Selected Speakers and Special Session

Mevion has benefited from Dr. Lawrence Tian’s leadership as a member of the board of directors since 2015 and was appointed Chairman in 2018. Dr. Tian brings a wealth of experience from the life sciences and medical device industry to this role. He is a Founding Partner of YuanMing Capital, a leading private equity firm which focuses on the investment in pharmaceutical research and development, innovative medical devices and high-end medical services in both China and the United States. He also serves as the Chairman of Investment Committee of China Pharmaceutical Industry Research and Development Association, and he is a member of the Biotech Advisory Panel of the Stock Exchange of HongKong Limited.

Dr. Tian also brings experience networking business leaders to the Mevion leadership team. He is the Founder and Chairman of the China Entrepreneurs Forum, the most influential business owners’ association in China, and is the founder of the China-U.S. Business Leaders Roundtable, a prestigious cross-border communication platform.

Prior to Mevion, Dr. Tian has had successful career as a serial entrepreneur with a strong track record of success. In the financial markets, he founded China International Futures Co., Ltd. (CIFCO) in 1992. CIFCO grew into a leading brokerage firm and achieved the largest market share in China during his chairmanship. He also co-founded Wumart Group in 1994, which is currently the largest supermarket chain in Northern China.

Dr. Tian obtained his master’s degree and doctoral degree from Wuhan University. He received the China Economics Theory Innovation Award, China’s highest prize for economics.

Mr. Shanquan Li is a Senior Vice President and Senior Portfolio Manager at Oppenheimer Funds, Inc. He has been managing the Oppenheimer Gold and Special Fund in the last 20 years. The fund won Lipper Best Fund Award in the 5 and 10 year periods within the precious metals category.

Before joining Oppenheimer Funds in 1995, Mr. Li had worked at Brown Brothers Harriman as a senior equities strategist for four years. He started his Wall Street career in 1990 as an analyst at Acadian Asset Management Co. in 1990. Before coming to the U.S. in 1986, Mr. Li had worked for four years as a senior researcher at the Development Research Center of the State Council (DRC), a government think tank established by the central government in early 1980s.

Mr. Li received a BA degree in Economic Planning and Statistics from the Renmin University of China in 1982. He was invited to study in the U.S. by Winston Lord, the U.S. Ambassador in Beijing, as a visiting scholar in 1986 under the Humphrey Fellowship Program. Later he moved on to a degree program and received a MA degree in International Economics and Finance at Brandeis University in 1989. He was approached by Acadian Asset Management Co. and started his asset management career in 1990 while he was studying at Boston University for a Ph.D. degree.

Dr. Jeannette M. Wing is Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. She came to Columbia in July 2017 from Microsoft, where she served as Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research, overseeing a global network of research labs. She is widely recognized for her intellectual leadership in computer science, particularly in trustworthy computing.  Jeannette’s seminal essay, titled “Computational Thinking,” was published more than a decade ago and is credited with helping to establish the centrality of computer science to problem-solving in fields where previously it had not been embraced.

Before joining Microsoft, Jeannette held positions at Carnegie Mellon University and at the National Science Foundation. She served Carnegie Mellon as Head of the Department of Computer Science and as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the School of Computer Science. At the National Science Foundation, she was Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, where she oversaw the federal government’s funding of academic computer science research. Her areas of research expertise include security and privacy; formal methods; programming languages; and distributed and concurrent systems. Jeannette has been recognized with distinguished service awards from the Computing Research Association and the Association for Computing Machinery. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.  She holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from MIT.

Ruth Jin has extensive experience in corporate and securities laws. She regularly represents private equity firms and hedge funds for fund formation, investment management and related regulatory compliance; and represents corporations for equity/debt securities offering, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and general corporate matters. She also provides broker-dealers with regulatory compliance related legal advice. Ruth’s clients range from entrepreneurs and emerging companies to Fortune 500 companies. She advises businesses through all stages of growth from start-up and capital financing right through to initial public offering and counsels on the ongoing securities law compliance and periodic reporting obligations. Ms. Jin also is an expert in not-for-profit laws. She represents schools, churches, temples and science associations for their federal and state tax exemption applications and compliance. ​Ruth has knowledge in Chinese law, Korean law and Japanese law, and is fluent in these three languages. She has a rich experience in cross-border transactions, including wealth management related transactions.

Prior to founding The Jin Law Group, she worked at the corporate law departments of such major law firms as Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe and McKee Nelson LLP. Ruth was selected as Rising Star by Super Lawyer magazine, a rating company of outstanding lawyers by Thomson Reuters; selected as one of the Top Attorneys in New York by New York Times Magazine since 2014; and Top 10% Attorneys by Lawyers of Distinction in 2018. Ruth was a panelist in the 2005 American Bar Association Section of International Law Spring Meeting on international trade related issues, and was a fellow of the Institute of International Economic Law in Washington, D.C. from 2003 to 2004. Ruth is admitted to practice in New York and Washington, D.C.

Dr. Albert Wai-Kit Chan is the Managing Partner of the Law Offices of Albert Wai-Kit Chan, PLLC. Dr. Chan handles all areas of intellectual property law (including technology transfer, patents, trademarks, copyrights, business transactions, and trade secrets), and his specialty is biotechnology patents.  He is well-versed in all aspects of prosecution and litigation and is experienced in licensing, technology transfer and the evaluation of intellectual property portfolios.

From 1996 through 2013, Dr. Chan taught as an adjunct professor of law at The City University of New York School of Law. His classes included intellectual property law, patent law, technology transfer, Internet and the law, food and drug law, and international business law.  He is currently adjunct associate professor in the School of Life Sciences at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and has adjunct professorship in the Department of Health Technology and Informatics at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Dr. Chan is active in a number of legal organizations including, among others, United States-China Intellectual Property Institute, Inc. (a New York Not-For-Profit Corporation) where he is founder and director.

Dr. Chan received his J.D. degree from Columbia University School of Law in New York. He was awarded his Ph.D. in virology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and he completed his postdoctoral training at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York as an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow. 

Prior to founding The Jin Law Group, she worked at the corporate law departments of such major law firms as Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe and McKee Nelson LLP. Ruth was selected as Rising Star by Super Lawyer magazine, a rating company of outstanding lawyers by Thomson Reuters; selected as one of the Top Attorneys in New York by New York Times Magazine since 2014; and Top 10% Attorneys by Lawyers of Distinction in 2018. Ruth was a panelist in the 2005 American Bar Association Section of International Law Spring Meeting on international trade related issues, and was a fellow of the Institute of International Economic Law in Washington, D.C. from 2003 to 2004. Ruth is admitted to practice in New York and Washington, D.C.

T. Tony Zhang is a Principal in the New York office of Fish & Richardson. Dr. Zhang’s practice emphasizes patent prosecution and counseling, opinion work, due diligence studies, development and management of patent portfolios, and patent litigation support. Dr. Zhang has substantial patent prosecution experience in the field of chemistry, pharmaceuticals, material sciences, and biotechnology. Exemplary technical areas of Dr. Zhang’s patent prosecution work include pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals (e.g., herbal extracts), drug formulations, chemical synthetic methods, nanotechnologies, medical devices (e.g., imaging devices, biosensors, and biochips), fuel cells, solar cells, batteries, material sciences (e.g., ink materials, catalysts, semiconductor materials, and polymers), and business methods. Dr. Zhang has previous legal experience as a patent agent and technology specialist with Fish & Richardson.