QB3 Malaysia Program

Regis B. Kelly, Ph.D.

Director, QB3; GloBE Course Director

Prior to joining QB3 in 2004, Dr. Kelly served as executive vice-chancellor at UCSF; he oversaw the UCSF research enterprise and was also responsible for construction of the new Mission Bay campus. He is currently chairman of the Bay Area Scientific Innovation Consortium and has served on the boards of the Malaysian Biotechnology Industry Advisory Board, the Scleroderma Foundation, and Bridge Pharmaceuticals. He is an advisor to the Thailand Bionanotechnology Institute, Ho Chi Minh City Biotechnology Department Corp., University of Oxford Systems Biology Program, and the San Francisco Mayor’s Biotechnology Advisory Group. He joined the UCSF Department of Biochemistry in 1971 and has served as the University’s Director of Cell Biology Graduate Program, the Director of the Hormone Research Institute, and Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics. He earned an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in biophysics from the California Institute of Technology.

Douglas Crawford, Ph.D.

Associate Director, QB3; GloBE Course Co-organizer

Douglas Crawford’s goal is to help stimulate economic growth in California by promoting cross-discipline academic research and accelerating the transfer of the resulting innovations to the market. Crawford created and manages the first incubator within the University of California, the QB3 Garage@UCSF, which has now expanded to include the QB3 Garage@Berkeley, the QB3 Mission Bay Innovation Center, and the QB3 East Bay Innovation Center. Together these incubators are currently home to 42 companies. Crawford is also a founder and managing director of Mission Bay Capital, an $11.3M seed-stage venture fund that seeks to make pivotal early-stage investments in bioscience companies emerging from UC. He is a board member of Redwood Biosciences (observer), Delpor, and the BayBio Institute. Crawford received his PhD in biochemistry from UCSF.

P'ng Loke, Ph.D.

Consultant, QB3 Malaysia Program

Dr. P’ng Loke is a research scientist from Penang, Malaysia, with an interest in infectious diseases and immunology. He studied in Chung Ling High School in Penang and UWCSEA in Singapore. For his undergraduate education he attended to St. Anne's College, Oxford on the Chevening Scholarship and graduated in 1996 with a first class honors degree, winning "proxime accessit" in the Gibbs prize for Biology.

He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh with Judith Allen, supported by the Wellcome Trust. In 2001, he took an International Traveling Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust to work with Dr. James Allison at UC Berkeley. From 2004 to 2007, he studied host-pathogen interactions at UCSF with Dr. Jim McKerrow, supported by an NRSA fellowship from the NIH. He then received a Career Development Award from the Pacific Southwest Regional Center of Excellence and started his independent group as an Assistant Research Immunologist at the Division of Experimental Medicine at UCSF. In 2009, he moved to New York University School of Medicine, where he is now an Assistant Professor.

 

He is an author on 20 international peer reviewed publications and is part of the Faculty of 1000, as a contributor to the "Immune Response" section.

Agnes L. Buenaventura

Program Coordinator, QB3 Malaysia Program

Agnes Buenaventura is currently the Malaysian Program Coordinator at QB3.

Agnes Buenaventura has years of experience in finance, administration, marketing and sales during her tenure at Philippine Airlines. She has served Philippine Airlines’ corporate office in the Philippines as account executive, product manager and assistant vice president. Agnes has also served Philippine Airlines’ foreign operations in Guam as Finance Officer and in Singapore and Americas Region as Country Manager. After her airline career, she became a travel agency entrepreneur. She joined QB3 on May 2007.

Agnes received her B.A. in Accounting from the University of San Carlos in Cebu, Philippines.

Kenny Ang, Ph.D.

Alumnus,, QB3 Malaysia Program

Kenny Ang comes from the city of Ipoh, Perak. He is a biochemist, holding a B.S. (Hons) from the Australian National University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the National University of Singapore. Having held positions as a research biologist at the Centre for Natural Product Research, Singapore and the National University of Singapore, Ang joined MerLion Pharmaceuticals Pte. Ltd. in 2002 as a Senior Research Scientist where he conducted high-throughput screening using fluorescence- and radioactive-based assay technologies. In 2006 Ang joined Exelgen Discovery Research Ltd. in Bude, U.K. as a Marie Curie Research Fellow. His responsibilities included collaborative programs on assay development, enzyme- and cell-based screening. From 2007 to 2011,, he joined the QB3-Malaysia Program as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the UCSF's Small Molecule Discovery Center. He continues his research interest in preclinical bioactive hit discovery using various assay technologies such as high content screening, surface plasmon resonance, flow cytometry and RNAi screening.

Kenny currently conducts research at UCSF's Small Molecule Discovery Center.

Izza Jahari, Ph.D.

Post-Doctoral Research Scholar, QB3 Malaysia Program

Izza Jahari is a native of Terengganu, hailing from Kampung Losong on the outskirts of Kuala Terengganu. An energetic and diverse character, she has worked on three continents in fields ranging from education to development and fair trade. She is a biochemist by profession, having obtained her B.Sc. in genetics and microbiology from the University of Malaya and her D.Phil. in biochemistry from the University of Oxford. For her post-graduate research she worked on the involvement of Srs2, Slx5, and Slx8 proteins of Schizosaccharomyces pombe in recombination. Jahari joined Inno Biologics in Malaysia as a Research Scientist shortly after completing her work at Oxford. At Inno Biologics she was involved in mammalian cell line development and engineering, as well as being a key figure in the development of collaborative research projects between Inno Biologics and local and international institutions and biopharmaceutical companies. She joined the QB3-Malaysia Program as a post-doctoral fellow in April 2008 and is working at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF, focusing on large-scale and high-throughput quantitative genetics and physical interaction maps in a number of organisms.  She retains her ties to industry and is also charged with expanding the commercial and research network of her parent company. Her interests extend beyond pure research to entrepreneurship and investment in the biotechnology industry, and she hopes to play an integral part in putting the Malaysian biotechnology industry on the global map.

Izza currently conducts research at UCSF's Krogan Lab.

Weng Ruh Wong, Ph.D.

Post-Doctoral Research Scholar, QB3 Malaysia Program

Wong Weng Ruh comes from the heart of Kuala Lumpur city. Research has been an integral part of her undergraduate and postgraduate training. Her first step into the marine world was during her BSc program in Marine Science (majoring in Marine Biology) at the National University of Malaysia. Weng has a great passion in scuba diving and she is a certified Rescue Diver.

In late 2009, she obtained her Ph.D. in Ocean Science, also from the National University of Malaysia. She studied on the diversity of bacteria associated with marine benthic dinoflagellates and mining functional genes from this environment using metagenomics approach.

Weng joined the QB3-Malaysia program as a post-doctoral fellow in Jan 2010 and working in the Department of Chemistry, UC Santa Cruz. She sees the potential of rich biodiversity Malaysian waters as the source of marine natural products. She hopes to extend her skills in rapid and high-throughput techniques, combining molecular biology and organic chemistry in order to provide a rich resource for drug discovery.

Weng currently conducts research at UCSC's Linington Lab.