Elizabeth Wood, PhD
Founder & CEO, JURA Bio
About
Elizabeth Wood is the founder and CEO of JURA Bio, where she leads the development of AI-native drug discovery technologies that solve the fundamental bottlenecks in biological machine learning.
JURA builds de novo AI models that build the real-world data they need to learn. Under Wood's leadership, JURA has developed an integrated platform combining variational synthesis (1000T+ real-world designs), VISTA screening (1B+ functional measurements per campaign), and LeaVS (codesign of experiments and learning for orders-of-magnitude information gain). This technology has enabled the discovery of millions of fully functional hits across multiplexed therapeutic targets, validated CAR designs, and TCR-mimicking antibodies against previously undruggable targets.
Background
Before founding JURA, Wood was a post-doc in the lab of Adam Cohen at Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Physics. She started her PhD with Angela Belcher and Markus Buehler at MIT, and finished it under the supervision of Claus Helix-Nielsen at The Technical University of Denmark, Departments of Physics and Civil and Environmental Engineering.
She has also worked at the University of Copenhagen's SBiN Lab with Kresten Lindorff-Larsen, integrating computational methods with experimental studies to better predict RNA structure and to understand how the ability of proteins to change their shape helps modulate their function.
Affiliations & Service
Wood is an affiliate member of the Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, and visiting scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, where she served on the founding steering committee of the Models, Inference & Algorithms (MIA) Initiative and as the primary organizer of the multi-year NeurIPS Workshop Learning Meaningful Representations of Life. She currently serves on the board of Project Clio, a Massachusetts-based non-profit.