In the role of CEO, Joe will manage MassBio’s federal affairs, state and municipal government relations, and will take the lead on initiatives to sustain Massachusetts’ economic competitiveness focusing on issues around infrastructure, workforce, and digital health. Prior to joining MassBio in September 2021, Joe served as the State Senator for the First Suffolk and Middlesex districts, representing his hometown of Winthrop; the Boston communities of East Boston, North End, Chinatown, Beacon Hill, Bay Village, and South End; the Cambridge neighborhoods of Cambridgeport, Riverside and MIT; and the City of Revere. While in the State Senate, Joe was the Chair of the Joint Committee on Transportation, Chair of the Senate’s Committee on Personnel and Administration, Chair of the Joint Committee on Housing, Vice Chair of Rules, and member of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, Senate Ethics Committee, Committee on Bonding, Capital Expenditures and State Assets, and the Committee on Financial Services. Before being elected to the state legislature in 2016, Joe practiced law specializing in criminal law in his private practice and as a public defender with Suffolk Lawyers for Justice. Since his early life, Boncore has been an active member in the Order Sons of Italy in America, he is currently the National Second Vice President. Boncore earned his bachelor’s degree in political science and government from Providence College in 2004 and received his juris doctorate from the Massachusetts School of Law. Joe resides in Winthrop with his wife Christine and twin sons John and Philip.

Philip serves as the Life Sciences Trade Commissioner at the Consulate General of Canada in Boston. In this role, he actively works with and supports Canadian Life Sciences companies that are seeking to grow their business through partnering, capital-raising, sales and technology commercialization in New England and the USA. Philip uses his relationships with New England based companies, investors, customers, and research institutions to support innovative Canadian companies and promotes the advantages Canada offers to the New England Life Sciences community. As an international and business development executive with over 30 years of global experience in the medical device and pharmaceutical industries, Philip has enabled businesses to grow, expand internationally, and develop and launch new products and technologies. A passion is diabetes technologies that help enable patients better manage their disease in a cost effective manner.

Cayce is the Vice President of Clinical Operations at Clara Health, a healthcare software company based in San Francisco focused on helping patients find and access promising experimental treatments from conducting trials. Located in Nashville, she has over 15 years of clinical research experience. She comes to Clara Health most recently from Teckro, an Irish-based life sciences technology company, where she helped to scale the clinical operations, pre-sales solution consulting, and digital strategy and analytics teams. In addition to her life sciences technology experience, Cayce also helped build the early phase oncology group at Tesaro (acquired by GSK in 2019), as well as has worked with multiple contract research organizations (CROs), including Sarah Cannon Research Institute and ICON Plc, managing clinical trials by providing planning, leadership and strategic support including, but not limited to, the design, development, and execution of protocols, site selection and performance monitoring, developing and implementing enrollment strategies, tracking trial progress and obstacles, and facilitating successful communication with investigative sites. Cayce recently joined Clara Health to help drive operational excellence across the platform by overseeing the clinical, site, and patient operations teams. Each day, Clara's teams have the privilege of being there for people confronting incredibly difficult circumstances. One of the biggest challenges with running clinical trials, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, is the time it takes to find qualified volunteers. At Clara, Cayce and her teams are honored to guide patients along their journeys by equipping them with the tools they need to beat their medical condition and by connecting them with the some of the most recent advancements that science has to offer.

Greg Erman is President & CEO of EmpiraMed, Inc., a digital health company that runs prospective Virtual Clinical Studies to generate Real World Evidence for the Life Science Industry. Formed in 2011 and sitting at the intersection of DCT (Decentralized Clinical Trials) and RWE, EmpiraMed pioneered the technology and methods of 100% site-less virtual trials. Greg’s career centers on entrepreneurship, intellectual property research commercialization, and business leadership. As the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Partners HealthCare (now Mass General Brigham), he collaborated on over 250 life science research projects within a 10 year period. Greg raised about $100M in venture capital and successfully grew businesses to about $20M in annual revenue with 150 employees. As the founder and CEO of 6 companies, each of his 3 VC-backed startups exited to large public companies while generating returns of up to 12X investment. The businesses Greg built are diverse and cut across many industries in the fields of biotech, medical devices, and digital health. He holds BSEE and Marketing MBA degrees with high honors from Rutgers University, sits on several biotech and digital health corporate boards of directors, is an angel investor, and is a part-time paid entrepreneurship lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Greg gives back to the community by volunteering as a mentor and judge for Harvard Innovation Labs, MassChallenge, MIT, and MassBio, as well as by serving on the boards of non-profit organizations, such as Life Science Cares and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Massachusetts. Greg is an avid coastal sailor and racer, jazz trumpeter, and tennis player who deludes himself into thinking there’s still time for his debut at the US Open.

Serban serves as the Senior Trade Officer for the CTA and Digital Health at the Consulate General of Canada in Boston. In his CTA managing role, he helps high-potential Canadian tech, life sciences and digital health start-ups connect to the New England market, clients, partners and investors, by providing the strategic guidance, market intelligence and network needed to compete in one of the world’s most dynamic ecosystems. As a physician entrepreneur with a strong clinical and research background, and extensive experience in healthcare innovation, Serban is focused on helping grow digital health and medical technologies in a global environment.

Amir has a diverse background in developing novel medical software technology. Amir developed a novel technology to predict and prevent chronic disease complications using machine learning techniques. Amir has presented this technology at the 78th, 79th, and 80th, American Diabetes Association Scientific summits and is actively contributing to the science of glucose monitoring and how this data can be used to predict the onset of glucose-based conditions for patients with diabetes and pre-diabetes.

