Mr. Slavin is the founder of EES Ventures, a venture capital firm focusing on seed-stage technologies out of universities, and founder and chairman of the Slavin Family Foundation, which operates a fellowship supporting world-changing student entrepreneurs. He is also a co-founder with Mr. Spivack of the Arch Mission Foundation, a nonprofit creating multiple redundant repositories of human knowledge in space, which created the first permanent library in solar orbit in February 2018 as part of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy test launch. Previously, Mr. Slavin spent seven years as a corporate attorney at Norton Rose Fulbright and Skadden Arps, at the time the #1 ranked corporate law firm by Corporate Board Member magazine for 13 consecutive years. Mr. Slavin is an advisor at the Texas Medical Center Innovation Institute and an investor in and advisor to a number of life science, medical device, energy, and digital technology companies. He holds a BA magna cum laude from Yale, where he graduated at 19, and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Dr. Toutov holds a PhD in organic chemistry from Caltech in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Robert H. Grubbs, where he held Dow-Resnick, NSERC, and Bristol-Myers Squibb fellowships. Dr. Toutov collectively has over 40 scholarly articles and patent grants and applications to his name spanning the fields of chemical synthesis, clean energy, and drug discovery. Among them is the discovery of a new form of catalysis, which was first published in Nature and was later presented to general audiences in the documentary film Element 19. He is the recipient of the 2016 Demetriades Caltech Thesis Prize, the 2015 Alfred Bader Award for Student Innovation (Sigma-Aldrich Corporation), the 2014 Dow Chemical Sustainability Challenge Grand Prize, and the 2014 Milliken & Co. “Deep Science” award, among others. Dr. Toutov also serves as senior technical advisor to the Gates Foundation-backed Medicines for All Institute, improving access to affordable, high-quality medicines.