Full Team Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Juvena Therapeutics

Vengadeshprabhu Karuppa gounder, PhD

Dr. Vengadeshprabhu Karuppa gounder, PhD, joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Scientist II working on preclinical in vivo disease modeling and drug discovery. Dr. Karuppa gounder brings over 10 years of pharmacology & drug development experience in academic research. Dr. Karuppa gounder has strong background in pharmacology, immunology and molecular biology. He has several years of experience developing preclinical animal models in areas of diabetes, NASH, cardiomyopathy, autoimmune diseases, aging, osteoarthritis, IBD, renal and inflammatory diseases.

Dr. Karuppa gounder completed his Undergraduate and Master’s work on Pharmaceutical Sciences at the TamilNadu DR. MGR Medical University, Chennai, India and did his Ph.D. studies at Niigata University of Pharmacy and Applied Life Sciences, Japan, where he studied the role of HMGB1 and GPCR role in diabetes and autoimmune disease models. Then he joined as a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State College of Medicine, PA. During his fellowship, Dr. Karuppa gounder established new methods to study the role of GPCR signaling in synovitis, osteoarthritis and osteoporosis in mouse models and treatment options.

Dr. Karuppa gounder achieved the first author in leading scientific journals, Science Translational Medicine, & Aging Research Reviews and co-author of several research and review articles, and bagged several awards and grants.

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Ritwik Datta, PHD

Ritwik Datta joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Scientist on the Pharmacology team. Ritwik is a physiologist with over ten years of experience. His expertise lies in comprehending the molecular basis of cardiometabolic diseases. Ritwik’s approach to investigating complex biological questions involves utilizing both mouse models and cell-based methods to develop innovative therapies for cardiometabolic and pulmonary diseases.

Ritwik received his Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta under the guidance of Sagartirtha Sarkar, Ph.D. Ritwik focused on studying how two major cell types in the heart – cardiac myocytes and fibroblasts – communicated with each other through secreted molecules and how these signaling pathways impacted cardiac fibrosis.

Ritwik completed his extensive postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the lab of Kamran Atabai, MD. Ritwik’s research identified a novel integrin-mediated feedback loop of insulin receptor signaling that regulates skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, laying the foundation for integrin-based therapy to lower daily insulin needs in diabetic patients. In his recent work, Ritwik investigated integrins’ role in regulating dietary fat metabolism in the intestine, providing insights into how intestinal lipid droplet homeostasis affects whole-body lipid metabolism and cardiovascular health.

Throughout his career, Ritwik has garnered recognition and support from prestigious organizations, including postdoctoral fellowships from the Larry L Hillblom Foundation, enabling him to pursue his research endeavors. Ritwik has 6, 1st author publications including in PNAS and Cell reports, and he is a co-author of 10 publications in leading scientific journals.

Besides his passion for science, Ritwik is a travel and photography enthusiast.

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Mingyu Chung, PhD

Min received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan and worked for five years as a product engineer at Samsung Austin Semiconductor. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical and Systems Biology at Stanford University, where he researched growth factor and cell cycle signaling in the laboratory of Tobias Meyer. He completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University (laboratory of Thomas Rando), where he leveraged single-cell genomics and chemical and genetic screening to investigate the mechanisms of skeletal muscle stem cell fate specification. Min received an NIH F32 postdoctoral fellowship and is a co-author on 17 publications.

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Trang Vuong

Trang joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Scientist to contribute to Dr. Li’s research on developing various assays for advancing Juvena Therapeutics’ pipeline library of rejuvenating proteins for therapeutic purposes.

Trang obtained her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from UC Davis and continued to study for her Master in Immunology at UC Davis. Before joining Juvena, she worked at Teva Pharmaceuticals and worked extensively in their antibody screening. She managed an early antibody discovery project and had experiences in running various animal models for lead efficacy testing. She has extensive experience in flow cytometry, assay development and project leadership.

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Jonathan Gaffney

Jonathan Gaffney joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Research Associate on the Discovery Team, where he conducts in vitro cell assays to evaluate the bioactivity of lead proteins, produces viruses to establish new cell lines, and generates gRNA libraries for optical pooled screening. Jonathan earned his B.S. in Biochemistry from UCLA. During his time at UCLA, he conducted chemical biology research in the Sletten Group.

Jonathan’s initial project in the Sletten Group involved investigating the photophysical properties of near-infrared polymethine dyes, focusing on whether exchanging their counter-ions could improve brightness. He later worked on synthesizing branched fluorous tags, which could be appended to drug payloads to enhance solubilization in fluorous nanoemulsions, with the ultimate goal of improving drug delivery.
Outside of work, Jonathan enjoys running, biking, hiking, and spending time with his family and dogs. He’s also an avid fan of good Netflix shows.

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Rohit Jadhav, PHD

Dr. Rohit Jadhav brings more than 12 years of cross disciplinary experience encompassing the fields of oncology, immune aging and auto-immune diseases. He has extensive experience in algorithm development for diagnostic and prognostic biomarker discovery dealing with diverse datasets investigating the Transcriptome, Epigenome and DNA mutations in clinical cohorts.

Dr. Jadhav earned his B.Tech. in Bioinformatics from India, a M.S. in Bioinformatics from Indiana University, Indianapolis, a PhD in Molecular Medicine from UT Health, San Antonio as a CPRIT pre-doctoral fellow, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Immunology at Stanford School of Medicine and Mayo Clinic.

