top of page

Biographies of Speakers

(In alphabetical order of surnames)
TP_edited.png

Tomi Poutanen

Chief AI Officer

TD Bank

Canada

Tomi is the cofounder of Layer 6 AI, which was recently acquired by TD Bank. He’s the cofounder and CTO of Milq.com, an online service providing a unique platform for people to discuss and curate music and other cultural content. Prior to Milq, Tomi founded Optimized Search Algorithms, which was sold to Yahoo. While at Yahoo, Tomi was the founder of a search-engine related advertising business, Paid Inclusion, which grew to a $200M-per-year business. He also served as the head of Yahoo’s International search operations. He cofounded Data Compression Technologies in his university days, which was acquired by Microsoft in 1996.

MS_edited.png

Dr. Molly Shoichet

University Professor and Michael E. Charles Professor in Chemical Engineering

University of Toronto

Canada

Photo Credit: Brigitte Lacombe

Professor Molly Shoichet is University Professor, a distinction held by less than 2% of the faculty, at the University of Toronto. She served as Ontario’s first Chief Scientist in 2018 where she worked to enhance the culture of science. Dr. Shoichet has published over 650 papers, patents and abstracts and has given over 420 lectures worldwide. She currently leads a laboratory of 30 and has graduated 220 researchers. Her research is focused on drug and cell delivery strategies in the central nervous system (brain, spinal cord, retina) and 3D hydrogel culture systems to model cancer. Dr. Shoichet co-founded four spin-off companies, is actively engaged in translational research and science outreach. Dr. Shoichet is the recipient of many prestigious distinctions and the only person to be inducted into all three of Canada’s National Academies of Science of the Royal Society of Canada, Engineering and Health Sciences. In 2018, Professor Shoichet was inducted as an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2011, she was awarded the Order of Ontario. Dr. Shoichet was the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Laureate for North America in 2015, elected Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2016, won the Killam Prize in Engineering in 2017, elected to the Royal Society (UK) in 2019 and awarded the NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal in 2020. Dr. Shoichet received her SB from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1987) and her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Polymer Science and Engineering (1992).

bottom of page