Keynote Speakers

When Drug Research is Personal
John F. Crowley, Founder, Novazyme Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Mr. Crowley's emotion-packed presentation will focus on his personal struggle to find a cure for Pompe disease, a rare and fatal illness that is caused by a defective or missing enzyme. Pompe disease affects fewer than 10,000 people world-wide, including Mr. Crowley's two small children.

Mr. Crowley, a Harvard educated businessman, created and built a pharmaceutical company devoted expressly to finding a cure for the disease. He will detail his journey through the labyrinth of scientific and business fronts, which lead up to a first-round clinical trial.

JOHN F. CROWLEY
INSPIRATIONAL ENTREPRENEUR

John F. Crowley is an American business and social entrepreneur. He is best known as the co-founder of several biotech companies devoted to developing treatments for human genetic diseases. John's involvement with biotech stems from the 1998 diagnosis of two of his children with Pompe disease-a severe and often fatal neuromuscular disorder. In his drive to find a cure for them, he left his post at Bristol-Myers Squibb and became an entrepreneur as the co-founder, president and CEO of Novazyme Pharmaceuticals, a biotech start-up conducting research on a new experimental treatment for Pompe disease (which he credits as ultimately saving his children's lives.) In 2001, Novazyme merged into Genzyme Corp., the world's third-largest biotech company, and John continued to play a role in the development of a drug for Pompe disease as Senior Vice President, Genzyme Therapeutics. He is presently the President & CEO of Amicus Therapeutics, Inc. John and his family have been profiled in The Wall Street Journal and are the subjects of a book by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Geeta Anand, "The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million-And Bucked the Medical Establishment-In a Quest to Save His Children." CBS Films is making a major motion picture about John and his family starring Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser and Keri Russell. The film is set for release in April 2010. John is also a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, assigned to the United States Special Operations Command. He graduated with a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, and earned a J.D. from the University of Notre Dame Law School and an M.B.A. from Harvard. John is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute and presently serves as the President & CEO of Amicus Therapeutics, Inc. He lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife, Aileen and their three children, John, Megan and Patrick.. John was recently named "The Humanitarian of the Year" for 2009 by the Make A Wish Foundation.

Technology, Aging, and the Brain
Gary W. Small, M.D., Parlow-Solomon Professor on Aging, Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, Director, UCLA Center on Aging, Director, Memory & Aging Research Center, Director, Geriatric Psychiatry Division, Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
New neuroimaging and other technologies are teaching us about how the brain ages and what we can do about it. Although memory declines as we age, medical and non-pharmacological strategies may protect brain health and improve memory performance.

At the same time, innovation in digital technology is not only changing the way we live and communicate, it appears to be altering how our brains function. As a consequence of this high-tech stimulation, we are witnessing the beginning of a new form of the generation gap – a brain gap dividing younger digital natives, immersed in the technology early in life, from older digital immigrants, who adapt to the new technology more reluctantly. This lecture will describe this current pivotal point in brain evolution and how we can harness the new technology and lifestyle choices to improve memory and brain function so we can live better and longer.

Gary Small, MD Dr. Gary Small is a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Semel Institute and directs the Memory and Aging Research Center and the UCLA Center on Aging. He is one of the world's leading experts on brain science and has published numerous books and articles. Scientific American magazine named him one of the world's top innovators in science and technology, and he frequently appears on The Today Show, Good Morning America, 20/20 and CNN. Dr. Small has invented the first brain scan that allows doctors to see the physical evidence of brain aging and Alzheimer's disease in living people. Among his numerous breakthrough research studies, he now leads a team of neuroscientists who are demonstrating that exposure to computer technology causes rapid and profound changes in brain neural circuitry.

Chips, Clones and Living Beyond 100
Paul J.H. Schoemaker, Ph.D., M.B.A., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Decision Strategies International, Inc.; Research Director, Mack Center for Technological Innovation, The Wharton School; Adjunct Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School Adjunct Professor, Wharton School of Business

As information technologies and life sciences continue to converge, new business opportunities and challenges will arise for the field of diagnostics and beyond. This keynote reviews the deeper forces shaping the future of the biosciences, from social and economic to technological and political, including the stresses they will introduce for existing business models and healthcare. Not only will bio-convergence introduce new products, services and competitors, it may create entirely new industries on a scale larger than the computer revolution has to date. Several broad scenarios will be painted for the state of the biosciences in 2025 and the forces that might take us there, summarizing a multi-year strategy study conducted and supervised by the speaker at the Wharton school.

Paul J.H. Schoemaker, Ph.D is an internationally renowned thought leader in the fields of strategy and decision making. He speaks frequently at conferences, offers seminars around the world, and has appeared on radio and television. He has shared stage billings with President Bill Clinton, Warren Buffet, Rudolph Giuliani, Jack Welch, Prime Ministers as well as other public leaders. He is a leading scholar and visionary author, an entrepreneur in both the business and the philanthropic sectors, and has been an adviser to more than 100 companies and non-profit organizations around the world (for details see www.paulschoemaker.com). His hobbies include tennis, golf, and piano. He lives with his wife and kids in Villanova, PA and Ft. Lauderdale, FL while retaining roots in Holland, his native country.

Professor Schoemaker is the author of Decision Traps (Doubleday 1989) and its sequel Winning Decisions (Doubleday 2001) which together have sold well over 100,000 copies. He is also the coauthor of Wharton on Emerging Technologies (Wiley 2000), Profiting from Uncertainty (Free Press 2002), Peripheral Vision (Harvard Business School Press 2006) and Chips, Clones and Living Beyond 100 (Pearson Ltd 2009). He is presently completing a new book titled Brilliant Mistakes, a topic he was recently interviewed about on CBS’s Sunday Morning. Schoemaker has written over 100 academic and applied papers, which have appeared in such diverse journals as the Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Brain and Behavioral Sciences, and The Journal of Economic Literature. His writings have been translated into twelve languages and the ISI citation index ranks him in the top 1% of scholars worldwide in business and economics.

Dr. Schoemaker also serves as Research Director of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at the Wharton School, where he teaches strategy and decision making part-time. For twelve years, he was a professor at the University of Chicago, where he did leading academic work in the Center for Decision Research covering behavioral economics as well as strategy. Schoemaker is the founder and executive chairman of Decision Strategies International, Inc, a consulting and training firm specializing in strategic management, executive development and multi-media software (see www.thinkdsi.com). The company’s clients include 8 of the 10 largest corporations worldwide, as well as many of the Fortune 100. He also co-founded Strategic Radar, a technology-platform company that helps organizations track changes and scan for weak signals in their external environment (see www.strategicradar.com). Schoemaker is a social entrepreneur as well via the Decision Education Foundation (www.decisioneducation.org) which teaches decision making skills to adolescents, in partnership with many US high schools around the country.