Joseph F. Petrosino, Ph.D. is the Chief Scientific Innovation Officer at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), where he is also professor and chairman of the department of Molecular Virology and Microbiology. He received his Ph.D. from BCM in 1998 and continued there for his postdoctoral training in Molecular and Human Genetics. In 2004, Dr. Petrosino joined the faculty of the Department of Molecular Virology and Microbiology.
Read More In 2011, he established the Alkek Center for Metagenomics and Microbiome Research at BCM to advance the understanding of how the microbiome impacts health and disease. In 2013, Dr. Petrosino founded Diversigen, a BCM Technologies start-up to serve industrial microbiome sequencing and analytics needs. He sits on the scientific advisory boards of several biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and nutrition companies and has contributed to more than 220 peer-reviewed studies. Dr. Petrosino was also named an American Society for Microbiology Distinguished lecturer from 2012-2014.
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Brad Kairdolf, Ph.D. is a Senior Manager of Commercialization and Technology Management with BCM Ventures at the Baylor College of Medicine, leading commercialization for therapeutics including small molecules, cell & gene therapies, biologics, and vaccines. He’s negotiated dozens of agreements in the space, including Commercialization & Collaboration Agreements for drug discovery partnerships, exclusive licenses for clinical-stage cell therapy technologies, and licenses for the COVID-19
Read More vaccine developed at Baylor and Texas Children’s. He also serves as a Joint Steering Committee member for Blue Square Discoveries, a drug discovery joint venture between Baylor College of Medicine and Deerfield Management. Prior to joining BCM Ventures, Dr. Kairdolf was founder and CEO of DiagNano, an in vitro diagnostics company based on technology developed at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. He received a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Tech and Emory University and completed a two-year Technology Commercialization graduate program through the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech.
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Michael is Executive Director, Licensing for the BCM Ventures team at Baylor College of Medicine. He has more than 10 years of experience leading the licensing team at BCM, and more than 20 years of experience in academic commercialization and intellectual property management. The BCM Ventures licensing team manages a diverse and growing portfolio of biomedical technologies and intellectual property, and we take a pragmatic, principled
Read More approach to negotiating impactful agreements with commercial partners to support the missions of the college.
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William Slattery is a Partner on the Therapeutics team and joined the Firm in 2000. Prior to Deerfield, Mr. Slattery was a senior healthcare analyst for 10 years at Amerindo Investment Advisors, where he oversaw biotechnology investments. He has held various positions in research including those at National Medical Enterprises, Johnson & Johnson, and HMSS. Mr. Slattery is the Chairman of Gilda’s Club New York City, a non-profit
Read More organization supporting cancer patients and their families. He holds an undergraduate degree in Biology and Chemistry from State University of New York at Albany and completed coursework in Immunology at the Graduate School-New Brunswick, Rutgers University.
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Michael Foley, Ph.D., is the Chief Executive Officer, Deerfield Discovery and Development. Dr. Foley joined Deerfield in 2018 to focus on research collaborations. Most recently, he was the CEO and Sanders Director at Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute (Tri-I TDI) where he led the efforts to discover drug candidates in an academic setting. Prior to Tri-I TDI, he was Director of the Chemical Biology Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Read More Dr. Foley is the founder of Forma Therapeutics. In 2001, he founded Infinity Pharmaceuticals and in 2000, he founded CombinatoRx. In 1999, he was a founding member of the Harvard Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology and served as the head of Chemical Technology. He was a GlaxoSmithKline Fellow at Harvard University and previously a Research Chemist at GlaxoSmithKline. Dr. Foley began his career at Bristol Myers Squibb as a Research Chemist. He received his B.S. from St. Norbert College, his M.S. from Utah State University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
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Damian W. Young, Ph.D. is Associate Director for the Center for Drug Discovery at Baylor College of Medicine and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology and Pathology and Immunology. His research is focused on applying modern synthetic organic chemistry to constructing collections of biologically active small molecules for drug discovery. He has applied concepts related to generating molecular diversity within small molecules
Read More for modulating a variety of disease-associated protein targets. His lab was among the first to apply the principles of diversity generation to fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) and DNA-Encoded Library (DEL) platforms.

Dr. Young received a B.S. in chemistry from Howard University and then worked as a process chemist at Trimeris Inc. on the HIV drug enfuvirtide. He received a Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry under the direction of Prof. Daniel Comins at North Carolina State University and subsequently pursued postdoctoral studies in the lab of Prof. Stuart Schreiber at Harvard University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Prior to joining Baylor, he was Group Leader within the Chemical Biology Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a Project Leader for the Harvard/Broad Centers of Excellence in Methodology and Library Development (CMLD). Dr. Young will serve as Scientific Business Manager for Blue Square Discoveries.
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