercialization Law Center.

Kevin Considine is an engineer at TARA. He received his B.S. in Bioengineering, with a concentration in biomedical devices, from Northeastern University. As part of the cooperative education (co-op) program at Northeastern, Kevin has previously worked as a mechanical engineer at Boston Scientific, and gained a year of experience as an engineer at TARA. At Northeastern, he worked in Dr. Qianqian Fang's Computational Optics and Translational Imaging lab, seeking to develop low-cost point-of-care medical devices for developing communities around the world. He also collaborated with the Northeastern Neuromotor Systems lab, developing instruments to support novel approaches to procedural memory-focused physical therapy.

Krista Durney, Ph.D. is the Senior Project Manager at TARA. Dr. Durney was trained in the laboratories of Dr. Gerard Ateshian, Ph.D. and Dr. Clark Hung, Ph.D at Columbia University where her graduate research focused on musculoskeletal biomechanics and tissue engineering. Krista was trained in financial markets and business valuation at Goldman Sachs where she covered the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors as an equity research fellow.

During her graduate studies, Krista’s entrepreneurial spirit has led to her involvement in bringing two technologies out of the university through funding from Columbia’s Biomedical Technology Accelerator and Cisco’s Global Problem Solver Challenge. She obtained both her Bachelor and Master of Engineering degrees from The Cooper Union in NYC (Inter-Disciplinary and Mechanical Engineering), and her Ph.D. from Columbia University (Biomedical Engineering).

Dr. Nicole Feric is the Associate Director of Lab Operations at TARA, Inc. She trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Milica Radisic at the University of Toronto where she helped develop the BiowireTM cardiac tissue maturation protocol and platform technology.

She obtained her B.Sc. (Honours, Biochemistry) and Ph.D. (Biochemistry) from Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. There she began her cardiovascular research career in the laboratory of Dr. Marlys Koschinsky investigating the prothrombotic effect of lipoprotein(a), a coronary heart disease risk factor, on the plasminogen activation system.

Meghan Garcia is a Senior Research Scientist at TARA, focusing on product development. With over 10 years of experience in industry research, her career has centered around developing advanced human disease models from primary human cells and stem cells. She has developed models for neurodegenerative, neurodevelopmental and liver diseases amongst others. Her work in the space of multiple sclerosis targeted a novel therapeutic approach to the disease. In her time at Vertex Pharmaceuticals she applied these disease platforms to drug discovery, and many of these models were successful in identifying molecules as clinical candidates for the treatment of life threatening diseases. Her work on establishing disease models and assay development has resulted in numerous patents, as well as an FDA approved clinical assay.

She obtained her B.S. in Biology and Biotechnology from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she began academic research in the labs of Dr. Steven Grossman and Dr. Michael Francis (UMass Medical School). Her research has largely focused on the fields of neurobiology and stem cell biology while the underlying current of her career has been towards progressing the state of human disease models to increase clinical translation and in turn treat disease.

Jamie is a Research Associate at TARA. She received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering in 2019 and her M.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2020, both from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). While obtaining her M.S., she worked in Dr. Kristen Mills’ lab at RPI where she performed mechanical tests on tumor cell aggregates from human colon cancer cells and human breast cancer cells in order to determine their material properties, providing insights into how tissue biomechanics modulate cell behavior, tissue morphology, and ultimately tumor growth.

Julia is a research associate at TARA. She received her BS in Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (2018), where she worked in Dr. Keith Cook's cardiopulmonary engineering lab researching thrombosis in a 3D-printed microfluidics device to optimize artificial lungs. She went on to complete her MS in Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (2019), exploring shape-specific bioreactors for bone bioengineering and engineering clickable antibodies through metabolic reagent labeling in Dr. Xi Ren's lab.

Isabella Pallotta, PhD, is a Research Scientist at TARA. Dr. Pallotta graduated from the University of Pavia, Italy (M.S., Biology, PhD, Biochemistry). As a visiting PhD student first, and later on as a Postdoctoral Scholar, she spent 5 years in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University (Prof. David Kaplan’s group), to gain fundamental insight into megakaryocyte cell biology and in vitro released platelet functions, within bioengineered systems and advanced 3D systems. This work led to 1 patent, together with several published papers.

