Jack is an empathic, solution-oriented, executive leader.
His teams connect people, data, & tools to empower a diverse research community. A natural consensus builder, Jack leads by prioritizing listening and building trust to drive progress. Balancing consistent optimism, vision, and inclusivity while serving as a steading force has been crucial to motivate strong team performance. Often leading without direct authority, fostering strong internal and external relationships has been critical to driving success. Multidisciplinary academic research followed by developing data ecosystems for academic, biopharma, and government partners has sharpened his abilities as a natural translator. Jack excels at distilling complex technical and scientific concepts for diverse audiences – from high-school to the corporate C-Suite.
Jack currently is SVP, Head of Science Strategy at Velsera (formerly Seven Bridges) with responsibility across all sectors (government, advocacy, biotech, and pharmaceutical). Jack serves on the Senior Leadership Team (n<15 execs) driving key strategic, cross-functional initiatives. Previously Jack was SVP and General Manager at Seven Bridges with responsibility for empowering government, academic, and non-profit clients. His team has grown the business to add key strategic capabilities (e.g. imaging) and new therapeutic areas (e.g. infectious disease). This growth correlates with an approximately 4x increase in revenue from 2018 to 2022. Jack has P&L responsibility for the entire business unit and has improved business models. Jack also serves as a PI or Co-I on multiple NIH projects, some exceeding $2M of annual revenue. Strategically, his organization helped the NIH realize return on the investments they have made in data generation and ecosystems.
Jack serves the community and connects directly with users whenever possible. e.g.
- Co-chair for System Interop working group of NIH Cloud Platform Interoperability (NCPI) Effort to help researchers bring together data and tools from NCI, NHLBI, Common Fund, NHGRI, and others
- External Advisory Board for NCI Imaging Data Commons
- Alumni Advisory Board for University of Florida BME.
Previously, Jack was Director of Program management – Program Management involves interaction with diverse financial, technical and community members to shape, develop, win, execute & renew strategic, multi-year engagements. Fundamentally, program managers are communicators who enable seamless information sharing across cross-functional, geographically distributed teams (internal and external) throughout the entire Program life cycle. Jack still supports the Programs team, determines overall strategy, engages with prospective clients, and sets product development priorities within Programs to maximize value to both the customer and Seven Bridges. Jack has worn many hats as the company grew including Business Development, Marketing, and Product among others.
Prior to joining Seven Bridges, Jack worked at ETH Zürich and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in neuroscience, machine learning, and prosthetics. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Penn State in 2002 and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Florida in 2008 – his thesis featured a novel brain-machine interface architecture based on reinforcement learning.
- Resume updated Aug 2023