Avi Patil, M.D. – Board Certified in Maternal-Fetal Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology.

Avi Patil, M.D., is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Nixxi. Avi brings a blend of clinical expertise, innovative research, and entrepreneurship to Nixxi.

Avi has a track record of collaborating with startups and established companies, both diagnostic and pharmaceuticals, to develop research findings critical to the commercialization of new technologies.

His research focus on progesterone metabolism and preterm birth prevention have led to multiple publications and patents. Avi has the unique distinction of being one of only a few physicians Board Certified in Maternal-Fetal Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology.

Avi earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and his MD from the University of Tennessee. His fellowships in Maternal-Fetal Medicine, Clinical Pharmacology, and Pediatric Clinical Research were completed at Duke University, Duke University / University of North Carolina, and Duke Clinical Research Institute, respectively.

Chetan Patil – Chief Operating Officer at Nixxi.

Previous to being the Chief Operating Officer at Nixxi, Chetan held a senior legal role at Cetera Financial Group, where he managed a nearly $20M annual legal budget and oversaw legal and regulatory operations for several acquired companies.

Prior to that, Chetan advised numerous financial services and healthcare entities, including Cleveland Clinic and Metrohealth, on legal and regulatory matters.

Chetan holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Tennessee and a J.D. from Case Western Reserve University.

Chad Grotegut – a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Wake Forest University.

Chad Grotegut, MD, MHS, is the Chief Medical Officer at Nixxi.

Chad is concurrently Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Wake Forest University. At Wake Forest, he serves as the Division Director of Maternal-Fetal Medicine and Vice Chair of Obstetrics, where in those roles he cares for women and their families with a variety of pregnancy complications, including preterm birth.

Chad’s clinical and basic science research interests include preterm birth, oxytocin, normal and abnormal labor, and medical complications of pregnancy.

He is currently funded by the NIH via the R01 mechanism to study the role of calcium signaling on uterine contractility. Chad has also served as Principal Investigator for a number of investigator-initiated and industry-sponsored clinical trials.

He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and contributes to societal functions with the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and the Society for Reproductive Investigation. Chad holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia, an MD from Temple University, and he received both an MHS and MBA degrees from Duke University.

Rick Proctor – Chief Strategy Officer at Nixxi

Rick has nearly 30 years of experience in pharma, biotech, and medical devices.

He started Breakthrough Life Sciences LLC, a consulting firm providing strategic, financial, and operational guidance to emerging companies.

Prior to that, Rick was Chief Executive Officer at Glenveigh Medical, an obstetric company developing novel therapeutics (for severe preeclampsia) and surgical instruments (post-partum hemorrhage, vaginal repairs). Glenveigh was the first U.S. distributor for the Monica fetal monitoring device, which was recently acquired by GE Healthcare.

Previous to that, Rick was a marketing and business development executive at GlaxoSmithKline. Rick served on the Board of Directors of the Preeclampsia Foundation for three terms.

Rick received an undergraduate degree from Emory University and an M.B.A. from Wake Forest University.

Jennifer Huberty. Ph.D – founder and director of Fit Minded

Jennifer Huberty, Ph.D., is an Associate professor at Arizona State University in the College of Health Solutions, Exercise and Wellness program and is an Associate Professor, Research Scholar in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at University of Arizona, College of Medicine.

She is also Adjunct professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Scottsdale, AZ and Mays Cancer Center/MD Anderson in San Antonio Texas.

Her research interests include using digital interventions (online, mobile apps) to deliver complementary approaches (e.g., yoga, meditation, physical activity) to improve mental and physical health in women (i.e., middle-aged, stillbirth mothers, pregnant women) and cancer patients. She works closely with industry and is currently the Director of Science for the mobile meditation app, Calm.

Dr. Huberty is also the founder and director of Fit Minded, an innovative online physical activity adherence program for adult women (www.befitminded.com). Dr. Huberty is co-author of the book entitled, Designing Effective Physical Activity Interventions and has published 130 peer-reviewed papers. She also serves as the Co-Editor for the journal Translational Behavioral Medicine.

Dr. Huberty has been funded over $6 million in grants from entities including National Institutes of Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and UNICEF.

Dr. Huberty loves to spend time with her husband and two boys, her three rescue dogs, and/or doing yoga.

Hugh Miller, M.D. – A Clinical Associate Professor in Maternal-Fetal Medicine in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Arizona.

Dr Miller has over 30 years of experience working in a variety of clinical settings including private, academic and group practice. He recently has practiced in CA, MT and VA, but he has spent the majority of his time serving the women of Southern AZ.

Dr Miller is a member of the Arizona Perinatal Trust working to improve maternal-child health developing programs to achieve those goals. He is also active in medical education as a Clinical Associate Professor in Maternal-Fetal Medicine in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Arizona.

He has authored many peer-reviewed articles and in 2003 founded a non-profit research foundation called Watching Over Mothers and Babies (W.O.M.B.). WOMB was created to continue his research interests after leaving a full-time faculty position at the University of Arizona. WOMB is based in Tucson, Arizona and is committed to improving maternal child health through research, education and programmatic development that address’s the full range of health issues that confront pregnant women and their children.

Karan Uppal, Ph.D. 

Dr. Uppal received his BS in Biomedical Engineering from University of Iowa in 2007, MS in Bioinformatics from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2009, and Ph.D. in Bioinformatics with a minor in Predictive Analytics from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2015. He joined Emory University in 2009 and was elevated to Assistant Professor of Medicine in 2016. He was the Director of Computational Metabolomics and Integrative Omics in the Clinical Biomarkers Laboratory at Emory from 2016-2020 and is now in a data science leadership position at a pharmaceutical company.

His primary research focus is computational metabolomics, integrative omics, biomarker discovery, machine learning, text mining, and application development. He has developed a series of algorithms and R packages for metabolomics data processing, annotation, biomarker discovery and data mining, and integrative network analysis. He has also developed feature selection techniques to identify robust biomarkers and natural language processing tools for automated summarization and knowledge discovery from clinical and biomedical text.

He has served as a PI/Co-I on multiple NIH funded projects focused on identification of biomarkers of environmental exposures and diseases (Alzheimer’s disease, age-related macular degeneration, ARDS, diabetic retinopathy, cardiovascular disease, malaria, and others), developing computational methods for integrating multi-scale data (clinical, omics, imaging, experimental, and laboratory) for precision medicine, and using data mining and natural language processing techniques for extracting and summarizing information from clinical and biomedical text.