QB3 Malaysia Program
People
Regis B. Kelly, Ph.D.
Director, QB3
Dr. Regis B. Kelly is Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics and former Executive Vice Chancellor at the University of California in San Francisco, where his major responsibility was the new Mission Bay campus. This campus, the development of which over the next ten years will double UCSF’s research space, will be the center of a 300 acre public/private biomedical research park in San Francisco.
From 1995 to 2000, Dr. Kelly served as Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF; from 1988 to 1995, he was the Director of UCSF’s Cell Biology Graduate Program; and from 1992 to 2000, he was Director of the Hormone Research Institute at UCSF.
Dr. Kelly received his undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1961, and his Ph.D. in biophysics from the California Institute of Technology in 1967. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford, Dr. Kelly was an instructor in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard. Dr. Kelly is a member of the Society for Neuroscience, American Society for Biochemistry and American Society for Cell Biology.
P'ng Loke, Ph.D.
Director, QB3 Malaysia Program
Dr. P’ng Loke is a research scientist from Penang, Malaysia, with an interest in infectious diseases and immunology. He studied in Chung Ling High School in Penang and UWCSEA in Singapore. For his undergraduate education he attended to St. Anne's College, Oxford on the Chevening Scholarship and graduated in 1996 with a first class honors degree, winning "proxime accessit" in the Gibbs prize for Biology.
He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh with Judith Allen, supported by the Wellcome Trust. In 2001, he took an International Traveling Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust to work with Dr. James Allison at UC Berkeley. From 2004 to 2007, he studied host-pathogen interactions at UCSF with Dr. Jim McKerrow, supported by an NRSA fellowship from the NIH. He then received a Career Development Award from the Pacific Southwest Regional Center of Excellence and started his independent group as an Assistant Research Immunologist at the Division of Experimental Medicine at UCSF. In 2009, he moved to New York University School of Medicine, where he is now an Assistant Professor.
He is an author on 20 international peer reviewed publications and is part of the Faculty of 1000, as a contributor to the "Immune Response" section.
David Charron
Course Director, Global Bio-Entrepreneurship
David Charron is Associate Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He is also a lecturer in entrepreneurship at the MBA level at the Haas School. He has been working in the field of technology commercialization and entrepreneurship for 18 years.
Mr. Charron has held positions in technology licensing and commercialization with Xerox PARC, MIT and Stanford University. In 1995, he co-founded Scientific Learning Corporation, a publicly-traded neuroscience company based on innovations from UCSF and Rutgers. He has also started two other companies and consults to startups, inventors and entrepreneurs. Mr. Charron has also worked with Technology Ventures Corporation, a non-profit organization, fostering the commercialization of technologies emerging from the national lab system through direct assistance to entrepreneurs and startups.
Mr. Charron is also the Executive Director of the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Laboratory, a non-profit incubator with the goal of increasing entrepreneurial activity at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At Haas, Mr. Charron teaches Case Studies in Entrepreneurship, Workshop for Startups and Entrepreneurship. He has also been a principal member of the faculty team for the Intel Curriculum project teaching other faculty members how to teach entrepreneurship in Budapest, Madrid, Sofia, Mumbai, Dublin, Cairo, Istanbul, Moscow and Beijing.
He holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from the Haas School
Agnes L. Buenaventura
Program Coordinator, QB3 Malaysia Program
Agnes Buenaventura is currently the Malaysian Program Coordinator at QB3.
Agnes received her B.A. in accounting from University of San Carlos in Cebu, Philippines. Following college, Agnes worked in a bank as an assistant bookkeeper and then as a medical representative for a multinational pharmaceutical company in the Philippines. She joined Philippine Airlines and established a career, undergoing extensive and continuous training in various facets of airline operations. She spent four years in accounting and moved to marketing and sales. During her tenure in marketing and sales management, she was assigned in Guam and a few years after, was assigned as the Country Manager in Singapore. Four years later, she was reassigned to handle the Visayas operation in Cebu, Philippines. Her last Philippine Airlines position before her early retirement was Country Manager for the Americas. After the airline career, she tried her hand in entrepreneurship and partnered with her old airline colleague to run a travel agency. While deciding which step to take next in her career, she worked with H&R Block as a licensed tax preparer. She joined QB3 on May 2007.
