Sandy Balkin, Ph.D.
Senior Director, Global Insights and Analytics, Sanofi
Sandy Balkin, Ph.D. is Senior Director, Global Insights and Analytics with Sanofi. He is responsible for the identification, development and scaling of new data and analytic capabilities that support R&D, medical and commercial decision making.
Prior to joining Sanofi, Sandy built best-in-class analytics functions at two consultancies as Vice President of Analytics and Commercial Effectiveness with Aptus Health and as Senior Principal with Precision for Value. Prior to that, Sandy held a number of roles of increasing responsibility at Boehringer-Ingelheim where he was Executive Director, Forecasting and Business Analytics and at Pfizer as Director/Team Leader of Predictive Modeling, building and leading teams responsible for providing forecasting and strategic support to key corporate functions including BD&L, marketing, finance, market research, new product planning and sales.
Sandy has a Ph.D. in Business Administration from Penn State University. He also holds a Master of Arts in Statistics from Penn State University, as well as a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Mathematics and Economics and Music from Lafayette College where he graduated with honors.
Mukulita Bapat
Manager, ZS Associates
Mukulita Bapat is a Manager with ZS Associates in the San Francisco, CA office. She has 9+ years of experience working with Pharma/Biotech clients in across sales and marketing engagements. Mukulita has worked with clients on a variety of issue areas ranging from customer segmentation and targeting, commercial organization design to measuring promotional effectiveness. Mukulita has strong expertise in using various secondary data sources such as claims, EMR, sales, etc. to help derive customer and market insights. Mukulita holds a BS in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering, from the University of Pune, India.
Anton Berisha, MD
Senior Director, Clinical Analytics & Innovation, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Health Care
Alongside over two decades of clinical experience spanning general practice, general surgery, clinical laboratory and pharmacy, Dr. Berisha has extensive expertise with relational databases, data analysis and predictive modeling applications across the continuum of healthcare. Dr. Berisha completed medical school in 1993 and General Surgery residency in 2002.Since joining LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Dr. Berisha has been instrumental in building clinical data intelligence including direction of scientist team in the design, development, and validation of predictive modeling algorithms and risk stratification tools.
Currently, he is serving as Head of Clinical Analytics and Data Science team at LexisNexis Risk Solutions researching Socioeconomic Determinants of Health (SDOH) and their impact and relationship with a number of relevant clinical outcomes, most recently around medication adherence and patient engagement trends.
Gagan Bhatia
Principal, DataStride Solutions
Gagan Bhatia is the founding Principal at DataStride Solutions, a sales and marketing consulting firm. Gagan has been in the biopharma industry for 14 years and his areas of expertise include strategic analysis for launch planning, sales force strategy, customer analytics, and managed care analytics. He has experience in advising senior executives from Fortune 100 companies to start ups. Before founding DataStride, he was in the Marketing Science group at Genentech and led analytics for several pipeline products including Ocrevus, a transformative blockbuster drug in Multiple Sclerosis. Before that, Gagan spent over 8 years at ZS Associates, helping clients in the bio-pharma and medical device companies on sales force strategy and operations including targeting and incentive compensation. Gagan holds an MBA from University of California at Berkeley, an MS in Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BTech in Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology at Bombay.
Julia Brodsky
Executive Director, Data Capabilities, Novartis Oncology
Julia has over 20 years of experience across pharmaceutical, finance and telecommunication industries. She is an Executive Director, Data Capabilities at Novartis US Oncology, leading a team responsible for creating a data capabilities roadmap, strategy & execution across both commercial & medical functions. In her previous roles at Novartis, Julia led teams responsible for Payer & IDN Insights & Analytics, Patients Services & Digital Analytics.
Prior to joining Novartis, Julia has served on several management teams, including Sanofi, Organon, and Symphony Health Solutions.
Karthikeyan Chidambaram
Associate Director - CMG-Data Strategy and Architecture, Genentech Inc
Karthikeyan Chidambaram, Associate Director - CMG-Data Strategy and Architecture with Genentech Inc, has high-end expertise in conduct and interpretation of secondary data analysis in the pharmaceutical/ biotechnology industry. In his current position, Karthik leads the CMG-Data Management and Architecture, responsible to all data acquisition, strategy and systems (data) architecture within the CMG pillars. Prior to Genentech, Karthik spent nine years with Cognizant Technology Solutions as a practice leader for the SAS center of excellence, providing strategic consulting services, supporting the analytics, data reporting, and data management needs of senior leadership in top Bio-Pharma, including Amgen, Roche, Genentech, Astrazeneca, J&J and Novartis. Karthik holds a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from Bharathiar University, a Master’s in Software Engineering from BITS-Pilani and an MBA from Colorado State University.
