The Prepare.ai Podcast

Erica Barnell is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Geneoscopy Inc., a clinical-stage diagnostic company working on early detection of colorectal cancer. Its technology analyzes RNA in stool samples to look for early warning signs of cancer, providing a non-invasive alternative to colonoscopies. Geneoscopy raised a $6.9m Series A in 2019; in 2020, its diagnostic device was awarded Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA and Erica was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30, and in 2021 a peer-reviewed article with results of company’s mutlifactor RNA-FIT test was published in the journal Clinical and Translational Gastroenterology.

Erica is also an MD/PhD candidate at the Washington University School of Medicine with a PhD in Molecular Genetics and Genomics, where her thesis work was completed in the Griffith Lab at the McDonnell Genome Institute to advance bioinformatic tools in the precision oncology space. She joins Dave and Fully to discuss how AI is helping to detect colorectal cancer and other gastrointestinal health conditions.
We also get to talk poop jokes for the first time.

Jason Bull is Chief Technology Officer of Benson Hill, a St. Louis-based food tech company unlocking the natural genetic diversity of plants thru its cutting-edge food innovation engine. Jason leads the company’s combined R&D and Data Science capabilities across predictive breeding, genomics, product discovery, big data engineering and software development. Prior to joining Benson Hill, he served as VP, Strategy & Machine Learning at Object Computing, Inc. and before that spent twenty years with Bayer (Monsanto) and then Climate Corporation, most recently as its Global VP R&D of Digital Seed Science. Jason has been granted 30 patents in digital agriculture, molecular breeding and robotic seed chipping and has also authored 15 publications. He earned his Ph.D. in Quantitative Genetics and Biometrics and a Bachelors Degree in AgSci (Honors) in Quantitative Genetics and Analytics from the University of Queensland in Australia.

Marc Bernstein is Founder & CEO of Balto, a real-time guidance tool for contact centers. Powered by AI, Balto listens to both sides of a conversation and visually prompts agents with the best things to say, live on every call. Marc also hosts Reimagining the Contact Center, a podcast that digs into the new contact center economy and how technology, businesses, and the modern customer work together for better outcomes. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Marc has both founded and worked at a number of startups before founding Balto. He joins Fully and Dave to talk about how technology is changing customer service and sales, and how Balto has captured so much market share so quickly.

Vidya Setlur is Principal Research Scientist and Research Manager at Tableau Software, a leading data visualization company acquired by Salesforce in 2019, where she focuses on natural language processing and computer graphics. Vidya earned her PhD in Computer Graphics in 2005 at Northwestern University; the goal of her work is to develop new computer algorithms and user interfaces that enhance visual communication and understanding of the semantics of the underlying data. Her research combines concepts and methods from information retrieval, human perception and cognitive science to help users effectively interact with devices and information in their environment. She speaks with us about user intent and human computer interaction, where search is headed in the coming years, and why its important for women in tech to engage young learners.

Sanmay Das is a professor of Computer Science at George Mason University. From 2013-2020, he was on the faculty of the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also founded and served as the first chair of the steering committee of the Division of Computational and Data Sciences. Dr. Das received his Ph.D. from MIT and a Bachelor's degree from Harvard, both in Computer Science.
He is chair of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence, a member of the board of directors of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, and serves as an associate editor for the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. He has been recognized with awards for research and teaching, including an NSF CAREER Award and the Department Chair Award for Outstanding Teaching at Washington University.