G. Hall Johnson

Co-founder / Chief Executive Officer

Hall's career experience centers on technology and includes commercializing new products and markets in both operational and business development senior leadership roles. He has broad experience in sales, strategic partners & alliances, entrepreneurship, operations, financial planning, and management. Hall's business development experience includes direct business to business sales of enterprise solutions to Fortune 500 companies as well as leading sales and service teams.

A graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Hall started his career with Hewlett-Packard selling scientific and engineering computing systems while being exposed to mass spectrometers and other analytical instruments. Drawn to smaller more entrepreneurial ventures, Hall eventually spent 20+ years in a variety of roles with MindLeaders helping to pioneer the e-learning market. By the end of his time with MindLeaders, organizations and individuals in almost every country in the world were using MindLeaders courses, including multi-national Fortune 100 companies and people living in mud hats in Africa that had to walk for miles to gain access.

Professor Michael A. Freitas, Ph.D.

Co-founder / Chief Science Officer / Board Secretary

Mike is the inventor of MassMatrix's protein and oligonucleotide analysis solutions for pharmaceutical companies and healthcare research centers. Mike oversees innovation, leading ongoing development and support of its RNA and conjugates analytic solutions.

Professor at The Ohio State University’s Department of Cancer Biology and Genetics in the College of Medicine at the OSU Wexner Medical Center, Mike has worked in mass spectrometry and proteomics for over 30 years with the last 20+ years developing and improving mass spectrometry and bioinformatic methods in cancer proteomics and chromatin biology. Mike received the American Society for Mass Spectrometry’s Research Award for his work excellence. He also directs the OSU College of Medicine’s Biomedical Science Graduate Program and codirects OSU’s Comprehensive Cancer Center Proteomics Shared Services.

Mike earned his BS and Ph.D. in chemistry at Oklahoma State and Kansas State Universities, respectively. His postdoctoral service was at Florida State University and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

See Mike's bio and publications at https://cancer.osu.edu/find-a-researcher/search-researcher-directory/michael-a-freitas

Herman Singh

Director of Engineering

Herman has cultivated a broad and comprehensive background in software engineering, spanning from mechanical engineering to advanced software development in healthcare, analytics, IoT, and energy sectors. His professional journey began with a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Maryland, which laid the foundation for a diverse career path that eventually steered into the realm of software engineering. Over the past decade, Herman has embarked on entrepreneurial ventures, led pivotal software development projects, and contributed to significant technological advancements within several startups and established corporations.

At CoverMyMeds (acquired by McKesson for $1.1 billion), Herman led a team of software engineers as well as a large scale data warehouse enablement project. At Elance Health, he designed and developed full stack microservice applications to integrate with a cutting-edge healthcare analytics platform built on Apache Spark, which was utilized by major healthcare payers including Cleveland Clinic and BCBS. Herman's passion for innovation and technology has driven him to not only develop cutting-edge solutions but also mentor and lead teams of engineers from varied backgrounds and levels of experience.

Dr. Juan D. Alfonzo

Executive Director, Brown RNA Center

Dr. Juan D. Alfonzo is currently the Mencoff Family Executive Director of the Brown RNA Center and until recently was an Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and the former Director of the Center for RNA Biology at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on the study of tRNA processing and modification in various organisms, including humans. The Alfonzo laboratory uses a multi-pronged approach that involves a combination of Biochemistry, Cell Biology, Biophysics, and omics to characterize various modification and tRNA processing enzymes. A major emphasis of the Alfonzo laboratory is the enzymology of modification enzymes to understand the basis for substrate specificity and to connect such studies with how intracellular compartmentalization affects tRNA modification and function. He was the recipient of an OSU Distinguished teaching award and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. He obtained his Ph.D. in Microbiology at Indiana University followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA working on the Biochemistry of RNA editing and modification in trypanosomes.

Dr. Alfonzo published an editorial in Nature Genetics in 2022 titled, “A call for direct sequencing of full-length RNAs to identify all modifications,” in which he and his co-authors outlined future research needs related to mapping and sequencing RNA chemical modifications. This has led to a National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) panel, for which Alfonzo is a member. The NASEM panel recently released a consensus study to call for a major investment by the Federal Government on new RNA sequencing and modification mapping technologies. This project is estimated to be 4-5 times the size of the Human Genome Project in scope.

See https://www.brown.edu/academics/biology/molecular-cell-biochemistry/graduate/people/juan-alfonzo

Prof. Patrick A Limbach

Professor and Vice President for Research, University of Cincinnati

Patrick A. Limbach, Ph.D., is an Ohio Eminent Scholar and professor of Chemistry at the University of Cincinnati. He has served as Vice President for Research for the University of Cincinnati since 2016 and is the current Board President for the University of Cincinnati Research Institute. His research lab has been focused on the identification, quantification, and sequence placement of modified ribonucleosides with an emphasis on characterizing and understanding the modification profiles of transfer RNAs from a variety of organisms. He and his group have developed numerous mass spectrometry-based approaches, tools, and reagents for the analysis of modified RNAs.

He was a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) consensus study committee that authored the 2024 report “Charting a Future for Sequencing RNA and Its Modifications: A New Era for Biology and Medicine” which outlines a 15-year roadmap to enable end-to-end sequencing of RNA and its variety of modified nucleosides. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a lifetime member of Phi Kappa Phi. He received his B.S degree from Centre College (Kentucky), his Ph.D. from Ohio State University training under Professor Alan G. Marshall, and conducted post-doctoral training at the University of Utah in the laboratory of Professor James A. McCloskey.

See https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/limbacpa