Kenny Ang, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Research Scholar, QB3 Malaysia Program
Kenny Ang comes from the city of Ipoh, Perak. He is a biochemist, holding a B.S. (Hons) from the Australian National University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the National University of Singapore. Having held positions as a research biologist at the Centre for Natural Product Research, Singapore and the National University of Singapore, Ang joined MerLion Pharmaceuticals Pte. Ltd. in 2002 as a Senior Research Scientist where he conducted high-throughput screening using fluorescence- and radioactive-based assay technologies. In 2006 Ang joined Exelgen Discovery Research Ltd. in Bude, U.K. as a Marie Curie Research Fellow. His responsibilities included collaborative programs on assay development, enzyme- and cell-based screening. In late 2007, he joined the QB3-Malaysia Program as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the UCSF's Small Molecule Discovery Center. He continues his research interest in preclinical bioactive hit discovery using various assay technologies such as high content screening, surface plasmon resonance, flow cytometry and RNAi screening.
Kenny currently conducts research at UCSF's Small Molecule Discovery Center.
Izza Jahari, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Research Scholar, QB3 Malaysia Program
Izza Jahari is a native of Terengganu, hailing from Kampung Losong on the outskirts of Kuala Terengganu. An energetic and diverse character, she has worked on three continents in fields ranging from education to development and fair trade. She is a biochemist by profession, having obtained her B.Sc. in genetics and microbiology from the University of Malaya and her D.Phil. in biochemistry from the University of Oxford. For her post-graduate research she worked on the involvement of Srs2, Slx5, and Slx8 proteins of Schizosaccharomyces pombe in recombination. Jahari joined Inno Biologics in Malaysia as a Research Scientist shortly after completing her work at Oxford. At Inno Biologics she was involved in mammalian cell line development and engineering, as well as being a key figure in the development of collaborative research projects between Inno Biologics and local and international institutions and biopharmaceutical companies. She joined the QB3-Malaysia Program as a post-doctoral fellow in April 2008 and is working at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF, focusing on large-scale and high-throughput quantitative genetics and physical interaction maps in a number of organisms. She retains her ties to industry and is also charged with expanding the commercial and research network of her parent company. Her interests extend beyond pure research to entrepreneurship and investment in the biotechnology industry, and she hopes to play an integral part in putting the Malaysian biotechnology industry on the global map.
Izza currently conducts research at UCSF's Krogan Lab.
Aida Baharuddin, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Research Scholar, QB3 Malaysia Program
Aida Baharuddin hails from Taiping in the northern region of Perak State. She holds a B.Sc. in biotechnology and M.Sc. in molecular biology from Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang.
Baharuddin obtained her Ph.D. in structural biochemistry from the University of Lübeck, Germany in 2007. Her dissertation focused on how protein structure correlates with pathogen fitness in Chlamydia and HIV-1.
She joined Universiti Sains Malaysia as a lecturer and researcher in October 2007. In late 2009, she joined the QB3-Malaysia Program; she will work at the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF. Her research interests include understanding function and cellular interactions of proteins involved in virulence factors; enzyme mechanisms; drug design using protein crystallography; and biophysical/biochemical approaches.
Baharuddin would like to extend her skills by learning molecular docking techniques in order to search for suitable small molecules that could serve as lead compounds. She hopes to gain competency in drug discovery techniques and looks forward to experiencing research culture at UCSF.
Weng Ruh Wong
Post-Doctoral Research Scholar, QB3 Malaysia Program
Wong Weng Ruh comes from the heart of Kuala Lumpur city. Research has been an integral part of her undergraduate and postgraduate training. Her first step into the marine world was during her BSc program in Marine Science (majoring in Marine Biology) at the National University of Malaysia. Weng has a great passion in scuba diving and she is a certified Rescue Diver.
In late 2009, she obtained her Ph.D. in Ocean Science, also from the National University of Malaysia. She studied on the diversity of bacteria associated with marine benthic dinoflagellates and mining functional genes from this environment using metagenomics approach.
Weng joined the QB3-Malaysia program as a post-doctoral fellow in Jan 2010 and working in the Department of Chemistry, UC Santa Cruz. She sees the potential of rich biodiversity Malaysian waters as the source of marine natural products. She hopes to extend her skills in rapid and high-throughput techniques, combining molecular biology and organic chemistry in order to provide a rich resource for drug discovery.
Weng currently conducts research at UCSC's Linington’s Lab.