Michael Chavez, Ph.D. is the co-founder and CEO of Enoda Cellworks Inc. Before founding Enoda, Michael was a graduate student in Stanley Qi’s lab at Stanford University. His research focused on synthetic immunology to develop the next generation of cell therapies, pioneering technologies for receptor, lentivirus, and genome engineering. Michael is a recipient of the Siebel Scholarship, the National Institute of Health Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award, and the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship. While pursuing his Ph.D, he also worked at Fifty Years, an early-stage, deep-tech venture capital firm based in San Francisco. There, Michael led biotech diligence, created the biology-focused Translation podcast, and co-led multiple founder-centric programs to help academics transform their research into real-world products, platforms, and companies. Taking the lessons learned at Fifty Years and the SPARK-funded research Michael and his co-founder Paul Finn, Ph.D. worked on in the Qi lab, Enoda was formed in 2022 to build the next generation of cell therapies.