Our Team

Shivika Sinha

Shivika Sinha is the Founder and Executive Director of NIPBL Therapeutics Foundation, a nonprofit advancing therapeutic development for Cornelia de Lange syndrome (CdLS), with a focus on NIPBL mutations. She leads the Foundation’s strategy, bringing together scientists, biotech partners, clinicians, families, and funders to accelerate the path from NIPBL biology to meaningful therapies for children living with CdLS. She also serves on the Advisory Board of Cohen Children’s Medical Center.

Alongside her Foundation work, Shivika advises and serves as an Advisor and fractional CMO to biotech and clinical insights companies, helping them turn complex science into clear positioning and strategic growth.

Shivika brings more than 20 years of experience building and scaling consumer and technology businesses, with senior leadership roles at Love Wellness, Alex and Ani, Gap Inc./Intermix, and Oscar de la Renta. She also founded Veneka, an AI-powered retail platform, and has been recognized as one of Forbes’ Next 1000 Entrepreneurs, Digital Marketing News’ 40 Under 40, and a Retail TouchPoints Retail Innovator. A seasoned speaker and industry voice, Shivika’s work and perspective have been featured at leading conferences and in global publications. She now brings that same founder-level ownership, strategic rigor, and ability to build from zero to the urgent challenge of developing treatments for CdLS.

Anjali Shah, PhD

Dr. Anjali Shah is Senior Director and General Manager for PCR, Molecular Biology at Thermo Fisher Scientific, where she has spent two decades building and leading businesses at the point where genomics research becomes usable technology for basic, translational and clinical research. She has served as General Manager across several of the company's strategic segments, including PCR and COVID Response Solutions within the Life Sciences Group. Earlier in her career, she held product management and market development roles at Life Technologies and Applied Biosystems that developed and expanded next generation sequencing (NGS) solutions and applications across several disease and applied areas including oncology, inherited and infectious disease, reproductive health, and human identification.

She is a geneticist by training. Dr. Shah earned her Ph.D. in Genetics and Development from Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed postdoctoral training at UCSF, following a B.S./B.A. in Biology and Spanish from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That combination — deep genetics fundamentals paired with twenty years of translating molecular biology into products that reach patients and labs at scale — is among the many gifts she brings to the NIPBL Therapeutics Foundation, where she advises on research and translational strategies and the practical path from disease etiology to clinical utility. She also happens to be Yuvaan's grand-aunt.

Sujal Shah

Sujal Shah brings the Foundation direct experience taking a therapeutic for a rare disease from clinical development through approval. He was President and Chief Executive Officer of CymaBay Therapeutics, stewarding the company through approval of Livdelzi and the company's acquisition by Gilead Sciences in 2024. He is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Juvia Group, a Boston-based investment firm focused on life sciences. He serves as a Director on the boards of Tvardi Therapeutics, Soufflé Therapeutics and Dren Bio.

Before joining CymaBay, he was Director of Health Care Investment Banking at Citigroup, and was at Credit Suisse, last serving as Vice President in the Health Care Investment Banking Group. He holds an M.B.A. from Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University. Sujal serves on the Dean's Business Board of Advisors at the Tepper School of Business. He also happens to be Yuvaan's grand uncle.

Ian D. Krantz, MD

Dr. Ian Krantz is Division Chief of Pediatric Genetics and Genomics at Cohen Children's Medical Center, System Vice President for Pediatric Genetics across Northwell Health, and Professor of Pediatrics at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra University. He was previously an attending physician and Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Genetics at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Perelman School of Medicine, where he directed the Roberts Individualized Medical Genetics Center and the Center for Cornelia de Lange Syndrome and Related Diagnoses.

He is one of the world's foremost clinical and molecular experts on CdLS. His lab was the first to identify the genetic causes of CdLS and has helped define the role of the cohesin complex — NIPBL, SMC1A, SMC3, HDAC8, and RAD21 — in the pathogenesis of the syndrome, including recent findings that cells carrying these variants show genome instability, elevated oxidative stress, and premature cellular aging. His lab has also studied CHOPS syndrome, Pallister-Killian syndrome, Alagille syndrome, hearing loss, and congenital heart and diaphragmatic defects. He received his B.F.A. from Concordia University in Montreal and his M.D. from Tel Aviv University, trained in pediatrics at NYU, and completed medical genetics residency at CHOP.

Anne L. Calof, PhD

Dr. Anne Calof is Professor of Anatomy & Neurobiology, Developmental & Cell Biology, and a founding member of the Center for Complex Biological Systems at the University of California, Irvine. Calof received her B.A. from Reed College, her Ph.D. from UCSF, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University and Tufts University School of Medicine. She reviews for numerous scientific journals, is an editorial advisor for BMC Biology, and serves on numerous US and international grant review committees. Dr. Calof is Co-Director of UCI's Center of Excellence in Research on Cornelia de Lange Syndrome (CdLS), and serves the CdLS community by serving on CdLS USA's Research and Clinical Advisory Committees, and as a member of the International Scientific Advisory Committee for CdLS Worldwide.

The goals of Dr. Calof's research program are to understand how disruption of gene expression and cell lineage progression give rise to syndromic and non-syndromic birth defects, and to use this knowledge to help develop therapies for developmental disorders. To this end, her laboratory helped discover that mutation of the Nipbl gene is the causative factor in the majority of CdLS cases and developed the first mouse model of CdLS. Current research in the Calof lab focuses on determining how early cell lineages are altered by the global gene expression dysregulation caused by Nipbl mutation, and how these alterations produce structural and physiological differences in the heart and other organs. In recognition of her work on CdLS, Calof received the RARE Champion of Hope Award in Science from the Global Genes Alliance.

Elphège P. Nora, PhD

Dr. Elphège Nora leads a research group in the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, where the goal is to decipher and engineer the molecular processes cells use to organize their chromosomes, and to understand how this enables gene regulation in developmental and disease contexts. He earned his Ph.D. at the Université Paris-Sud in France, researching X-chromosome inactivation in Edith Heard's lab at the Curie Institute, then trained as a postdoc with Benoit Bruneau at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, applying genome engineering to study proteins involved in chromosome organization and gene regulation.

His research focuses on how NIPBL and the cohesin protein complex fold chromosomes and regulate gene activity. Using precisely controlled cell culture models, his group recently showed that reducing NIPBL or cohesin dosage affects chromosome folding in distinct ways, and that lower NIPBL levels specifically slow the rate at which cohesin loops chromosomes (Shah, Tortora et al., Molecular Cell, 2026). His lab also studies how disruption to chromosome organization upon NIPBL or cohesin alteration affects how genes communicate with their regulatory elements (Hansen et al., Science, 2026). Together, his work helps us understand how reduced NIPBL levels disrupt normal gene regulation.

Parul Baxi Shah, PharmD

Parul Baxi Shah brings the Foundation more than two decades of clinical pharmacy and biopharmaceutical medical affairs experience, from bedside pediatric care through therapeutic area strategy at a major biotech. She’s spent nearly ten years at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Her work centers on the discipline of translating clinical evidence to empower physicians, patients, and caregivers in making informed healthcare decisions — the same problem the Foundation faces in moving NIPBL science from computational prediction to something a treating clinician can act on.

She started her career at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and continued to build upon her expertise in leadership roles at Accredo Health (a Medco Company) and Eversana (formerly Dohmen Life Science Services). Today, she serves as Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy. She holds a Doctor of Pharmacy from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is based in the Bay Area. She also happens to be Yuvaan’s grand-aunt.