This century's biological breakthroughs are bottlenecked by data and infrastructure

Xinkun Nie, PhD is Founder and CEO at Lighten. Xinkun's interest in healthcare stems from a deep passion in using data to improve people's lives. During her PhD at Stanford, she developed state-of-the-art causal inference and machine learning methods in personalized treatment effects estimation and data-driven treatment recommendation, which have been widely cited in academia and adopted by many leading technology companies in Silicon Valley. However, to realize the potential of data to improve health outcomes, the bottleneck often lies in healthcare data itself. Healthcare data, as available today, are created and designed for billing, and not for generating patient-centric insights. Xinkun founded Lighten to bridge this gap by building foundational technology to transform the value of healthcare data and accelerate how people create, assess and access new treatments.

Prior to founding Lighten, Xinkun led large system innovation programs at Actuate, a R&D nonprofit modeled after DARPA to tackle societal challenges including climate change, healthcare and democracy. Xinkun was also a former researcher in epidemiology and biostatistics at Harvard Chan School of Public Health. Xinkun holds a Bachelor's Degree from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and earned a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Angela Bakker Lee, PhD serves as Chief Strategy Officer at Lighten. She oversees commercial strategy, product evolution and pricing, channel partnerships and M&A to improve product market fit and more rapidly grow top-line revenues. Prior to Lighten, Dr. Bakker Lee served as Executive Vice President for SomaLogic, a proteomics technology and service provider with headquarters in Colorado that completed an IPO in 2021. She also held multiple leadership positions at Quid an AI software provider in San Francisco and at IBM in New York, launching the first Watson Business Unit.  She began her professional career in 1996 by joining MAG, an industry first bioinformatics start-up in Palo Alto, California that was acquired by Celera Genomics, and later as a Global Managing Partner at ZS Associates, a management consulting firm, working with healthcare clients in over 40 countries. Dr. Bakker Lee holds a Bachelor's Degree from Stanford University and earned a PhD in Immunology from Strathclyde as a Marshall Scholar in the UK.

Kathryn Sands, MSN, RN serves as Head of Product and Clinical Strategy at Lighten. She is a clinical product leader with extensive experience transforming unstructured health data into structured formats for AI, research, and regulatory applications. Previously, Kathryn led clinical abstraction at Verana Health and served as a Senior Clinical Data Manager at Tempus, where she built and scaled teams to support model development and FDA-cleared validation pipelines across oncology, neurology, urology, and cardiology. Earlier in her career, she worked at the American College of Surgeons, where she supported national quality initiatives and trained thousands of nurse abstractors as part of the NSQIP program. A registered nurse with a foundation in critical care, Kathryn brings clinical depth to her work in health data infrastructure and AI-powered evidence generation. She holds a Master of Science in Nursing in Executive Leadership from Northern Kentucky University and dual Bachelor’s degrees in Nursing and Nutrition Science from Purdue University.