Press kit

Appointment to the Board
April 2022, previously Chair of BenevolentAI Ltd, appointed July 2021.

Experience and expertise
Dr. Nader was CEO of NPS Pharma. During his tenure, he transformed NPS Pharma into a leading global biotechnology company focused on delivering innovative therapies to patients with rare diseases. He won the Ernst and Young National Life Science Entrepreneur of the Year® award in 2013 and was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor® in 2017.

Before NPS, François was a venture partner at Care Capital, LLC. Prior, he served on the North America Leadership Team of Aventis Pharma and its predecessor companies holding several executive positions including Senior Vice-President, US integrated healthcare markets and North America medical and regulatory affairs. Previously, he led the global commercial operations at the Pasteur Vaccines division of Rhone-Poulenc.

François is past chair of BioNJ, Acceleron Pharma and Prevail Therapeutics. He served on the board of BIO, Baxalta NPS Pharma, Alexion, Clementia Pharmaceuticals, Advanced Accelerator Applications and Noven.

François earned his French doctorate in medicine from St. Joseph University in Lebanon and a physician executive MBA from the University of Tennessee.

Current external appointments
François currently serves as chair of Talaris Therapeutics and Neurvati Neurosciences. He serves as board director of Moderna and RING Therapeutics and as senior advisor to Blackstone Life Sciences. 

Ivan is Chief Operating Officer and a Co-Founder of BenevolentAI. His role guides the company’s growth, encompassing various aspects of company financing, strategy, corporate and business development, and technology commercialisation.

Ivan has nearly 20 years of experience working with early stage life science and technology companies. Prior to co-founding BenevolentAI in 2014, he spent 10 years in venture capital as an investor in early stage life science companies, considering all aspects of technology commercialisation, including company formation, business development, private and public equity financings and trade sales. In 2013, he also helped launch Genomics England Ltd, a nationwide DNA sequencing programme linking genomic data with NHS records of patients with rare disease and cancer. Ivan holds a D.Phil. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Oxford where he also completed a year’s post-doctoral research.

Anne is BenevolentAI’s Chief Scientific Officer and is responsible for all aspects of drug discovery from therapeutic area selection through to target identification, building BenevolentAI’s drug discovery portfolio, and delivering candidate molecules to clinical development. She is also the Site Head for BenevolentAI’s Cambridge Laboratories. 

Anne’s key strengths focus on promoting organisational delivery and productivity. She is passionate about building high-functioning and cohesive teams with equal gender representation at every level, that are committed to delivering life-changing medicines to the clinic.

Anne has over 25 years of experience in pharma and biotech, and has worked on all stages from early discovery to late-stage drug development. Before joining BenevolentAI, Anne worked for pharma (Pfizer) and biotech (Mission Therapeutics), across a wide range of therapeutic areas including fibrosis, pain, arthritis and rheumatology, and neurodegeneration. She was Head of Pharmacology and Chief Operating Officer for Pfizer in the UK where she was responsible for the generation of primary and secondary data to support the portfolio. Anne holds a BSc and PhD in Genetics from the University of Liverpool, UK.

Daniel is BenevolentAI’s Chief Technology Officer, and is passionate about developing and delivering transformative technologies that tackle some of the most challenging problems in science. He is responsible for building and developing the Benevolent Platform™  to support the company’s mission to discover new medicines. Daniel organises and oversees the five functions in product and tech, including engineering, AI, informatics, product, and project management, guiding their work to apply machine learning and other advanced technologies to the world’s biomedical data, extracting insights from that data at scale, and enabling drug discovery scientists to make better decisions throughout target identification and drug development.

Daniel is also responsible for future innovation at BenevolentAI, including facilitating data integration at scale, information extraction and inference using multiple data modalities, and enhancing the interplay and trust between human and artificial intelligence via explainable AI and data visualisation.

Daniel has worked at the intersection of technology and biology for over 15 years. After a foundation in biomedical computation at Stanford, he worked as a technology consultant with Accenture in Silicon Valley before obtaining a Ph.D. in Switzerland at ETH Zurich in machine learning and neuroscience. He is the author of more than 40 publications and patents in research areas spanning biologically-motivated machine learning, algorithm development, and neuroscience, with over three thousand scientific articles citing his work.

Anna serves as Chief People Officer at BenevolentAI. She brings over 20 years of experience in talent acquisition, employer branding and human resources strategy, having held HR roles at Amazon, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson and the digital health company, Kry. Anna is a trained executive coach and regular speaker at global conferences on the future of work, female leadership and diversity, and has led successful change management strategies. 

At BenevolentAI, Anna oversees all things People, including talent acquisition, people partnering, learning and development and office management. Her mission is to drive a cohesive global people, culture and engagement strategy that deepens performance to accelerate value and scale and enables BenevolentAI to continue attracting top talent.