Digitalis Research is an applied research organization building new ideas at the intersection of health and technology.

Digitalis Research is part of the Digitalis Group which also includes Digitalis Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in solutions to unmet needs in health, and Digitalis Commons, a non-profit organization developing public-interest technologies for better health.

Misti Ushio is a Managing Partner at Digitalis Ventures, a member of the Board of Directors of Digitalis Commons, and leads strategic partnerships for Digitalis Research.

Dr. Ushio has over 25 years of experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry, and early-stage life science company building. She is formerly the CEO of TARA Biosystems which developed physiologically relevant 3D tissue models for drug discovery and development and was acquired by ValoHealth in 2022.

Prior to TARA, Dr. Ushio served as Chief Strategy Officer and Managing Director of Harris & Harris Group, where she advised and invested in life science companies to help them translate their transformational science into commercially successful companies.

Earlier in her career, Dr. Ushio held management roles at Merck & Company, where she developed vaccines and biologics products, and Columbia University, where she managed the intellectual property of several scientific and engineering portfolios.

She was graduated from Johns Hopkins University (B.S., Chemical Engineering), Lehigh University (M.S., Chemical Engineering) and University College London (Ph.D., Biochemical Engineering). In 2018, she was named to Fast Company’s Top 100 Most Creative people in Business.

Dac is a Technical Partner at Digitalis Ventures and a Researcher at Digitalis Research.

He received his Ph.D. in biophysics from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and A.B. in physics from Harvard. His interests include physical and computational approaches to problems in biophysics, genomics, and synthetic biology.

Dave C. Frankel is a Researcher at Digitalis Research.

He is a New York-based creative director, graphic designer, illustrator, photographer and educator. He is the founder of Virgo, a graphic and interactive design studio that has worked with companies and institutions across the United States and Asia. Prior to founding Virgo he worked with some of the best design studios in the country, including Pentagram and Collins.

He has taught graphic and interactive design and typography at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, as well as teaching privately, has been a guest critic at Parsons School of Design and the Pratt Institute, and has written about design for Print Magazine.