Neurotech AI platform &
next-gen psychedelic drug development company

Dillan DiNardo is a biotechnology investor and operator with a background in venture capital. Prior to Mindstate Design Labs, he worked in a $1 billion venture fund, executing and managing more than fifty biopharma, medical device, and health tech investments ranging from pre-seed to publicly traded companies. In addition to his investing capacity, he took an operating role in over a dozen early-stage spinout companies. His experience spans a variety of disease indications and modalities, with a focus on deep-tech applications such as cell and gene therapies. Prior to his venture roles, he worked in finance for large international accounting and consulting firms as a transaction-focused consultant, covering the full investment life cycle from seed-stage startup funding to Fortune 500 mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. Dillan holds an MBA and a Bachelor's in Finance from Robert Morris University.

Dr. Ray is an evolutionary biologist, iconoclast, and polymath who has made seminal contributions to multiple fields of science. His paradigm-shifting work has been featured in dozens of media outlets including Time Magazine, The New York Times, and Wired. Enrolling in university at the age of 16, as an undergraduate he was already publishing in the journal Science about new phenomena of nature he discovered with the natural history method. He brought the same natural history approach to the field of artificial life; with no training in computer science, he designed a new CPU architecture, a new operating system, and a new machine language. He created the first known instance of evolution by natural selection apart from life on earth - the first true artificial life program. For the past two decades he has devoted his research to the natural history study of psychedelic experience, synthesizing human experience data and biochemical data to develop hypotheses concerning the biological basis of the diverse varieties of psychedelic experience. Dr. Ray holds a PhD in Biology from Harvard University.

Dr. Wren is a translational pharmacologist with three decades of global neuroscience R&D experience and senior leadership roles within large pharma at Pfizer and GSK, including global disease area strategy leader for depression and anxiety. Dr. Wren has initiated and led multiple multidisciplinary drug discovery and development efforts from target identification and validation to screening to optimization through to Phase 3. His experience has spanned leading multiple discovery, translational, and clinical pharmacology units, psychiatry and neurology disease area strategies, and early development project teams. Most recently Dr. Wren was the CSO of ESCAPE Bio, a clinical stage precision neurology biotech company. Previously Dr. Wren was a Senior Director at GSK where he headed multiple global neuroscience related activities, and he has held additional roles at Pfizer, Organon, and Novartis.

Dr. Brotz is a neuroscientist and and drug development expert with over 20 years of experience leading toxicology, DMPK, in-vivo pharmacology, clinical pharmacology and diagnostic groups. Most recently Dr. Brotz was Sr. Director, Development Sciences at Achaogen where he contributed to multiple programs from lead optimization through Phase 3. Prior to Achaogen, Dr. Brotz worked as head of preclinical development and as a consultant for a number of emerging companies. He is an advisor for the CLSI FAST Program and a member of the Scientific Review Board of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation. Dr. Brotz holds a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Tübingen.

Dr. Hough is a psychiatrist and senior neuroscience clinical development executive, having led the development of the first and only FDA-approved therapeutic in the hallucinogen classes. He was previously a Vice President at Janssen (a Johnson & Johnson company) where he served for 17 years in several leadership roles. His latest position was the SPRAVATO (esketamine) compound development team leader overseeing the development program through two severe mood disorders indications. He was responsible for all medical, scientific, manufacturing, quality, preclinical, and commercial aspects of the program. Previously he was the schizophrenia disease area leader and the development team leader for paliperidone. He played a pivotal role in the development programs for oral INVEGA (paliperidone) and INVEGA SUSTENNA/XEPLION (paliperidone palmitate) 1-month and 3-month formulations.

Dr. Wang has over 20 years of experience contributing to the discovery of multiple clinical candidates, leading cross-functional discovery teams, and serving as a clinical pharmacology subject matter expert. Previously Dr. Wang was Executive Director of Clinical Pharmacology and DMPK at Cortexyme. Earlier in her career as a DMPK Research Scientist at Gilead Sciences, she led the nonclinical team in completing the nonclinical IND and NDA package for Biktarvy®, which is the best-selling medicine to treat HIV. Dr. Wang holds a PhD in Analytical Chemistry from Iowa State University.

Dr. Beaver is a seasoned regulatory leader with a strong track record in regulatory affairs, healthcare compliance, quality assurance, and risk management. Her experience includes small molecule and biologics development for drug candidates across discovery, early and late-stage development, and marketed products. Beginning her career at Johnson & Johnson as a Clinical Pharmacokinetics Leader, Dr. Beaver subsequently held senior regulatory roles at Targacept, Kowa Pharmaceuticals, and Verinetics. She holds a PhD in Pharmacokinetics & Drug Metabolism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Master of Legal Studies in Business & Compliance Law from Washington University in St. Louis.

Dr. Richardson has over 20 years of medicinal chemistry experience in integrated drug discovery, developing and implementing research strategies from lead generation to pre-IND candidate selection. He previously served as Discovery Program Leader at Cavion, Inc. (acquired by Jazz Pharmaceuticals), developing novel T-Type calcium channel inhibitors for neurological and oncology indications. He is the co-inventor of 15 patents and co-author of several publications in peer-reviewed journals, and has a broad knowledge base and experience in crafting new intellectual property to secure patent space. Dr. Richardson holds a PhD in Organic Chemistry from The Ohio State University.