Masters & PhD (2009-2016)

Dr. Jadhav worked on identifying epigenetic biomarkers investigating alterations in DNA methylation across different cancer types including breast, ovarian, endometrial, oral and prostate. He was awarded a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Predoctoral Fellowship, which enabled him to be involved in collaborative projects focusing on non-invasive approaches for biomarker discovery. One such project involved use of single-cell RNA sequencing to study circulating tumor cells and another involved studying DNA methylation in cell free DNA, both from peripheral blood. As a lead bioinformatician for these studies, he implemented classification-based prediction methods to enable identification of a panel of biomarkers to be used in determining treatment approaches for prostate cancer patients belonging to different subtypes. These studies have led to 3 approved patents from his mentor Dr. Tim Huang. During this time, Dr. Jadhav was also a lead author on the study that identified DNA methylation biomarkers capable of identifying predisposition to breast cancer after prenatal exposure to the compound bisphenol A and preventive effects of genistein.

Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017-2022)

Dr. Jadhav’s work at Stanford University and Mayo Clinic with Dr. Jorg Goronzy who is a leading expert in immune aging and auto-immunity, focused on epigenetics in the context of chromatin accessibility and specifically alterations in the immune cell types like CD4 and CD8 T cells during aging and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. He was also a lead author studying epigenetic alterations in exhausted T-cells post checkpoint blockade therapies in collaboration with Dr. Rafi Ahmed from Emory University. During this time Dr. Jadhav built pipelines deployed in on-prem clusters and in the cloud for analyzing and visualizing data from RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, TCR-seq, single cell multiome (RNA+ATAC), single cell Cite-seq (RNA+Protein) among others.

Dr. Jadhav has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers with over a thousand citations.

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Munir Yousef, MS

Munir Yousef joined Juvena Therapeutics as a bioinformatics analyst to contribute to Juvena’s growing platform by developing robust data analysis pipelines for their in silico protein drug discovery platform. After realizing his passion for data-driven discovery of solutions to real world problems, Munir obtained his Masters degree in Applied Data Science from Syracuse University.

Before officially joining the team, Munir worked as a data science consultant and helped develop internal data analysis and visualization tools to support Juvena’s growing R&D platforms.

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Hee Ju Kim, MS

Hee Ju joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Research Associate to work on the validation of our pipeline of pro-regenerative lead protein therapeutic candidates in in vivo preclinical models of aging and degenerative diseases caused by aging.

She is originally from Korea and she received her master’s degree in biochemistry from Korea University. Her master’s degree was supported by Brain Korea 21 (BK21). During her masters, she was trained in basic molecular techniques and in vitro experiments. Her master’s thesis was about double stranded DNA repair in yeast ribosomal protein S3.

Before joining Juvena Therapeutics, Hee Ju was trained as a research volunteer in the Peter W. Laird lab, Norris Cancer Center at the University of Southern California (USC). She was involved in the epigenomic projects and she designed the reaction oligo for Mouse MetyLight and some of the primers, which she designed, were published in the paper, Urology.

Hee Ju started improving her in vivo skills in the David J. Anderson’s lab as a research assistant for 5 years at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She was involved in the projects of anxiety and aggression. After she moved to Austin, she worked with Michael R. Drew as a research associate for 4 years at the Center for Learning and Memory, UT Austin. Then she worked at the KPC lab in Korea for 2 years in preclinical models of neurodegeneration, in particular Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease.

In Hee Ju’s free time, she enjoys traveling with family, playing golf, and spending time with her lovely dog Kelly.

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Skanda Goudar

Skanda joined Juvena Therapeutics in April 2025 as Senior Director of Alliance and Program Management. With 20 years of industry experience drawing from a solid clinical development background, across multiple therapeutic areas, all phases and FDA filings, he is adept at fostering effective collaborations to guide cross-functional teams in translating strategic plans into tactical initiatives. Most recently, heading the Alliance Management function at Bolt Biotherapeutics, he spearheaded the creation of effective solutions to bridge the cultural gap between biotech and big pharma, while adapting to the unique challenges of virtual team interactions, ensuring that market trends, competitive intelligence, and business analysis inform key decisions. Prior to that, he was Gilead Sciences managing a portfolio of partnerships and collaborations across R&D and Commercial, with a focus on oncology (immunotherapy) and antiviral development and commercialization. He has an MBA from Loyola Marymount University. In his free time, he enjoys reading (and writing) science fiction and exploring the great outdoors

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Ashil Koranne

Ashil joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Research Associate to contribute to pre-clinical in-vivo research, including the functional and behavioral validation of lead protein therapeutics developed by the in-vitro team.

Ashil obtained his bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of California, Riverside. Working in the Nabity Lab, he focused on genetics with the aim to parse out an endosymbiont genome from that of its host, the woolly apple aphid, to elucidate the mechanisms the endosymbiont utilized to fortify the amino-acid poor diet of the aphid.

Realizing his aptitude for dissection and surgery, he began a two-year stint at the Oka Lab at Caltech post-graduating. After beginning by managing and genotyping mouse colonies of up to 55 lines and 400+ animals for the lab, he moved towards behavioral testing and survival intracranial surgery. He worked as a co-author on a project to create an opiate-biosensor, validating in-vitro and ex-vivo results in-vivo by both optimizing and executing intracranial viral injections, and optic fiber implantation in the VTA in the brain. This in conjunction with post-op fiber photometry and DeepLabCut analysis allowed visualization of how the brain processes mu opiates such as fentanyl.

In Ashil’s free time, he is a basketball fanatic, both in playing pickup and following the pros!

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Vengadeshprabhu Karuppa gounder, PhD

Ritwik Datta, PHD

Mingyu Chung, PhD

Trang Vuong

Jonathan Gaffney

Rohit Jadhav, PHD

Munir Yousef, MS

Hee Ju Kim, MS

Skanda Goudar

Ashil Koranne

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