Leadership Team
Meet iSpecimen's experienced leadership team with a shared commitment to our mission.
Tracy Wilson Curley
Interim Chief Executive Officer & Chief Financial Officer
Tracy is an experienced, results-oriented business builder focused on leading iSpecimen’s vision for progressive financial performance, expansion and growth in today’s dynamic healthcare and biotechnology research markets.
Tracy brings three decades of experience in public accounting and corporate finance for both publicly traded companies and emerging companies like iSpecimen. Before joining iSpecimen, Tracy served as a partner at CohnReznick LLP, a national accounting firm, where she led the creation and development of an emerging markets commercial audit practice team focused on recruiting and providing audit services to private and public emerging growth companies in the technology and life sciences industries. Earlier, and as a partner at Marcum LLP, a national accounting firm, Tracy led the northeast regional high-tech practice for the firm with a focus on expanding the client base to provide a full range of accounting, tax and advisory services for private and public emerging growth companies in high tech industries such as technology, life sciences and advanced manufacturing. Tracy has also served as a partner at Moody, Famiglietti & Andronico, LLP (MFA), a proactive, Boston-based consulting firm with national and global reach, where she led the creation and development of a public company audit practice focused on recruiting and providing audit services to public emerging growth companies.
Tracy received her Master of Accountancy and Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in accounting from Kansas State University. She also attended the United States Military Academy. She is a certified public accountant licensed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Tracy Wilson Curley
Interim Chief Executive Officer & Chief Financial Officer
Benjamin Bielak
Chief Information Officer
Ben brings 25 plus years of executive and senior information technology experience to iSpecimen. In his role at iSpecimen as Chief Information Officer, Ben is responsible for technology delivery and data strategy and services. He most recently served as the Chief Information Officer at GNS Healthcare, a leading casual machine learning product and services company, and as Director of Academic Technology at Harvard University. Prior to his work at GNS and Harvard, Bielak was the Chief Information Officer at Dovetail Health, a high-growth product and services company focused on reducing costs through pharmacy-focused interventions. He previously held roles as Manager of Development and Integration at Boston Medical Center and Senior Manager of Technology at Sapient.
Bielak holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Bentley University, where his studies focused on change management, and a master’s degree from Boston University in computer science. He maintains two certifications, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) Certified Healthcare Chief Information Officer (CHCIO) and the Health Information Management System Society (HIMSS) Certified Professional in Healthcare Information and Management Systems (CPHIMS).
Benjamin Bielak
Chief Information Officer
David Wages, Md, Phd
Chief Medical Officer
David is responsible for ensuring that iSpecimen meets the medical research needs of customers. This includes ensuring that specimens are of the highest quality and that iSpecimen technology will continue to meet the increasingly sophisticated needs of the academic, pharmaceutical, and government research communities.
Prior to joining iSpecimen, David served as Senior Medical Director at Quintiles, the world’s largest clinical research organization, where he supported both large pharmaceutical companies as well as smaller biotech organizations in a wide variety of clinical oncology programs. David has worked in both start-up biotechs and large pharma. David began his career working on the clinical development of novel drug-device combinations for blood decontamination at Cerus Corporation. He then worked on clinical trials at Wyeth that led to the development of Xyntha®, a drug used to treat hemophilia. After a brief stint assisting institutional investors on healthcare technology opportunities at Leerink-Swann’s Medacorp, David then moved on to ARIAD Pharmaceuticals where he turned to cancer research, working on ARIAD’s mTOR inhibitor for solid tumors as well as initiating ARIAD’s phase I trial for chronic myeloid leukemia drug, Iclusig®. David next joined EMD Serono where he worked on phase I-III trials of immune-agents for oncology. David holds an MD and PhD from the University of Virginia School of Medicine where he focused on the basic science of oncology. He then completed a residency at the University of California, San Francisco and a fellowship in hematopathology at Boston’s Beth Israel hospital.
David Wages, MD, PhD
Chief Medical Officer
Dawn Michelle
Vice President of Operations
Dawn and her team manage all aspects of daily operations at iSpecimen, from understanding researcher requirements through fulfillment, working closely with iSpecimen’s network of partner laboratories and biorepositories.
Dawn has over 25 years of clinical laboratory management experience with an emphasis on regulatory oversight. Dawn was formerly the Director of Operations for the Partners Biorepository for Medical Discovery, where she was responsible for providing the Partners research community with a repository and related services to support clinical, translational, and basic science research programs. Prior to that she was on the management team at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital blood transfusion service where she managed day-to-day activities and special initiatives including the implementation of a new laboratory information system.
During her time at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, she sat on the AABB Immunohematology Reference Laboratories Standards Committee. She was a committee member for the 4th and 5th edition of standards and committee chair for the 6th edition of standards.
She received a BS in Clinical Laboratory Science from Georgia State University earning MT(ASCP) certification. Later, she earned a Specialist in Blood Banking (SBB) certification. She holds an MS in Computer Information Systems from Boston University as well as Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification from Villanova University.
Dawn Michelle
Vice President of Operations
Eric Langlois
Chief Revenue Officer
Eric is responsible for driving and managing all aspects of company sales and business development. In this position, he applies his strategic vision as well as day-to-day execution on initiatives related to revenue generation and account management. He also plays a key role in analyzing and developing the supply partner network in order to meet the demands of iSpecimen’s rapidly expanding customer base.
