It’s always an event when we spend time together

Jonny did his graduate work at the University of California San Diego in chemistry and trained as a postdoctoral fellow in structural biology in Nobel Laureate Roger Kornberg’s lab at Stanford University.  He then moved to North Carolina to help start the BRITE institute – a drug discovery institute situated between Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill and became the director of drug discovery there.  Jonny started two biotech startups and then moved to the University of Michigan Medical School in 2018 in the department of Internal Medicine in Gastroenterology and Hepatology.  Jonny’s research program is focused on drug discovery and drug repurposing for GI diseases like NAFLD/NASH, Type-II diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease. The technology focus of the lab is high content imaging and machine vision to interrogate physiologically relevant cell and tissue models as the platform for drug discovery.  Jonny also founded the U-M Center for Drug Repurposing in 2019 that helps to facilitate drug repurposing research. 

Aaron Friedman is co-founder and CEO of Reservoir Neuroscience, a biotech company based in the San Francisco bay area that is developing drugs designed to heal dysfunctional blood vessels in the brain as a new treatment approach for Alzheimer’s and other neuro disease. Prior to founding Reservoir, Aaron completed his PhD at UC Berkeley as an NSF GFRP and NIH NRSA fellow, where his breakthrough work on the role of blood-brain barrier dysfunction in aging and cognitive decline was published on the cover of Science Translational Medicine. Aaron received training in entrepreneurship through the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, the NSF I-Corps program, and the Bakar innovation fellowship program.