Michelle Laflamme is the founder, president, and CEO of Emovi, Inc., a medical device company that developed the KneeKG, the first in-clinic device that meets the global need for identifying and quantifying knee biomechanical dysfunctions causing knee pain and symptoms. Michelle has more than 20 years of experience in business and commercial development in life sciences, particularly in biopharmaceuticals and medical devices. In 2008, she received First Prize in the Technological and Technical Innovations category from the Québec Entrepreneurship Contest. With the support of PME Mtl, Desjardins Group, the City of Montreal, and the Quebec Government, she formed the CTS Health Technology, an organization dedicated to helping medical businesses market innovative medical products. In 2009, Michelle was a finalist in Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year® competition. Michelle is Chairman and member of the Board of Directors of PME Mtl Centre-Est, an organization dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs, and is a member of the Board of Directors of MEDTEQ, an industrial research and innovation consortium in medical technologies in Quebec. She was recently appointed administrator of Axelys, a new company set up by the Quebec Government to accelerate the commercialization of innovations. She also sits on the entrepreneurship action table in Laval and Montreal and is actively involved in Réseau Mentorat to support entrepreneurs. Prior to Emovi, Michelle served as Vice President, Business Development of ProMetic Life Sciences, a biopharmaceutical company, where she led private and public funding, clinched strategic alliances and agreements with partners of international scope for the development and commercialization of products. Michelle has a Master of Laws from Université de Montréal and is a member of the Barreau du Quebec.

Ben Liu is the co-founder and CEO of TrialSpark. He received his DPhil at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, leveraging machine-learning, AI, and big-data to develop diagnostics and therapeutics for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. During his graduate work, he observed the way clinical trials bottlenecked the development of new treatments for patients, compelling him to start TrialSpark. Before TrialSpark, Ben graduated from Yale where he was awarded the college’s highest honor at graduation and received his MPhil with distinction in Computational Biology from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge as a Paul Mellon Fellow.

Carolin serves as the Investment Officer at the Consulate General of Canada in Boston. In her role, she actively facilitates Foreign Direct Investment in Canada by bringing industry, community, and government partners together to offer valuable services making it easy for U.S. and specifically New England companies to start or grow their operations in Canada. As an international executive and business development enthusiast, Carolin has dedicated her career to supporting multinational corporations to enter and grow in new markets. She has helped companies of all sizes in Europe and North America to increase their global presence and operations. She also has worked to advance vocational education and training.

Kendalle Burlin O’Connell is a seasoned and effective executive who has received wide acclaim for her leadership of MassBio, the world’s largest biopharma membership organization, where she drives the strategy to grow the industry and support member companies as CEO and president. To better serve the entire life cycle of biopharma companies, Kendalle has expanded MassBio’s innovation offerings to include partnering and investor events, an entrepreneurial accelerator, and a network for founders and chief executives. As part of MassBio’s commitment to realizing a more diverse and equitable life sciences industry, Kendalle was the driving force behind the organization’s launch of the non-profit Bioversity and the opening of its first workforce training center in Dorchester where graduates are prepared for rewarding entry-level careers at local life sciences companies. Kendalle has been an outspoken advocate for the industry in policy debates about state government support for the expansion of the life sciences in Massachusetts, the federal government’s intervention into biopharma innovation, and efforts to improve the affordability and accessibility of life-changing medicines, just to name a few. Kendalle has earned numerous accolades for her leadership, including top recognitions from Boston Magazine and the Boston Business Journal, and serves on the Boards of The Boston Foundation and the American Cancer Society, where she is Chair for the Eastern New England region, among others.

Maria Picone is the Co-Founder and CEO of TREND Community. TREND is a digital health analytics company with a bold vision to revolutionize the world’s understanding of diseases. Maria and her husband Chris started TREND together after their daughter was born with a rare disease called Prader-Willi syndrome. TREND’s technology analyzes social media conversations to understand diseases from patient and caregiver perspectives. These valuable insights can shed light on aspects of our health conditions that even our most qualified doctors and scientists couldn’t possibly know.

Jacqueline has nearly two decades of experience in the healthcare technology space, as a founder in several venture-backed startups and in leadership roles ranging across client engagement, operations, and product management functions. She has spent much of her career creating new products and services across several areas of the healthcare industry, including technology-enabled patient navigation services at Docent Health, remote care coordination for healthcare providers at Klio Health, and patient-reported outcomes measurement for pharmaceutical clinical trials at CRF Health. Jacqueline is active in the Boston entrepreneurial eco-system: as a past participant in the MassChallenge accelerator, she continues to be a mentor for a number of local digital health programs. Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Jacqueline holds an undergraduate degree in Marketing and Information Systems from the University of British Columbia and an MBA from INSEAD.

Mario Voltolina joined Infoway in 2010 and was appointed CTO and Executive Vice President in 2019. He leads a team that is identifying, assessing and measuring the impact of innovative technologies; reviewing global best practices and trends; and ensuring that Infoway and stakeholders are well-positioned to adopt the most promising digital health technology. Mario has more than 30 years of experience in the information technology industry, mainly in health care and financial services. He developed his experience with large technology companies such as Sun Microsystems and Oracle, as well as start-ups and medium sized technology firms in the fields of performance measurement and management, process control, life insurance, trading platforms and exchange systems. Mario holds a BA in International Relations from the University of Toronto.