Ray serves as the program manager for drug discovery at sciVelo where he supports the commercial translation strategy of the Pitt Health Sciences drug discovery research portfolio. Prior to joining sciVelo, while obtaining his MD at the University of Pittsburgh, he conducted patient education research at Pitt Neurosurgery. As a student entrepreneur, he was awarded in multiple pitch competitions and hackathons, including 2nd prize at IBM Blue Hack. During medical school, he co-founded his startup, Labkind, a web-based platform for cross-disciplinary collaboration among science research labs. Prior to his medical education, Ray engineered human stem cells at Columbia University and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is a co-inventor of a methodology to genomically edit human neural stem cells. As an innovator, he is interested in designing and implementing solutions using software and computational technologies, most recently as a full-stack web and mobile developer. Outside of academia, Ray has lifelong passions for global humanitarian disaster intervention, violin, and scuba diving.
Education
M.D. Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, 2020
Graduate Foundations Certificate, Columbia University, 2015
B.S. Cell and Molecular Biology, West Chester University, 2012
Research Experience
Department of Neurosurgery, University of Pittsburgh
Supervisor: Robert M. Friedlander, MD
Patient Education and Engagement Through Multimedia: Prospective Pilot Study on Health Literacy in Patients with Cerebral Aneurysms
School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh
Supervisor: Arpan Prabhu, MD
A National WestLaw Next Database Analysis of Malpractice Litigation in Radiation Oncology
Columbia Stem Cell Core Facility, Columbia University
Supervisor: Barbara Corneo, PhD
Stem Cell Core Facility: Production of Motor Neurons and Cardiomyocytes
Center for Regenerative Medicine, National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Supervisor: Mahendra Rao, MD, PhD
Engineering of Neural Stem Cells for Therapeutic Application
Transcription Activator-like Effector Nuclease (TALEN)-mediated CLYBL Targeting Enables Enhanced Transgene Expression and One-step Generation of Dual Reporter Human induced Pluripotent Stem Cell (iPSC) and Neural Stem Cell (NSC) Lines
Department of Biology, West Chester University
Supervisor: Gregg Phares, PhD
RNAi Knockdown of Male Mating Behavior in Pond Snail Lymnaea stagnalis
Commercial Translation Experience
BHI Commercialization Consulting Club
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Engineering neural stem cells using homologous recombination
US Patent No. WO2015073867A1
Malik N, Rao M, Zhou J, Funahashi R
Entrepreneurial Experience
- 2nd prize - IBM Blue Hackathon 2018 - Team Leader
- 2nd prize - Children's Hospital Hackathon for Hope 2018 - Team Leader
- 2nd prize - StartUp PittBlitz 2016 - Team Leader
- 4th prize - Randall Big Idea Competition 2016 - Team Leader
- Blast Furnace University of Pittsburgh Accelerator (2016 cohort)
- IdeaFoundry Accelerator (2017 - 2018)
CEO — LabKind Project (2014 - 2020) — Pittsburgh, USA