Director: John Zacharia, jzakhari (at) ucsd.edu

John is a fourth year bioengineering undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego. This is his third year in VentureForth, and has been an active part of the UCSD and San Diego biotech community since his arrival on campus. John honed his technical and entrepreneurial abilities by studying regular expressions at the Protein Kinase Resource / SDSC, cancerous resistance mechanisms at UCSD Moores Cancer Center, and business modalities at startup internet firm BuilderDepot.com.

In addition to directing the ABEC, he is also part of the UCSD undergraduate cardiovascular laboratory headed by professor Jeff Omens ( http://cardprint.ucsd.edu/ ), developing a computational model to calculate fluid induced shear stress on cardiac myocytes. John also holds a position as a research associate at Millenia Diagnostics ( http://www.milleniadiagnostics.com/ ), a San Diego in-vitro diagnostics firm.

In the future, John desires to use his experience with the ABEC in conjunction with his technical background to pursue a career in device development, manufacturing, or business strategy.

Ian Lian, ilian (at) ucsd.edu

Ian is a graduate student in the UCSD Bioengineering program, specializing in microarray bioinformatics and gene expression analysis. As a native Taiwanese who graduated from high school in Canada and complete his college study in UCSD, he has been involved in various academia-industrial interactive events. Ian is the publicity officer of the Bioengineering graduate research symposium, and the student representative in the Whitaker Institute of Bioengineering (WIBE) industrial advisory board. He has also participated in entrepreneurship startup process of Bmnews corp and GeneScope bioinformatics.

Kerry Tan, ktan419 (at) gmail.com

Kerry Tan is a fourth year student majoring in Economics with a minor in Mathematics. Kerry would like to get a PhD in Economics, specializing in Industrial Organization, and become a college professor in order to research the airline industry and teach about the process and causes of how a company can monopolize its industry. He has served as VentureForth's Co-President from 2004-2005 where his biggest accomplishments externally include the coordination of the E-Conference and ABEC2005, whereas he was able to better structure VF internally by instituting more formalized planning meetings and work meetings. He would also like to use his experience as VentureForth's former Director of Undergraduate Involvement (2003-2004) to implement ways to involve UCSD students with the local industry and find resources to help train them to become successful business leaders and entrepreneurs.

James Lu, lu.james.m (at) gmail.com

James is a third year Pharmacological Chemistry major with a minor in Management Science. His interest in VentureForth began with the Biotech Conference in 2005 . He joined VentureForth to further his aspirations of incorporating business and science together in hope to pursue a career in management in the biotech industry. He is currently a research analyst at Lancer Group [www.lancergroup.net], a corporate executive retained search firm. Before that, he was a lab/research intern at Solulink Biosciences. [www.solulink.com].
Despite having a strong background in science, he grew up with a passion to keep up with current events around the world. He's always on the look out for latest news in the biotech and hi-tech industry. Also, his broad knowledge and passion of the science industry and business is a great asset to VentureForth.

Lisa-Anne Chung, lfchung (at) gmail.com

Lisa-Anne Chung is a 3rd year Management Science major at UCSD. She started becoming interested in VentureForth through one of the two main conferences that they host, the Entrepreneurial Conference. She is excited to continue serving VentureForth to even higher levels with both UCSD and the community surrounding UCSD. She loves the management involved in running a small company and helping VentureForth organize events. She is currently a Research Analyst for the Lancer Group, (www.lancergroup.net) a corporate executive retained search firm, a Research Assistant for a Professor in the Economics Department and an Academic Advising Intern. This past summer, she interned at the Department of Commerce and next summer will be interning and volunteering in China. For the past two years, she has also been an orientation leader and involved with 3 different mentorship programs along with many other leadership opportunities. Lisa plans on using her skills and experience in VentureForth to facilitate her transition and benefit to her career. She is extremely excited to be the next President of VentureForth.