Jack DiGiovanna | Chief Science Officer
Velsera

Jack currently is Chief Science Officer at Velsera (formerly Seven Bridges) with responsibility across all sectors (government, advocacy, biotech, and pharmaceutical). He is part of the Strategic Priorities Group – with a focus on the data integration products for accelerating precision medicine across multi-modal data. Jack serves on the Senior Leadership Team driving key strategic, cross-functional initiatives. Jack also serves as a Principal Investigator (PI) on multiple NIH projects, some exceeding $2M of annual revenue. Overall, Jack is responsible for approximately 125k hours of professional services annually.   Previously Jack was SVP and General Manager at Seven Bridges with responsibility for empowering government, academic, and non-profit clients. His team has grown the business to add key strategic capabilities and new therapeutic areas. This growth correlates with an approximately 3x increase in revenue from 2018 to 2022. Jack had P&L responsibility for the entire business unit and improved business models including optimizing labor rates (+30%) and developing new SaaS products.   Strategically, his organization helped the NIH realize return on the investments they have made in data generation and ecosystems.  Prior to joining Seven Bridges, Jack worked at ETH Zürich and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in neuroscience, machine learning, and prosthetics. We brought together diverse data - decoding sensorimotor cortical activity to modulate real-time epidural electrical stimulation - so paralyzed rats could walk again. This technology is helping humans today. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Penn State in 2002 and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Florida in 2008 – his thesis featured a novel brain-machine interface architecture based on reinforcement learning.