Jasminder Soto has over 15 years of global clinical research experience in clinical operations and clinical data management. She has managed Phase I - III studies in a variety of indications with responsibilities including CRO & clinical sites selection, RFP development and bid analysis, project planning, budget development, EDC and randomization systems build, testing & implementation, and data reporting. Her previous roles include Director of Clinical Operations at Disc Medicine and Associate Director of Clinical Operations at Verastem Oncology. Jasminder holds a Bachelor's in Biology from the University of Massachusetts.

Dr. Rehlaender is a veteran drug product development expert with over 30 years of experience in formulation development, dosage form design, predictive pharmacokinetic modeling, drug delivery technologies, and GMP manufacturing. He designs and oversees development of novel drug products, specializing in controlled release technologies and solubilization of poorly soluble drugs. Dr. Rehlaender holds a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Tegan Johnson has built on her background as an engineering physicist designing particle accelerators to move into project and program management for complex medtech development. Most recently, she served as Director of Program Management at Openwater, a neurodiagnostic medical imaging company where she led the inaugural regulatory program and drove the development program from early hardware proof-of-concept to its first human studies. Prior to her role at Openwater, she served as Project Manager at Varian Medical Systems where she led product design development, risk hazard analysis, verification & validation, and compliance testing to FDA standards for a number of projects, each with teams numbering between 5-20 personnel. Tegan holds a Bachelor's in Psychology and Physics from Otterbein University and a Master's in Particle Beam Physics from Indiana University in conjunction with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Lex Levkovskyy has over seven years of experience in software development, system architecture, and machine learning engineering. He has worked with software engineering teams ranging from seed-stage to Fortune 500 companies in the fields of medical equipment and biometrics. As part of a $2 million contract with the Department of Defense, he co-developed a mobile-based alternative to Common Access Cards used by military personnel for authorized access. Lex is also the technical co-founder of Sojourns, a mobile application for personalized harm reduction in substance use.

Lex has published research on neural machine translation between natural and formal languages, and on semantic derivation from character-based neural network models. He is the co-inventor of multiple patents in the field of behavioral biometrics, which describe machine-learning-based systems that can identify authorized users based on their behavioral patterns.

Lex holds a Master's in Computer Science from Nova Southeastern University with a focus on machine learning algorithms for natural language processing.

Dr. Thieme is a cheminformatician with deep expertise in the areas of data science, biochemical and subjective experiential data curation, computational chemistry, medicinal chemistry, psychopharmacology, pathophysiology, and drug discovery and development. He employs machine learning techniques, quantitiative structure-activity relationship modeling, molecular modeling, and biomedical knowledge graph analysis to develop virtual screening platforms oriented toward the identification of novel candidate molecules for targeted applications.

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Dr. Thieme's dissertation focused on harmonizing raw subjective scent data via natural language processing, predicting subjective scent perception profiles from chemical structure of odorants, and leveraging biomedical knowledge graphs to draw connections between perceptual processes and various disease states.  Additionally, Dr. Thieme has worked to formally define the concept of Clinical Outcomes Pathways, a new paradigm for the classification, characterization, and comparision of drug action. Now, at Mindstate Design Labs, Dr. Thieme is adapting these methods to the domain of subjective psychedelic experience to drive discovery of novel psychedelic drugs and precision design of modified conscious states.

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Dr. Thieme holds a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Bachelor's Degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Purdue University.

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Ahnjili ZhuParris is a data scientist, machine learning engineer, and cognitive neuroscientist specializing in applying machine learning techniques to generate insights from complex heterogeneous data. She was previously a data scientist at the Centre for Human Drug Research (CHDR), a leading clinical research organization, where she developed a data science library for analyzing clinical trial data.

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While at CHDR, Ahnjili was also a PhD Candidate at Leiden University Medical Center and Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, where her thesis focused on translating self-reported outcomes, physiological, and behavioral data into meaningful clinical insights. She created new biomarkers that enabled passive collection of informative health data during clinical trials and used those biomarkers to develop machine learning models that classified clinical diagnosis, estimated symptom severity, and predicted future clinical states.

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Ahnjili’s prior research has also explored the impacts of LSD, methylphenidate, and mindfulness on cognitive flexibility. In addition to her academic pursuits, she hosts workshops and installations that aim to demystify the mechanisms, biases, applications, and potential challenges associated with AI algorithms.

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Ahnjili holds a Bachelor's Degree in Neuroscience from Edinburgh University and a Master's Degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from Radboud University. In 2024, she will defend her thesis as a PhD candidate in Clinical Neuropharmacology & Applied Data Analytics at Leiden University.

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Bethany Leins has over 25 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry with more than a decade in project management roles. Her technical background is in process development, cell culture, and aseptic processing of biologic drugs. She holds a bachelors in biology from Duquesne University and the PMP certification from the Project Management Institute.

Josie Kins is a pioneer and prominent leader in the online psychonautic community, having spent the last 12 years formalizing the documentation of subjective psychedelic effects. She spearheads the effort to develop a detailed index of the diverse varieties of the psychedelic experience, which will enable new psychometric scales and computational efforts to map the biological basis of subjective psychedelic experience.

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Josie brings a deep familiarity with psychedelic phenomenology and a unique ability to precisely articulate the range of psychedelic experience. As the founder of PsychonautWiki.org, Josie grew the site into a leading source of information about the phenomenology of psychedelic drugs with over one million unique monthly visitors.

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She is also the founder of EffectIndex.com which features a granular taxonomy of the subjective psychedelic experience. Recognizing that verbal descriptions of psychedelic phenomenology would greatly benefit from complementary visual and auditory representations, she also founded the r/replications subreddit which has over 140,000 subscribers and has launched the careers of multiple visionary artists.

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