At the New York Stem Cells Foundation, NY, in Prof. Donald Freytes’ group, she then started her research career in cardiac tissue engineering, by developing advanced cardiac constructs and investigating the interactions with the inflammatory environment found at the site of myocardial infarction.

Kacey Ronaldson-Bouchard, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Scientist and co-founder of TARA. Dr. Ronaldson-Bouchard has spent the previous 6 years developing various microphysiological systems for organ-on-a-chip studies of human toxicity and disease modeling.

Dr. Ronaldson-Bouchard’s doctoral studies primarily focused on the development of cardiac microphysiological systems with mature functionality. This work led to four published papers and four pending patent applications.

She was graduated from the University of Florida (B.S., Biochemistry), and Columbia University (M.S., Ph.D., Biomedical Engineering). She was President of the Graduate Society of Women Engineers and continues to support initiatives that mentor young women to pursue STEM related fields.

Brian Schriver, Ph.D. is a Research Scientist at TARA, specializing in cardiac electrophysiology. Brian was trained in the Neural Engineering and Control Theory Laboratory at Columbia University, where he combined innovative signal processing and machine learning algorithms, classic neuronal electrophysiology, and non-invasive methods to model neural pathways. His graduate research focused on brain state, specifically attention and arousal, and its effect on decision-making and early stage somatosensory processing. He received his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University.

Ole Seibt is a Senior Staff Engineer at TARA. With more than 7 years of experience in the medical device industry, Ole dedicates himself to platform engineering, testing and scale-up. Before joining TARA, he worked as Product Manager and Project Engineer for a German based implant manufacturer to design oncology, orthopedic and pediatric implants. He managed a small research and development group that successfully developed, validated, and manufactured several implants for product launches in the United States and the CE market.

Before his position in orthopedics, he worked as a research associate in the field of transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) to create computational models of electric fields in the brain. He published scalp electrode positioning methods and predicted resulting currents in areas associated with depression. Ole also helped a medical device start-up to develop an implantable infusion pump for chronic pain and served as a member of the X-ray Imaging Systems department at Philips to improve Positron-Emission-Tomography. He received a Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering from the Technical University Berlin and a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechatronics from the Kiel University of Applied Sciences.

Rooz Sobbi, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Scientist at TARA. Rooz has extensive experience in cardiac electrophysiology and has spent the last 10 years studying ion channels and structural changes in the heart as a result of arrhythmias.

Rooz holds a B.Sc. in Cellular and Molecular Microbiology from University of Calgary and a Ph.D. in Physiology from University of Calgary Medical School.

Mercy is a research associate at TARA. She started her career at Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, a Harvard University affiliated research institute led by Don Ingber, where she helped develop a cystic fibrosis lung airway chip model and experimented with in-house fabricated electrode chips that can measure short circuit currents from the cells. She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering in 2018 and later her M.S. in Biomedical Engineering in 2019, all from Carnegie Mellon University. While obtaining her M.S., Mercy interned at a research lab in Allegheny General Hospital where she designed a dynamic cell culture system for T-cells that better simulated the flow on microfluidic chips.

Dr. Steve Sorota is the Director of Drug Discovery at TARA. He is an experienced cardiovascular physiologist and pharmacologist with over 20 years of drug discovery experience. Immediately prior to joining TARA, he was the lead of a heart failure and pulmonary hypertension discovery group at Merck & Co, Inc. His career at Schering-Plough and Merck covered a wide range of responsibilities including in vitro cardiac repolarization safety, ion channel discovery efforts for pain targets, hypertension, the role of the autonomic nervous system in regulation of blood pressure and metabolism, heart failure, diabetic cardiomyopathy, portal hypertension and pulmonary hypertension. He served as the biology lead for multiple targets and a variety of modalities including oral and inhaled small molecules efforts, fusion proteins, targeted protein degraders and antibodies.

Dr. Sorota obtained his Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Connecticut Health Center under the guidance of Dr. Achilles Pappano. His post-doctoral experience was in the laboratory of Dr. Brian Hoffman in the Department of Pharmacology at Columbia University. After completing postdoctoral training, he remained at Columbia University as faculty member and leader of an independent laboratory until moving to Schering-Plough Research Institute.

Sarah is a Research Associate of Drug Discovery at TARA. She received her B.S. in Biology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2017. While working on her degree, she completed her honors thesis in song sharing and social interaction in song sparrows in Dr. Jeffrey Podos’ lab. Sarah received her M.S. in Biomedical Sciences from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2020. She completed her master's thesis in Dr. Dirk Hubmacher's lab where she studied the role of ADAMTS10 in skeletal muscle development.

