Dr. Vahan Simonyan is a multidisciplinary scientist and technology executive whose career spans quantum physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, genomics, biomedical informatics, regulatory science, and large-scale scientific computing. After entering U.S. federal service at NIH/NCBI, he moved to the Food and Drug Administration, where he served in senior scientific and technical roles including Lead Scientist in Genetics and Director of R&D Bioinformatics. He is the Founder and Chief Scientist of DNAHIVE and an Adjunct Professor at George Washington University. Across more than two decades of federal, academic, and industry leadership, he has authored more than 100 scientific publications and built complex data and analytics infrastructures designed for rigorous scientific, regulatory, and operational use.

Dr. Simonyan is best known for translating advanced computational biology into trusted federal infrastructure. At FDA, he led the development and operation of the High-performance Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE), a secure platform for large-scale genomic and multi-omic analysis that has supported regulatory science and next-generation sequencing workflows. He also leads the FDA-ARGOS effort, which develops curated, quality-controlled microbial reference sequences for diagnostics, medical countermeasure development, and regulatory decision-making. His work on reproducibility and provenance helped establish the BioCompute framework, which evolved into IEEE 2791-2020 and provides a machine-readable standard for describing and reproducing complex bioinformatics computations.

Today, Dr. Simonyan is extending that foundation into a federated model for biological intelligence. As Principal Investigator of DNAHIVE's ARPA-H Biomedical Data Fabric project, FEAST (Federated Ecosystem for Analytics and Standardization Technologies), he is developing an architecture that moves validated computation to distributed data, performs runtime harmonization, and preserves local governance and security. BIONET brings these capabilities together: FDA-ARGOS provides trusted biological reference knowledge, HIVE/H2O provides pathogen detection and interpretation, and FEAST enables those analytics to operate consistently across independently governed clinical, laboratory, environmental, agricultural, transportation, and defense environments. His objective is to create an operational global biosurveillance ecosystem capable of detecting naturally evolving pathogens, anomalous propagation patterns, and adversarial biological constructs early enough to support decision advantage.

Laura Calabria leads BIONET national-security strategy and engagement, helping position its scientific and technical capabilities against U.S. and allied security priorities. She works at the intersection of emerging biotechnology, intelligence, policy, and government adoption, translating complex technical capabilities into strategies that support national-security decision-making and operational partnerships.

Ms. Calabria spent twenty years in the U.S. Intelligence Community in senior roles at the CIA and ODNI. She served as Chief of Strategy in the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, Chief of Staff for Foreign Partner Engagement, and Chief of Staff of the ODNI Executive Secretariat. In these roles, she supported senior U.S. government leaders and prepared analysis for the National Security Council, Congress, and White House principals.

Her experience includes geopolitical and threat analysis, emerging technology strategy, foreign partner engagement, and the coordination of complex national-security initiatives across organizational and international boundaries. As a Middle East political analyst, she produced assessments that provided senior policymakers and military leaders decision advantage on regional political and security developments.

At BIONET, Ms. Calabria applies this experience to the national-security implications of biotechnology and biological data. Her work focuses on aligning BIONET capabilities with government mission requirements, developing U.S. and international partnerships, navigating policy and regulatory environments, and building the public-private relationships necessary to move advanced biological capabilities from technical innovation toward operational adoption.

Dr. Elaine Thompson has decades of leadership experience in biomedical research, running successful R&D programs in industry, government, and as a federal contractor. She has built her career at the intersection of bioinformatics, biostatistics, and bench biology. Dr. Thompson started her career in the pharmaceutical industry, developing data analysis and cheminformatics for high-throughput screening. She moved on to postgraduate bioinformatics training and clinical trial biostatistics, supporting Phase I and Phase IV post market studies. At FDA she was a data standards liaison for CDISC and the research lead for the CBER HIVE (High Performance Virtual Environment) bioinformatics platform. She also led an Navy AI contract at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation and was the VP of Bioinformatics at Embleema, Inc. Currently she is the co-founder and CEO of Cobalt42, Inc., a small business focused on AI and data science. Dr. Thompson has a publication track record spanning decades and is a major contributor to CDISC and IEEE data standards.

Dr. Thompson is known best for her cross-domain expertise in scientific data collection, standardization, and knowledge extraction, which enables rapid and accurate data analysis. She leverages a unique background of postgraduate training in three fields: neuroscience, bioinformatics, and biostatistics. Her cross-domain understanding made her instrumental in helping FDA develop the capability to accept and use nonclinical submissions in the CDISC-SEND data standard. Dr. Thompson also acted as the research lead in the FDA-HIVE bioinformatics program, developing analysis protocols for genomics, epigenetics, gene editing, metagenomics, and pathogen genome data. Dr. Thompson also led both a successful Defense Innovation Unit program to develop and integrate wastewater pathogen detection into sensor networks for rapid response, and a pilot program to collect and analyze wastewater on Navy bases.

Currently, Dr. Thompson is working closely with DNAHIVE to develop analytics AI models that can be run on the FEAST (Federated Ecosystem for Analytics and Standardization Technologies) platform.