Karthik has presented at several SAS, big data and other industry conferences and has authored numerous white papers on SAS & secondary data.
Karthik has served PMSA’s board for seven years as Program Committee Co-Chair, Member Relations Chair, Media and Marketing Director, Secretary/Treasurer, Vice President, and President.
Yu-Chen Chen
Senior Analytics Manager, Genentech
Yu-Chen is a Senior Analytics Manager at Genentech and has 9+ years of experience in data analytics and research. Her experience includes developing targeting strategies, segmenting customers, and analyzing promotional effectiveness. At Genentech, Yu-Chen is the Marketing Science Lead for Hemophilia and provides analytical insights to support the product launch. Prior to Genentech, she worked in marketing analytics across multiple industries and companies including Safeway, Ogilvy & Mather, GfK, and the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC). Yu-Chen holds a BA in Diplomacy from National Chengchi University in Taiwan and a MA in Politics from New York University.
Vijay Chovatiya
Data Scientist, Analytical Wizards
Vijay is a data scientist and consultant at Analytical Wizards(AW), a healthcare analytics startup focused on advanced analytics. He has over 5 years of healthcare analytics and consulting experience. Prior to joining AW, he was a business consultant at ZS, where he worked on a range of client and internal projects involving machine learning, automation and optimization. Vijay leads real world evidence based analytics at AW and is focused on building scalable machine learning and artificial intelligence based solutions.
Vijay has done his bachelors in chemical engineering from National Institute of Technology (Nagpur, India).
Cynthia Dilley
Head of New Patient Value Focus, UCB, Inc.
Cindie Dilley is a Solution Accelerator at UCB, Inc., charged with progressing non-medicinal epilepsy patient solutions through a combination of devices, digital health and data with current emphasis on sophisticated patient stratification for early phase development, biomarkers and multilayer data for prediction. Cindie has over 15 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry in diverse roles including global brand lead, strategic marketing, pricing and forecasting, managed care analytics, health outcomes, organic and inorganic product development assessments, sales force sizing, strategy, and structure and primary/secondary market research both globally and nationally. Cindie performed her graduate studies in economics at the University of Illinois where, for four years, she also concurrently taught undergraduate economics and finance.
Cindie has served PMSA’s board for eight years in the role of Program Committee Chair, Program Committee Member, Secretary/Treasurer, Vice President, President and Executive Advisory Council.
Orla
Doyle
Senior Data Scientist, IQVIA
Orla Doyle is a Senior Data Scientist in the Predictive Analytics team. She leads the machine learning solution design and delivery across a range of cleint engagements, including developing early disease detection algorithms for patient finding in rare and undiagnosed diseases. Her expertise is in the area of biomedical signal processing, statistical and machine learning methods. She has worked on a range of challenging healthcare applications across a wide range of modalities including EEG, ECG, MRI, behavioural and clinical data which have resulted in over twenty-five peer review publications and attracted industrial and research council post-doctoral research funding. Orla has particular expertise in developing predictive models in Bayesian frameworks, kernel learning methods. The overarching aim of her work is to develop sophisticated models which are readily interpretable. Orla received her PhD from University College Cork (Ireland) and has held post-doctoral research positions at Kings College London.
Adam
Dubrow
Advanced Analytics Services Director, Crossix
Adam is a Senior Manager, Advanced Analytics, at Crossix and is responsible for developing and executing innovative analytics solutions that leverage the power of Crossix data and technology. He manages a team of analytics professionals to deliver custom projects and insights for healthcare clients, with extensive experience in multi-channel marketing measurement and optimization and deploying predictive analytics and real-world data to improve patient and business outcomes. Adam joined Crossix in 2011 and holds a BA in Philosophy from Columbia University.
Jeff Greene
VP Digital Strategy & Insights, DRG Digital | Manhattan Research
Jeff Greene's digital journey began with a Texas Instruments 99/4A and a subscription to CompuServe. He's never looked back. A strategist, writer, speaker, and marketing innovator, Jeff has spent more than 20 years guiding clients into the digital age. For the past 9 years, he's worked with pharmaceutical manufacturers to evolve their multichannel approaches, harnessing the power of customer data to make programs and teams more effective. In his new role at DRG Digital, Jeff gets to dive headlong into several terabytes-worth of digital insights and real-world evidence. He plans to emerge with powerful opportunities for life sciences companies to accelerate their digital transformation.
