Advisory Board

Dr. Gujrathi is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gossamer Bio. Prior to joining Gossamer Bio, Dr. Gujrathi served as Chief Medical Officer of Receptors, Inc. from June 2011 until the company’s acquisition by Celgene Corporation in August 2015. Prior to joining Receptors, she was Vice President of the Global Clinical Research Group in Immunology at Bristol Myers Squibb from 2008 to 2011. Dr. Gujrathi worked at Genentech from 2002 to 2008 where she held roles of increasing responsibility in the Immunology, Tissue Growth and Repair clinical development group and served as the Avastin Franchise Team Leader. From 1999 to 2002, Dr. Gujrathi was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in the healthcare practice where she provided strategic advice on a variety of projects in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Gujrathi received her B.S. with highest distinction in Biomedical Engineering and M.D. from Northwestern University in their accelerated Honors Program in Medical Education. She completed her Internal Medicine Internship and Residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She received additional training at University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University in their Allergy and Immunology Fellowship Program.

Ralph A. DeFronzo, MD, is Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Diabetes Division at the University of Texas Health Science Center and the Deputy Director of the Texas Diabetes Institute, San Antonio, Texas. His major interests focus on the pathogenesis and treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus and the central role of insulin resistance in the metabolic-cardiovascular cluster of disorders known collectively as the Insulin Resistance Syndrome. For his work in this area, Dr. DeFronzo has received many national and international awards including the Banting Award from the ADA (2008), the Claude Bernard Award from the EASD (2008) and most recently, Dr. DeFronzo received the Hamm International Prize (2017). These represent the highest scientific achievement awards given by the American and European Diabetes Associations, respectively. With more than 800 articles published in peer-reviewed medical journals, Dr. DeFronzo is a distinguished clinician, teacher, and investigator who has been an invited speaker at major national and international conferences on diabetes mellitus.

Dr. Rohit Loomba is a Professor of Medicine, Director of Hepatology and Vice Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology at University of California at San Diego. He is an internationally recognized thought leader in the management of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and has established a thriving and vibrant center for clinical care and research in NAFLD at UCSD.
Dr. Loomba is the founding director of the UCSD NAFLD Research Center. Along with his collaborators, he has led several innovative applications such as the establishment of MRI-PDFF as a non-invasive biomarker of treatment response in early phase trials in NASH, which has now been adopted in more than 50 clinical trials conducted worldwide. In addition, Dr. Loomba served as the Chair of the NAFLD, Special Interest Group of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, and is currently an elected member to the National Board of Directors of the American Liver Foundation and the American Society of Clinical Investigation
Dr. Loomba has published more than 300 manuscripts and has an H-index of 94. He is among the top 1% of the globally highly cited scientists across all fields in 2019 and 2020 by Web of Science. He served as the Deputy Editor of HEPATOLOGY, the official journal of the AASLD, from 2017-2021, and continues to serve on the Editorial Board of Gastroenterology, Journal of Hepatology, GUT and Nature Reviews in Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
UCSD Gastroenterology and Hepatology was listed as the number 1 research and education program in the World by the US World News ranking in 2021.

Professor. Faraone is Distinguished Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University. He is also Senior Scientific Advisor to the Research Program Pediatric Psychopharmacology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Prof. Faraone is Editor for the journal Neuropsychiatric Genetics, and heads the educational website www.adhdinadults.com. In 2021, Prof. Faraone was recognized as the top-rated expert in ADHD, worldwide (https://bit.ly/3j9n8w2).
Prof. Faraone was inducted in 2002 into the CHADD Hall of Fame in recognition of outstanding achievement in medicine and education research on attention disorders. He is also the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities from the State University of New York, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics and the Paul Hoch Award from the American Psychopathological Association.

Dr. Janda has been the Ely R. Callaway, Jr. Chaired Professor in the Departments of Chemistry, Immunology and Microbial Science at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) since 1996. Dr. Janda has been the Director of the Worm Institute of Research and Medicine (WIRM) at The Scripps Research Institute since 2005. He has served as an Associate Professor/Skaggs Scholar within the Skaggs Institute of Chemical Biology, also at The Scripps Research Institute, since 1996. Over a career of almost 25 years, Dr. Janda has provided numerous seminal contributions and is considered one of the first scientists to merge chemical and biological approaches into a cohesive research program. He has been a
Director of Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc. since April 15, 2012. He serves as Member of Scientific Advisory Board of Medisyn Technologies, Inc. He serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of Singapore Ministry of Education (“MOE”), EP1 Physical Sciences. He was a Scientific Advisor of Materia, Inc. He has published over 425 original publications in peer-reviewed journals and founded the biotechnological companies CombiChem, Drug Abuse Sciences, and AIPartia. Dr. Janda received B.S. degree in Clinical Chemistry from University of South Florida in 1980 and M.S. from University of Arizona in 1983. He holds PhD./doctoral degree from the University of Arizona with Robert B. Bates in natural product total synthesis in 1984.

Lawrence J. Cheskin, MD, FACP, FTOS directed the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center, a multidisciplinary clinical research and treatment program that he founded in 1990. Dr. Cheskin is Professor and Chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, Interim Chair of the Department of Global and Community Health, Co-Principal Investigator of the Mason Cohort: Health Starts Here study, and Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He received his medical degree from Dartmouth, and postdoctoral training at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He has written over 200 peer-reviewed publications, 6 books, and is frequently cited in the media on issues related to obesity, nutrition, and dieting.

Dr. Chun is currently professor and the senior vice president of Neuroscience Drug Discovery at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, with over 27 years of experience in academia and industry. He currently leads a team of 25 researchers in the study of genomic mosaicism (DNA sequence variation in brain cells) and lysophospholipid receptor signaling to understand and develop drug treatments for brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and hydrocephalus. Dr. Chun previously held professorships at The Scripps Research Institute, the University Of California San Diego School Of Medicine, and also headed the Department of Molecular Neuroscience at Merck Research Laboratories. Dr. Chun has published ~300 scientific articles and three patents. He received M.D. and PhD. (Neuroscience) degrees through the Medical Scientist Training Program at Stanford University School of Medicine, and was a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research/MIT.