
SynBioBeta 2026 Speaker
Sharrol Bachas
Onava AI
Co-founder & CSO
Sharrol Bachas is a biophysicist, structural biologist, and protein engineer working at the intersection of AI and protein design. He is Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Onava, where he is building a next-generation platform for therapeutic protein designโcombining generative models, protein engineering, structural biology, and a proprietary high-throughput wet lab to rapidly iterate on antibodies, peptides, and miniproteins for design and optimization.
Prior to founding Onava, Sharrol led AI-driven antibody engineering programs at Absci, directed scaled AIโwet lab implementation of protein design workflows at EvolutionaryScale, and helped shape foundational infrastructure for integrating structural biology with machine learning in drug discovery. His work spans de novo design, structural grafting, display-based screening, and biophysics, with a strong emphasis on human-in-the-loop design cycles.
Sharrol earned his Ph.D. in Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and completed his postdoctoral research at the NIH, focusing on structureโfunction relationships of proteins and RNAs using X-ray crystallography.



Reagan
Jarvis
Anocca AB
CEO, Co-founder

Alex
Rives
CZI Biohub
Head of Science

Karenโฏ
Akinsanya
Schrodinger
President, R&D โ Therapeutics

Christopher
Arendt
Takeda
CSO, Head of Research

Stef
van Grieken
Cradle
CEO

Michael
Koeris
DARPA
Director, BTO

Jennifer
Dionne
Pumpkinseed
CEO

Daniyal
Hussain
GSK
Exec. Dir., Tech BD

Cynthia
Hong
Novartis
Dir., Search & Evaluation
SynBioBeta 2027 May 3-6, San Jose, California