Ira Haimowitz
VP, Product Strategy, Crossix
Ira Haimowitz is Vice President, Product Strategy, at Crossix. In this role, Ira helps accelerate new product innovation for Crossix’s range of patient-centered, data-driven marketing solutions. Ira also enhances client delivery as a subject matter expert, and provides thought leadership. He has more than 20 years of pharmaceutical, CPG, agency, and consulting expertise. Ira has shared his knowledge through publishing and speaking opportunities, including authoring the book Healthcare Relationship Marketing. Ira received both his Ph.D. in Computer Science and B.S. degree in Mathematics from MIT.
Tim Hare
Senior Manager, Client Analytics, Symphony Health
Tim Hare is Senior Manager in Client Analytics
at Symphony Health. He is a statistician and computational biologist with 13+ years of robotic high throughput drug discovery experience, and 14+ years of pre-clinical biochemical research experience, Tim was Sr. Scientist in Informatics at a pharmaceutical firm prior to joining the commercial effectiveness team at Symphony. Tim has an extensive publication record and has received 10 industry awards.
Markus Hauser
CEO, Enginologi Inc.
Markus Hauser is the CEO of Enginologi, a company that ignites rapid sales growth through proven machine learning, third generation segmentation and real time execution capabilities for pharma and biotech companies globally. Prior to Enginologi, he was Director of Commercial Effectiveness and Operations at Biogen and responsible for supporting inline and launch brands in immunology and rare diseases. He led the Commercial Effectiveness, Forecasting and Information Management groups and held various roles in Operations, Marketing and New Products. Prior to joining Biogen, Markus worked at Booz & Co. and ZS Associates where he focused on Sales, Marketing and Payor related strategy and operations. Markus co-founded AdPilot, a NYC based company delivering data on the effectiveness of mass media advertising to consumer packaged goods companies. Markus received an MBA and a PhD from the University of Zurich, received a post-doc and lectured at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Wesley Heeter
Analytics Manager, Genentech
Wesley (Wes) Heeter is an Analytics Manager with Genentech Inc. in San Francisco, CA. He has 5+ years of healthcare analytics experience guiding marketing and sales efforts through advanced analytics, and previously consulting for CMS and the FDA. Wes’ broad experiences prior in both marketing and finance have created a strong expertise in communicating expense planning, promotional effectiveness and customer targeting. Wes hold a BS in Economics and Public Health from Johns Hopkins University and a Masters in Public Health from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Mimi Huizinga
Vice President and Head of Strategic Data, US Oncology, Novartis
Mary Margaret (“Mimi”) Huizinga, MD MPH FACP, is the Vice President and Head of Strategic Data for US Oncology at Novartis. Dr. Huizinga leads the digital and data strategy and supports the broader digital, data and real world evidence needs for US Oncology. In addition, she oversees the generation and dissemination of value evidence at Novartis through the work of the HEOR (health economics and outcomes research) team.
Prior to joining Novartis, Dr. Huizinga was the Chief Health Information Officer at Premier, Inc., ensuring that Premier’s products and services met the evolving needs of healthcare systems. She led Premier’s Applied Science division of over 40 HEOR scientists. Dr. Huizinga also oversaw a collaborative of over 40 integrated delivery networks that were participating in alternative payment models. She led the development of a benchmarking approach that helped systems prioritize efforts to achieve success in these programs. Dr. Huizinga was named a core faculty in three of CMS’s learning action networks for Pioneer ACOs, Next Generation ACOs and ESCOs (ESRD Seamless Care Organization). She was a member of various National Quality Forum (NQF) and PCPI committees.
