Michael is co-founder and CEO of Tether Therapeutics. Prior to founding Tether in 2022, Michael was a life sciences venture capital investor at Adjuvant Capital and with the Gates Foundation’s Strategic Investment Fund. He has extensive experience supporting early development of drugs and vaccines on behalf of major stakeholders in the realms of global health and biosecurity, including DARPA, BARDA and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Michael holds a BA from the Johns Hopkins University and is an MPH Candidate at the JHU Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Phil is a co-founder of Tether Therapeutics and a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech, where he focuses on mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics. Phil started out as an aerospace/mechanical engineer working on optical diagnostics and imaging during his undergraduate and PhD studies. Following a desire to merge his expertise in imaging with biology, he became a postdoc with Gang Bao at Georgia Tech, where he focused on imaging RNA and applying these techniques to study viruses. In 2007, Phil became an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech in Biomedical Engineering where his work on imaging RNA in live cells led to work interrogating synthetic mRNA delivery in vivo and development of mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics.

Chiara is co-founder of Tether Therapeutics and an Assistant Professor in Phil Santangelo’s lab at the Department of Biomedical engineering at Emory and Georgia Institute of Technology. Chiara has twenty years-long research experience at the interface of biology, biophysics and biomedical engineering. She is currently working on the development of mRNA-encoded antibodies and CRISPR based nucleases and modulators against infectious diseases, and on the implementation of cellular and molecular biology  techniques and novel imaging assays to assess their mechanism of action and potency. Chiara holds a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from The University of Milan.

Daryll is co-founder of Tether Therapeutics. In addition to founding Tether in 2022, Daryll is a project manager at Emory University where he coordinates the laboratories that part of the first-ever award from ARPA-H. He has significant experience in drug and preclinical model development, having developed nebulization apparatuses and drug screening platforms for multiple animal species. Daryll earned his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University in Biomedical Engineering and has a B.S. from the Georgia Institute of Technology.