Kai Wang is a research scientist at TARA working on cardiac disease modeling. Kai has extensive research and protocol development experience in the field of cardiac channelopathy and stem cell biology. After obtaining M.B.B.S. degree at Tongji Medical University and Ph.D. degree at the University of Hong Kong, he first worked at Columbia University with Dr. Robert Kass on molecular composition and activities of the ion channels associated with congenital cardiac arrhythmias. His widely cited work of modeling Long QT Syndrome using patient-specific iPSCs is among the first few studies that demonstrate the value of an iPSC-based disease model in understanding disease mechanism and in drug testing or developing personalized therapy. During his time in Dr. Eric Bouhassira’s lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Kai focused on disease modeling using human hematopoietic stem cells. He developed an innovative method to reprogram single hematopoietic stem cells into iPSCs at about 50% efficiency, published in Cell Report. His recent work of reprogramming, culture and erythroid differentiation of baboon iPSCs in feeder-free condition was published in Cell in 2019. He was an awardee of the Drukenmiller fellowship at NYSCF.

Alex is a Research Associate at TARA. He received his BS in Biomedical Engineering from University of Rochester where he worked in Dr. Edward Schwarz’s lab developing a passive immunization for MRSA induced osteomyelitis affecting patients with total joint replacements. He went on to receive his M.S. in Bioengineering from University of Pennsylvania. He worked in Dr. Dongeun Huh’s lab where he primarily studied drug transport mechanisms and mechanosensitive effects across the maternal-fetal barrier of placenta-on-a-chip. He also contributed to fabrication of various 3D vascularized tissues models to investigate biological response that mediate complex diseases.

Kristen Young is an engineer at TARA. She received her Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering with a concentration and minor in design from MIT. While there, she worked in the Nuclear Science and Engineering lab under Dr. Jacopo Buongiorno, where she experimented with infusing different kinds of neoprene with heavy inert gases in an attempt to create "artificial blubber" for divers in the Navy. She then dove into two internships at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where she designed and built a system to fill fuel capsule targets with various isotopes for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in order to expand our ability to test unstable isotopes in a high-energy environment. From there, she went on to intern at Cisco Meraki as a Product Design Engineer where she designed and modeled 2 antenna casings for WiFi routers. After graduating, she went on to work as a Project Manager at a financial technology company called Broadway Technology where she managed 3 separate development teams that created bond-trading software for big banks.

Boyang Zhang is a co-founder of TARA and a postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto, Canada. At TARA, Dr. Zhang is developing the manufacturing process of BiowireTM plates. Dr. Zhang obtained his B.Eng. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010, and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry from University of Toronto in 2016.

In 2016 Dr. Zhang was named MedTech’s Rising Star by Medical Device and Diagnostic Industry (MD+DI). In 2013, University of Toronto named Dr. Zhang inventor of the year for his collaborative work on a skin bioprinter. Dr. Zhang’s research interests are tissue vascularization, tissue assembly and organ-on-a-chip engineering. He utilizes microfabrication techniques in combination with biomaterials to build complex tissue models in vitro for drug discovery and regenerative medicine. His research on AngioChip, published as a cover article in Nature Materials, was featured in the Toronto Star and on The National on CBC in 2016. He has published over 20 research papers with H-index of 10 and has 3 patents pending.

Yimu Zhao is a 4th year Ph.D. Candidate in the laboratory of Dr. Milica Radisic at University of Toronto. Her Ph.D. thesis is to develop BiowireTM II drug testing platform (TC dish version and 96-well version) that is designed to 1) be minimally drug absorbable, 2) mature engineered cardiac tissues and 3) accurately evaluate inotropic and chronotropic responses of tissues with drugs. She is one of the inventors of TARA’s BiowireTM platform technology (Patent) and contributes significantly on tissue conditioning, maturation and drug screening optimization for platform development. She is one of the co-founders of TARA.

She obtained her B.A.Sc. (Chemical Engineering) from University of Western Ontario and M.A.Sc. (Chemical Engineering) from Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. There she worked on stem cell technology in the laboratory of Dr. Lauren Flynn and Dr. Stephen Waldman for multi-lineage differentiation and application of adipose-derived stem cells.