Previously, she was the Medical Director for the Center of Health Promotion and Disease Management at Vanderbilt University where she promoted population health and shared data strategies and was a leader in informatics. She worked to harmonize cross-continuum metrics across many payer programs and provide actionable reports to physicians and administrators at various sites of care. Dr. Huizinga was the Vice President for Quality at LifePoint Hospitals and led the Hospital Engagement Network. At LifePoint, her efforts lead to a cultural change movement and have significantly reduced mortality, readmissions and patient harm while improving employee satisfaction. Dr. Huizinga has also worked as an Associate at McKinsey & Company’s Washington, DC, office and as a faculty member at The Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Huizinga graduated summa cum laude from Mississippi State University with a Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biology, Biochemistry and Mathematics. She received a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology and a Doctor of Medicine from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, TN. Dr. Huizinga completed a two year fellowship in Quality Improvement at the VA hospital in Nashville. She is a board-certified internist, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a part-time Assistant Professor of Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Prasanna Kumar
Manager, ZS Associates
Prasanna is a Manager at ZS Associates, based out of Princeton, NJ. In his 11+ years at ZS, Prasanna has led several client projects and programs encompassing such broad areas as Commercial Strategy and Transformation, Marketing Execution, Resource Planning and Deployment, Sales Compensation and Business Technology. Through a continuous involvement in all phases, from strategy to tactical execution, Prasanna has gained a holistic experience on how functions can be best enabled to transform ideas into wholesale change. Prasanna holds a Bachelors and a Masters degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
Shubham Lahoti
Axtria
Shubham Lahoti has more than 11 years of experience in analytics, modeling, and technology projects with close to 6 years in sales and marketing optimization in the pharma industry.
Shubham has managed several sales force analytics projects that involved segmentation, multi-channel analytics, response modeling, ROI calculation, sales force sizing and structure assessment, alignment, people placement and call planning.
He holds a Bachelors degree from IIT Bombay
Steve Laux
Principal in Predictive Analytics, IQVIA
Steve Laux is a principal in the predictive analytics team at IQVIA with over 20 years’ experience in the life sciences industry as a consultant and industry executive. Steve’s experience spans commercial strategy across the entire life-cycle of pharmaceutical product development, including roles as head of new product planning, commercial analytics and business development for a specialty biotechnology company. Steve’s background in consulting, large pharma and small, public biotech gives him a broad strategic perspective and experience in developing innovative life science technologies and building new businesses.
Alina Levin
Senior Director, Crossix
Alina joined Crossix in 2013 and serves as Senior Director, Analytics Services. With significant agency background at Digitas and Digitas Health prior to joining Crossix, Alina has nearly 12 years of marketing analytics and strategy experience within financial services, media, and healthcare. Alina has worked closely with executives and brand teams throughout the Top-25 Pharma companies to evaluate and optimize marketing programs. In her time on the agency side, Alina established detailed measurement strategies for multi-channel campaigns across both launch and established brands. Alina developed an expertise in display and search media measurement, as well as detailed website analytics. Alina holds a BA in Strategy and Marketing from Babson College.
Jack Lin
Director of Business Analytics, Actelion, a Janssen Pharmaceutical Company
Jack Lin leads the Business Analytics function at Actelion.
He brings two decades of experience in the healthcare sector. Jack earned his MBA from UC Berkeley and hold both an MS and a BS from Stanford University.
Antonio Melo
Program Leader, Sage Therapeutics
Antonio (Tony) Melo is a Program Leader at Sage Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company committed to discovering, developing and commercializing novel medicines to transform the lives of patients with life-alter central nervous system disorders. Prior to Sage, he was the head of US Customer Excellence & Operations group at Biogen responsible for sales operations and excellence, marketing and multichannel operations, customer and market insights, customer information management and congresses and meeting management. Prior to Biogen, Tony worked as an investment banker and engineer for various companies from Fortune 500 to start-ups. Tony received an MBA, with healthcare concentration from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University.
Ajit Menon, Ph.D.
Sr. Director, Commercial Innovation, Janssen North America
Ajit Menon PhD is Sr. Director, Commercial Innovation at the Janssen Pharmaceutical companies of Johnson and Johnson. In this role, Ajit is responsible for the design, development and scalable implementation of advanced analytics capabilities in the pursuit of sales growth, enhanced customer experience and operational efficiencies. Ajit and his team identify commercial “use cases”, design experiments and implement solutions that leverage the power of AI, Machine Learning and Data Visualization to catalyze business impact.
Ajit joined Janssen in 2015 from Biogen, where he spent over 6 years in progressively expanding analytics leadership roles, ranging from commercial analytics, strategic planning and forecasting. Prior to Biogen, Ajit spent several years in management consulting, pricing strategy and market research, supporting multiple bio-pharma clients.