Eric has amassed nearly 20 years of experience in the arena of preclinical sample collections and biobanking for translational research. Before joining iSpecimen, Eric was Head of North American Sales for the ReproCell Group. He helped build and manage a sales team driven by the demands of integrating four portfolio companies with products and services in Cellular Reprogramming, Stem Cells, 3D cell culture, and biospecimens. Prior to that, he held rapidly increasing positions from Regional Sales Manager to VP of Sales with Genomics Collaborative, SeraCare Life Sciences, SeqWright, and BioServe. For over a decade Eric and his teams have proven quite successful at driving revenue using a consultative, customer-centric approach. Eric holds a BS in Biotechnology/Biochemistry from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Eric Langlois
Chief Revenue Officer
Carly Lejnieks
Vice President of Marketing
Carly and her team are focused on bringing the unique iSpecimen offering to life science customers who are seeking streamlined, compliant solutions for procuring archived pathology, banked, and prospective or custom-collected human biospecimens. The team is also focused on engaging new partners interested in joining the iSpecimen network, enabling deep and far-reaching access to millions of human biospecimens and patients that have consented to donate them.
Carly has led marketing strategies, integrated programs, and high-growth initiatives for Life Science organizations for more than 20 years. Before joining iSpecimen, she worked as a marketing consultant for more than a decade serving clients in the healthcare and life science industries. Most recently, she managed global, digital marketing and eCommerce programs responsible for driving double-digit growth in the cell culture consumables division of Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Carly Lejnieks
Vice President of Marketing
Evan Cox
Vice President of Product Management
Evan brings nearly 20 years of Product Management and leadership experience to iSpecimen. In his role at iSpecimen, Evan is responsible for creation and management of the long-term roadmap and strategy plan for our industry leading iSpecimen Marketplace application. Prior to joining iSpecimen, Evan held several key senior management roles at Definitive Healthcare Corp., a provider of healthcare commercial intelligence, most recently as Associate Vice President, where he led the product management team. Before that, he held multiple product strategy and decision support roles at Change Healthcare, a healthcare technology company, where he focused on artificial intelligence and natural language processing to streamline existing workflows.
In addition, Mr. Cox co-founded DSE Analytics, a company that used natural language processing to integrate qualitative and quantitative information available on Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) surveys to deliver providers deep insights into their satisfaction scores. He also served as Senior Product Manager of Data Analytics and Research at Press Ganey Associates and Product Lead of Clinical Data Management at WebMD.
Evan Cox
Vice President of Product Management
Erik Uribe
Director of Global Implementations
With years of experience in data gathering and system integration, Erik is focused on building out the capabilities of the iSpecimen Marketplace to enable customers to more easily search, find, and acquire the human biospecimens and data they need to power their research. Because specimen data forms the backbone of our evolution as a company, Erik is vital in streamlining the experience of both suppliers and researchers.
Erik has led system implementation projects, executed global technology roadmaps for life science organizations, established new supply chain management systems, consolidated systems of acquired companies, and guided vendor selection for global IT projects. Prior to joining iSpecimen, he worked in successive sales and management roles in the healthcare and life science space. Most recently, he worked as the Associate Director of Global Implementations for Discovery Life Sciences where he worked with senior management to spearhead system implementation projects internationally.
Erik Uribe
Director of Global Implementations
Jeff Ladino
Vice President of Software Engineering
Jeff brings over fifteen years of experience in software engineering to iSpecimen’s software team, leading them in building out our online marketplace platform. By driving the consistent evolution of the iSpecimen Marketplace, Jeff and his team creates an increasingly user-friendly environment for our researcher clients to find the correct specimens they need to do ground-breaking research.
In the past, Jeff has designed and implemented web applications, created platforms that mobilize enterprise data to native apps across various devices, led software release processes, and managed geographically distributed development teams. Before joining the iSpecimen leadership team, Jeff worked on the engineering team at high-growth corporations such as Wayfair and Charles River Development to develop applications that would revolutionize both the consumer experience and the field of financial advising. Most recently, Jeff worked as the director of engineering at the Predictive Index. There, he led the monolith to microservices architecture transformation, grew the engineering team, and created an innovative training and onboarding program for new engineers.
Jeff Ladino
Vice President of Software Engineering
Jeff brings over fifteen years of experience in software engineering to iSpecimen’s software team, leading them in building out our online marketplace platform. By driving the consistent evolution of the iSpecimen Marketplace, Jeff and his team creates an increasingly user-friendly environment for our researcher clients to find the correct specimens they need to do ground-breaking research.
In the past, Jeff has designed and implemented web applications, created platforms that mobilize enterprise data to native apps across various devices, led software release processes, and managed geographically distributed development teams. Before joining the iSpecimen leadership team, Jeff worked on the engineering team at high-growth corporations such as Wayfair and Charles River Development to develop applications that would revolutionize both the consumer experience and the field of financial advising. Most recently, Jeff worked as the director of engineering at the Predictive Index. There, he led the monolith to microservices architecture transformation, grew the engineering team, and created an innovative training and onboarding program for new engineers.
Jeff Ladino
Vice President of Software Engineering
Board of Directors
In addition to our original Founder, Christopher Ianelli, the following individuals sit on iSpecimen’s board of directors:
Andrew Ross
Board Member
George “Bud” Scholl
Board Member
Steven Gullans
Board Member
John L. Brooks III
Board Member
Christopher Ianelli, MD, PhD
Board Member
Jill Mullan
Board Member
Joseph J. Basile
Board Member
Advisors:
Robert Babkowski, MD, FCAP
Chair of Pathology, Stamford Hospital
Martin Ferguson, PhD
Consultant, National Cancer Institute
Bill O’Donnell
Chief Executive Officer, Blade
Ed Trautman, PhD
VP, Informatics, Analytics and Business Intelligence LabCorp
Jim Vaught, PhD
Editor in Chief, Biopreservation & Biobanking Journal