Advisory Council

Jesse Dylan is an American film director and founder, CEO, and creative director of the media production company Wondros.  He is also the founder of Lybba, a non-profit devoted to the benefits of community, data and technology in healthcare.  A graduate of the New York University film school, he founded Wondros to specialize in translating complex business and prosocial ideas into simple media messages.  Wondros clients include Creative Commons, TED, the Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the MIT Media Lab and Harvard University. He has created media projects for a diverse group of organizations, including Bono’s non-profit ONE, the (RED) campaign fighting AIDS in Africa, and the Council on Foreign Relations.  He is an active member of TED (Technology Entertainment Design), where he has created materials and short films in support of TED Prize Winners.  Dylan was named one of the “most Creative People of 2010” (Fast Company) and directed the will.i.am Emmy Award winning music video “Yes We Can”, inspired by Barack Obama’s campaign for president.  Most recently he and his team created the video currently posted on DBMI’s home page that quite aptly captures the spirit and vision of the new Department as it endeavors to change medicine from the ground floor up.

Bill is a General Partner and cofounder of Flare Capital Partners, a team of proven healthcare technology venture capital investors delivering strategic industry resources, experience and insight to partnering entrepreneurs. Prior to helping start Flare Capital Partners in 2013, Bill was with North Bridge Venture Partners since inception in 1994.

During Bill's more than twenty-year tenure investing in emerging healthcare technology companies, he has served on the Boards of numerous industry-leading companies, actively helping and working closely with founders and management. His current and prior firm's healthcare investments include Aetion, HealthReveal, Bright Health, Health Verity, Valence Health, Iora Health, ClearDATA, Welltok, Humedica (Optum Analytics), Explorys (IBM), Rise Health (Best Doctors), SynapDx, Connance, MC10, Phase Forward (Oracle), Pharmetrics (IMS Health), NaviNet (Nant Health) and eBenX (ADP). 

Previously, Bill was a Partner at Hambro International Equity Partners. Prior to that, he was Chief Financial Officer of MathSoft, a science and engineering applications software start-up that subsequently went public on the NASDAQ and was later acquired by Parametric Technology Corporation [NASDAQ: PMTC], and was a CPA in the Boston office of Arthur Andersen & Company.

Bill holds an undergraduate degree from Boston College's Carroll School of Management and has served his alma mater in a variety of capacities, including former Chair of the Board of Trustees and current member of its Investment & Endowment Committee. Additionally, Bill has been Chair of the Parents Committee of Duke University, is a member and Chair of the Parents Advisory Board of Stanford University, is on the Board of Trustees of the MGH Institute of Health Professions, and was appointed by the Massachusetts Governor to the Oversight Council of the Center for Health Information and Analysis.

Arnab Gupta is founder and CEO of Opera Solutions, a global leader in machine learning and Big Data analytics. The company combines advanced science, technology, and domain expertise to find and transform Signals—the valuable predictive and descriptive information in Big Data flows—into machine-generated best actions that drive frontline productivity and bottom-line growth. It serves premier companies in financial services, healthcare, government, supply chain, marketing, and other sectors through offices in North America, Europe, India, and China.

Prior to establishing Opera Solutions in 2004, Arnab founded and sold a number of other companies, including Mitchell Madison Group and Zeborg. He began his career at McKinsey & Co., where he rose to partner.

Since 2004, he has worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on its India HIV-AIDS initiative. There, he has focused on stopping the spread of this disease by using innovative private-sector approaches.

Arnab earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Jeff Hammerbacher is a founder and the chief scientist of Cloudera, a startup that makes software tools for data scientists. In the summer of 2012, he became an Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he is exploring genetic and other medical data in search of breakthroughs in disease modeling and treatment. Healthcare, in his view, is “the best problem by far,” where his talents could do the most good (“Sizing Up Big Data, Broadening Beyond the Internet,” New York Times, June 19, 2013). Jeff, who also is an angel investor, was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners immediately prior to founding Cloudera. Before Accel, he conceived, built, and led the data team at Facebook. Before joining Facebook, Jeff was a quantitative analyst on Wall Street.

Gilbert S. Omenn is a professor of internal medicine, human genetics, and public health at the University of Michigan. He served as executive vice president for Medical Affairs and as chief executive officer of the University of Michigan Health System from 1997 to 2002. Gilbert was formerly Dean of the School of Public Health, and professor of medicine and environmental health, at the University of Washington, Seattle. His research interests include cancer proteomics, chemoprevention of cancers, public health genetics, science-based risk analysis, and health policy. He was principal investigator of the beta-Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial (CARET) of preventive agents against lung cancer and heart disease; director of the Center for Health Promotion in Older Adults; and creator of a university-wide initiative on public health genetics in ethical, legal, and policy context while at the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Gilbert served as Associate Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Associate Director, Office of Management and Budget, in the Executive Office of the President in the Carter Administration. He has served on the advisory boards for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Academies, the IOM, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Prahalad currently holds the title of President and CEO of Epic Sciences, Inc. (EPIC), a venture backed cancer management company specializing in the detection and analysis of circulating tumor cells (CTCs).

Prior to joining EPIC, Dr. Prahalad held various roles at Life Technologies Corporation (Nasdaq: LIFE), a global leader in reagents and instruments for biomedical research. Dr. Prahalad joined Life Technologies in April, 2005 as part of the Mergers and Acquisitions team. He went on to become a Director in the Corporate Development Group where he coordinated all in-licensing activities for nearly two years. In addition to roles within the Corporate Development function, Dr. Prahalad managed several significant businesses within Life Technologies spanning both genomics and cell analysis portfolios. His final role at Life Technologies was VP, Corporate Strategy where he helped shape the organic and inorganic investment priorities across Life Technologies’ research tools, clinical diagnostic and applied markets portfolios. His role culminated in the strategic sale of Life Technologies to ThermoFisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO) in 2013 for $13.6B, the largest non-pharmaceutical acquisition in the biotechnology space.

Prior to joining Life Technologies, Dr. Prahalad was the Vice President of Business Development for Sequenom Inc., a San Diego, CA-based biotechnology company.

Dr. Prahalad received his B.Sc. with Honors from the University of Michigan in 1992. He went on to receive his Masters in Medical Sciences and Doctorate in Biochemistry & Molecular Pharmacology from Harvard University in 1995 and 1998, respectively.

Jim Reese is the former chief operations engineer and head neurosurgeon at Google, Inc. Jim joined Google a year after it was founded as the company’s 18th employee. In his role, Jim was the company’s main system administrator and he oversaw its dramatic hardware and network expansion. Some of his achievements while working at Google include scaling network to service more than one billion hits per day, from hundreds of thousands of servers, in more than half a dozen datacenters across the globe and designing and implementing multi-tiered global and local server load balancing across these servers and sites. He served at the company from 1999 to 2005.

Jim originally embarked on a career in medicine, receiving his medical degree and then serving a three-and-a-half-year residency in neurosurgery at Stanford Hospital and Clinics (1992-1995). He left Stanford to work as a Research Physician at SRI International, a nonprofit research institute, where he developed a computer program to analyze brain MRIs. He was with the organization from 1995-1997.

Halle Tecco is a Founder & Managing Director of Rock Health, the first seed fund devoted exclusively to digital health companies. She is also an angel investor with Techammer, which has made over 40 investments in technology companies.

Tecco has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. She was named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list as well as Goldman Sachs's Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs. She has a Bachelor of Science degree from Case Western Reserve University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.