Ajit is known as an analytics futurist and has demonstrated a strong commitment to customer centric analytics approaches that have demonstrable impact to the business. He empowers his teams to creatively tackle business challenges of today with an eye towards the impending opportunities of the future.
Ajit is a trained pharmacist and holds a PhD in Pharmacy Administration (Health Outcomes) from the University of Georgia.
Shunmugam Mohan
Principal Consultant, Bayser
Shunmugam Mohan is a Principal Consultant with Bayser. He is fascinated with Specialty Pharma and is on his way to becoming an expert. Another of his interests is simulation and he recently developed an agent-based model in the urology field that forecasts sales while leveraging group practice dynamics. Shunmugam worked on several territory alignment projects and is always on the lookout for creative displays of multi-dimensional information. In the cardiovascular field, his recent contribution has been to build a potential assessment model of hospitals that incorporates geographic dynamics around the hospital. Prior to joining Bayser, Shunmugam worked in immune system modeling where he specialized in 3D texture analysis of multiple imaging modalities during his Masters in Electrical Engineering at the Ohio State University. He can be reached at (847) 679-8265 or
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Paul
Rabideau
Sr. Advisor, KMK Consulting
After completing his Ph.D. in Economics at Rutgers University and teaching undergraduate Economics, Statistics and Finance. Paul began his career at AT&T Bell Labs. In 1996, he moved into Pharma, working at Novartis for 18 years heading up both the US and Global Marketing Science groups.
For the past 4 years, Paul has been at KMK , an innovative consulting firm in Morristown, NJ with 100+ analysts, which covers the full range of pharma analytics needs in MS, MR, SFE, data management.
One of most rewarding career experiences that he has ever had was joining the PMSA Program Committee and eventually becoming President in 2002.
Sanjay Rao
Vice President, Strategic Research Insights
Sanjay K. Rao graduated with a Ph.D. in Marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a minor in statistics and econometrics. Over the past two decades, he has been part of the biopharmaceutical industry as an analyst, manager, consultant or executive, actively designing, managing and leading projects shaping sales, marketing, pricing, access and commercial strategies of ~40+ biopharmaceutical products launched in the U.S. and other global markets.
Dr. Rao was formerly director and team leader in the Business Analysis and Information (BAI) group at Amgen, a management consultant at ZS Associates and vice president, Life Sciences, at CRA International.
Dr. Rao’s publications have appeared in The Journal of Business Strategy, The Journal of Commercial Biotechnology, The Journal of New Product Innovation Management, Marketing Research, Marketing Health Services, Product Management Today, The Journal of Pharmaceutical Development & Regulation, PM360, Law 360, Journal of Medical Marketing, Pharmaceutical Executive Europe and proceedings of the PMRG, the PMRG Institute, the PMSA, the EPHMRA, the Oxford Outcomes PRO Conference and the MRA.
In a special management consulting supplement, the November 2007 issue of Pharmaceutical Executive carries Dr. Rao’s profile as one the leading strategy consultants in the global bio/pharmaceutical industry.
Rick Rosenthal
Senior Principal , Symphony Health
Rick Rosenthal leads advanced analytics consulting engagements in Symphony Health's Commercial Effectiveness practice. For over 25 years, he has been focused on creating productive relationships between healthcare providers and the biopharma industry. Rick also serves on the Board of Hunterdon Healthcare System, and is an avid fly fisherman.
Dharmendra
Sahay
Principal, ZS Associates
Dharmendra Sahay is the global leader of Integrated Analytics at ZS. He has also been a member of ZS’s Board since 2009. Sahay has more than 27 years of experience in the healthcare industry, helping multiple organizations to develop commercial strategies and improve commercial effectiveness through analytics and technology solutions. The breadth of experience across business consulting, technology and analytics has allowed him to help his clients effectively link commercial strategy with downstream implementation and operations. Sahay has worked extensively with clients to effect transformational changes through large analytics programs, system implementation and outsourcing. He is currently driving various innovations at the intersection of technology and analytics to drive pragmatic business impact by leveraging big data technology. Sahay holds an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, an M.S. in Computer Science from Northwestern, and a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
Mark Schulman
Senior Director, Analytics Services, Crossix
Mark has over 17 years of analytics, strategy and marketing consulting experience, and has worked closely with executives and brand teams from many Fortune 100 companies and Top-25 Pharma companies. Mark leads Crossix’s Patient and HCP Insights and Segmentation Practice. Mark holds a BA in Economics from Haverford College and an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.
