Maria Luisa Pineda

Dr. Maria Luisa Pineda is currently the CEO and cofounder of Envisagenics, Inc. a bioinformatics start-up company spinout of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. She has led the company to obtain paying customers in the field of RNA therapeutics, an SBIR Phase I award from NIH, a pre-seed investment from Accelerate Long Island, the LIET Fund, the Breakout Labs by the Thiel Foundation. Maria is a cell and molecular biologist with over 10 years of research experience. She received her PhD from the Watson School of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as an Arnold and Mabel Beckman graduate student and a William Randolph Hearst foundation scholar. For her undergraduate studies she graduated from Barry University with a Bachelor of Science and a minor in Mathematics. As an undergraduate student she was able to acquire an endowment of $2 Million dollars from the Goizueta Foundation and lobby the foundation to renew it after her graduation. She was the first recipient of the Goizueta Minority Science Scholarship and was a NIH fellow with the Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC U*STAR) Award. After her doctorate, she decided to combine science and business together with her interpersonal skills by acquiring experience in investment of technology and life sciences startup companies at Canrock Ventures and Golden Seeds, LLC.