The team

Rhodemann is a three-time healthcare founder with 30 years of company-building across Wall Street, medical devices, and biotechnology. He co-founded Li Medical Technologies, a venture-backed orthopedic implant company acquired by ConMed, and began his career as a vice president in corporate finance at UBS Securities.

He is a co-author of three peer-reviewed publications in oncology drug delivery, including a study led by Merck's pharmaceutical sciences group. He founded Causal Data AI to give drug developers causal evidence, not correlations, before they commit to a trial.

Murthy created scDEFT, Causal Data AI's model for predicting and explaining patient drug response from single-cell data. He joins from Novartis, where as Executive Director and Head of AI for Target Identification he led an AI-first program using single-cell foundation models that delivered novel drug targets across eight indications into lab validation.

Before Novartis he was a research professor in biomedical informatics at Arizona State University and Mayo Clinic, and spent more than two decades at IBM Research, where as a Distinguished Research Scientist he led AI development for IBM Watson Health. He holds more than 60 U.S. patents, has published over 70 papers, and earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Farideh leads the organoid program that generates scDEFT's training and validation data. She is a developmental biologist and stem cell scientist with more than ten years of experience in organoid modeling, 3D culture, and gene editing.

She joins from Harvard Medical School and Mass Eye and Ear, where as a postdoctoral fellow she built organoid models of hearing loss to screen for regenerative drugs. Earlier, at the Royan Institute, she pioneered vascularized human inner ear organoids derived from pluripotent stem cells. She is a recipient of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Research Fellowship from the Dubai Harvard Foundation for Medical Research.

Tejal Patwari is Lead AI Evaluation Scientist, Biology at Causal Data AI, where she brings hands-on biology expertise to make sure the company's AI models are built on the right data and produce results that make biological sense. She finds and reviews the public cancer datasets the models learn from, and checks the models' results against the underlying biology.

Before joining Causal Data AI, Tejal earned her PhD in cell and molecular biology, where she developed RNA-based tools to switch genes on and off with light and used next-generation sequencing to find the RNA sequences that worked best. Her research was published in peer-reviewed journals and a Springer book chapter, earned a poster prize from the German Research Foundation, and was supported by a competitive innovation grant.

Rithika earned her M.S. in Computer Science, specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning, from Columbia University in 2026. She received her bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Data Science from Smith College, where she also took part in the joint BA/MA program with the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID). Her research interests sit at the intersection of artificial intelligence, society and computational biology.

At Causal Data AI, she works with the AI models that predict how patients respond to different drugs, work that opens up new possibilities for drug discovery. Outside of work, she is an avid tennis player and follows tennis, basketball, football and cricket.

Llew Keltner is a physician-scientist with more than four decades in biopharma drug and business development, much of it in oncology. He has led several cancer-focused biotechnology companies as CEO, including AgonOx, which developed OX40 agonists for cancer immunotherapy; Light Sciences Oncology, which advanced a late-stage, light-activated therapy for liver cancer and other solid tumors; and Metastat, which focused on cancer metastasis.

He founded EPISTAT, a healthcare technology transfer and strategy company, and has served on the boards of public companies including Raptor Pharmaceuticals, where he was Chairman, and MannKind. He is an Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, where he earned his MD and PhD, and has lectured in Columbia University's Bioethics program.