Ashish Sharma
Principal, Axtria
Ashish Sharma is an entrepreneur and technology strategist with over 20 years of experience in Big Data, data engineering, and building scalable products. As a principal at Axtria, Ashish unifies the people, process, and technologies of data, analytics, cloud, and machine learning to accelerate the data to insight journey.
Through his work, Ashish leads teams that enable operational efficiencies and business transformations, by building incubators and R&D labs. These efforts have resulted in successful companies, capabilities, and product lines in Big Data, including decision science, data engineering, security, and scalability with focus on business insights, advanced analytics, and customer adaption.
Arun Shastri
Principal, ZS Associates
Arun leads ZS’s Analytics practice for multiple market sectors. In this role, he provides strategy and advisory services to clients on their analytics organization, helping them build their analytics capabilities and leverage their data and analytics for greater commercial effectiveness. Arun’s work on a broad range of commercial effectiveness issues spans multiple industries, including insurance, asset management, travel and transportation, pharmaceuticals, high-tech and healthcare. He is an expert in analytics organization design, data science and advanced analytics, analytics capability building, and analytics process outsourcing. Arun was with ZS from 1995 to 2010, during which time he served clients in the financial services, travel, and pharmaceutical industries on a broad range of issues. He opened ZS’ Boston office in 2001. Before rejoining ZS in 2015, he was chief strategy officer of Promontory Interfinancial Network LLC. Arun holds a Ph.D. in Decision Sciences from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Kingston Smith
Managing Director, Accenture
Kingston Smith leads Accenture’s Midwest Analytics Practice and has focused on analytics innovation for over 25 years. He has led several large-scale multi-year analytics innovation programs and has worked with clients on enterprise analytics strategy and transformations to help mature analytics capabilities across the organization. His educational and professional background is in advanced analytics and data science with an emphasis on sales and marketing effectiveness.
Within Accenture, Kingston leads a team of regionally based analytics practitioners supported by global delivery centers serving clients across all industries in the Midwest region. Prior to joining Accenture in 2007, Kingston held commercial operations leadership positions at TAP and AstraZeneca and started his career with ZS Associates specializing in pharmaceutical sales force planning and optimization. He holds an MBA in Econometrics and Statistics from the University of Chicago and a BS in Communications and Economics from Northwestern University.
Cindy Solomon
For more than two decades, leadership expert, author, and keynote speaker Cindy Solomon has helped Fortune 1000 companies around the world cultivate courageous leaders and customer-focused cultures.
With her razor-sharp wit, Cindy goes beyond battlefield analogies and sports metaphors to deliver real-life business stories and actionable advice on next-generation leadership and service excellence in today’s customer-driven economy.
Keynote attendees and workshop participants praise Cindy for providing new and relevant information that can be immediately applied to their daily work routines. Business leaders consistently express amazement at the fast and lasting results they see both in their corporate cultures and against the bottom line. Past and present clients include: Oracle, Cisco, Google, Salesforce, Raytheon, Wells Fargo, UPS, PWC, The Ritz-Carlton, Pfizer, and hundreds more.
Tatiana Sorokina
Associate Director, Digital & Advanced Analytics, Novartis Oncology
Tatiana Sorokina is a data science and machine learning expert with extensive experience in healthcare. Tatiana leads Advanced Analytics for Oncology at Novartis and is focused on building scalable technology and driving automation in marketing. Tatiana has been developing machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions for healthcare industry for over 5 years. Prior to joining Novartis, she has run Parceed, an AI-based guidance system for medical students. Before starting her own company, Tatiana was a Head of Data Science at Prognos, a healthcare technology company that applies AI to clinical lab diagnostics. Tatiana holds M.Sc. in Advanced Analytics in Marketing from Columbia University and B.Sc. in Economics from Moscow State University.
April Todd
Senior Vice President, Avalere
April Todd, Senior Vice President, Avalere, leads our Data Analytics practice, which provides creative data-driven insights to inform strategic solutions for complex business challenges and policy issues.
Prior to joining Avalere, April established MNsure, Minnesota’s health insurance exchange, and served as its Executive Director. Prior to that, as Minnesota’s State Health Economist, she led a team of researchers and analysts tasked with monitoring, analyzing, and advising on health policy issues related to cost, quality, and access. April also served as the Vice President of Strategic Analysis and Communications for Government Affairs at UnitedHealth Group and as the Director of Competitive Intelligence for United Healthcare.
