Dr. Gopika Nair is the Director of Islet Cell Therapy and Stem Cell Biology at Eli Lilly and Company. She is leading Lilly's efforts in regenerative medicine in the Diabetes, Obesity and complications therapeutic area. Prior to joining Lilly, she was the CEO and co-founder of EndoCrine Bio, a start up spun out of University of California - San Francisco developing new stem cell based therapies for diabetes. During her time as an Investigator at the UCSF Diabetes Center, she led the breakthrough work of generating mature pancreatic beta cells from human pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) and utilized these cells with CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to study beta cell biology, maturation and engraftment. Dr. Nair is a stem cell biologist, endocrinologist and bioengineer by training. She obtained a Bachelor of Engineering, in Biotechnology from VIT, India. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying transcription factors involved in specification of pancreatic endoderm and commitment to pancreatic lineages using mouse embryonic stem cells. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF before holding principal investigator research position.