Speakers

President and CEO
BioNexus KC

Dennis Ridenour (he/him/his) is President and Chief Executive Officer of BioNexus KC, the coordinating body for the KC region’s life sciences research initiatives. In this role, Mr. Ridenour fosters regional collaboration while working to increase the concentration and capacity for life sciences and healthcare research in the region. His work makes the region more efficient at commercializing technologies being developed locally, improves the health of patients and animals across the region while reducing and eliminating health disparities, and positively impacts the regional economy by leveraging our strengths at the intersection of human and animal health. Mr. Ridenour is strongly committed to the vision of BioNexus KC, that Kansas City is a global leader at the nexus of human and animal health benefiting all our citizens and the economy.

Prior to joining BioNexus KC, Mr. Ridenour was President and Chief Executive Officer of BioKansas, a regional life science and healthcare trade association. There he managed all facets of the organization, including day-to-day operations, member development and engagement, strategic planning, and finance.

Mr. Ridenour previously worked at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, MO, Merck Research Labs in Boston, MA, and as a researcher in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Dennis earned a B.S. in Biological Sciences and an M.S. in Veterinary & Biomedical Sciences from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, as well as an M.B.A. from the University of Kansas.Mr. Ridenour serves as Chair of the Board of Directors for RareKC, a non-profit whose mission is to accelerate the diagnosis, care, and treatment of rare conditions, and as a member of the Board of Directors for the Alphapointe Foundation, a non-profit that works to empower people with vision loss to live, work and be independent. He also currently serves on several other advisory boards whose work is committed to workforce development and the fight to eliminate health inequities and the systemic barriers that cause them.

Professor and Vice Chair of Operations
Department of Computational Biomedicine
Associate Director of Computational Oncology
Cancer Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

Dr. Nicholas Tatonetti is Professor and Vice Chair of Operations in the Department of Computational Biomedicine and Associate Director of Computational Oncology in the Cancer Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. They received a PhD from Stanford University where they focused on the development of novel statistical and computational methods for observational data mining. Over the past 14 years, Dr. Tatonetti has applied these methods to drug safety surveillance and the discovery of dangerous adverse drug effects and has identified and validated previously unknown serious drug-drug interactions. Their lab at Cedars-Sinai is focused on using massive-scale real clinical and molecular data for making robust and validated scientific discoveries, with a particular focus on detecting, explaining, and validating drug effects and drug interactions.

Dr. Tatonetti has published over 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications across medicine, systems biology, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Dr. Tatonetti is passionate about the integration of real-world data (such as those stored in the electronic health records) and high-dimensional biological data (captured using next-generation sequencing, high-throughput screening, and other “omics” technologies) to reimagine and rescale the scientific method.