April holds an MA in Public Health from the University of Minnesota and a BA from Beloit College.
Jean Patrick Tsang
President, Bayser
Jean-Patrick Tsang is the Founder and President of Bayser, a Chicago-based consulting firm dedicated to pharmaceuticals sales and marketing. JP is an expert in patient-level data and related analyses ranging from longitudinal analyses to hospital-retail spillover, KOL identification, influence mapping, referral networks, molecular targeting, promotion response, and the like. JP is also an expert in specialty pharma and has worked on numerous specialty pharma projects. JP publishes and talks on a regular basis and runs one-day tutorials several times a year. In a previous life, JP deployed Artificial Intelligence to automate the design of payloads for satellites, methaners, ethaners, and cruise-liners. JP earned a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Grenoble University and an MBA from INSEAD in France. Recipient of the PMSA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. He can be reached at (847) 920-1000 or
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Devesh Verma, Principal, Axtria Inc.
Devesh Verma is a principal at Axtria, Inc. He has over 18 years of diverse experience with brand marketing, technology, campaign enablement, data-driven decisions, data security and platforms built for reaching customers to deliver on customer engagement, business insights, advanced analytics and infrastructure capacity management across multiple domains. He leads Axtria's Marketing Solutions practice.
Yunlong Wang
Sr. Mgr, Advanced Analytics, IQVIA
Data scientist of Advanced Analytics at IQVIA. Trained as a computer and machine learning scientist, Yunlong has expertise in deep learning, data modeling and simulations, Bayesian methods, and their applications to network data analysis, such as social network, TV channel network, and physician-patient networks. In this capacity, he provides methodological and analytical support to help clients solve complex issues in business and health outcomes research.
Prior joining IQVIA, Yunlong was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Digital Technology Center (DTC) at the University of Minnesota. He received his BS degree in electrical engineering from the Xi’an Jiaotong University, and he earned his PhD degree in computer engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is an active and prolific scholar whose work has been published more than 15 journal/ conference papers and book chapters. He is a member of IEEE and he serves as a reviewer for many highly ranked IEEE journals.
David Wood
Principal, Axtria
David Wood brings more than 35 years of experience in mathematical modeling of business problems, with over 20 years in sales and marketing analysis for Life Sciences companies. At Axtria, David serves as a Senior Principal, with emphasis on projects in mathematical modeling of sales operations and multi-channel promotion analysis. In addition, David has done substantial work in the development of Yield Management for the commercial airline industry (at Sabre Decision Technologies), and has worked in finance, energy and natural resource economics issues.
David holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in Operations Research.
Yilian Yuan
Vice President, Statistics and Advanced Analytics, IQVIA
Yilian Yuan is vice president, Statistics and Advanced Analytics at IQVIA. She leads a team of data scientists, statisticians and research experts to help clients address a broad range of business and industry issues. Dr. Yuan has an extensive background in applying econometric and statistical modeling, predictive modeling and machine learning, discrete choice modeling and quantitative market research, combined with patient-level longitudinal data to provide actionable insights for Pharma clients to improve business performance.
Kaiwen Zhong
Senior Associate, Axtria
Kaiwen is an innovator, focusing on leveraging big data and machine learning to deliver efficiency and insights in pharma. She is a senior associate at Axtria’s Innovation Lab and Big Data team. Prior to Axtria, Kaiwen worked in pharma, finance, and growing startups. She graduated from Cornell University with a Master’s degree focusing on machine learning.
Throughout her time at Axtria, Kaiwen has been developing and productizing pharma-specific capabilities for clients in medical affairs, marketing, data, and analytics, through AI, natural language processing, and advanced analytics.
Li Zhou
Director, Advanced Analytics, IQVIA
Li Zhou is Director in Global advanced analytic team. She has more than 20 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry specialized in market science and marketing research. As a Director of Advanced Analytic group, Li leads a very experienced group with backgrounds in Projection, Statistics modeling, Marketing Research, and Consulting. This group supports high-end analytic projects, core competence in physician targeting, patient-level studies, and different data assets projections, which integrate pharmacy data, medical, hospital, lab and payer level data. She designed patient projection models for Oncology, RA, HGH and Vaccine data marts. Her other experiences focused on: predictive modeling, survival analysis, forecasting, direct to consumer advertising evaluation, and experimental design. Her strength has been method and product design and development.
