Dr. Ilan Samish founded Amai Proteins in 2016 to produce hyper-sweet designer proteins by biotechnology. Amai's AI-CPD platform produced sweelin®, a serendipity-berry sweet protein enabling 40–70% sugar reduction with no compromise on taste, health, cost or sustainability — with a double-blind clinical trial showing no effect on blood sugar or insulin, and FDA clearance achieved.

He gained his CPD expertise as an EMBO and HFSP fellow during postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania, in the labs of Prof. Jeffery Saven and Prof. William DeGrado — who established the field of protein design — where he built an algorithm leading to the first de novo designed membrane transporter. He earned his PhD at the Weizmann Institute, deciphering structure–function relationships of membrane proteins, with a Nature publication on photosynthesis along the way.

In 2017 he published Computational Protein Design (Springer, MiMB 1529) — the first book with that title and a field standard, now with 90k+ accesses — and he founded and co-chairs 3Dsig, the leading meeting in structural computational biology.

Dr. Naama Kopelman brings 22 years in academia and education, researching genomes, proteins and computational-biology algorithms across both applied and theoretical work. Her publications in computational and algorithmic biology have received over 5,000 citations.

She joined Amai Proteins in 2021 as Director of Computational Protein Design, soon taking on the company's Intellectual Property department and then most of its R&D — leading experimental design and oversight of the Food Technology department.

A graduate of Tel Aviv University's Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for outstanding students, she holds an MSc from the Weizmann Institute and a PhD from Tel Aviv University and Stanford. Her postdoctoral work developed computational tools for statistical learning of biological data; she later joined the Bioinformatics unit at the Weizmann Institute and a tenure track at the Holon Institute of Technology, teaching and developing courses in Data Science and AI.

Brazilian/German food engineer (UNICAMP) with an MBA from ESPM, São Paulo. Mauricio began at Roche/Royal DSM in 1988 and rose through Director of Human Nutrition & Health roles in Mexico and Asia-Pacific to Vice President of the Global Food & Pharmaceutical Industry Unit at Roche Vitamins in Basel.

After DSM's acquisition of Roche Vitamins, he became EVP and Head of Global Marketing Nutritional Products, then the first President of DSM's global Human Nutrition & Health business, later Chief Global Marketing Officer of Royal DSM, and in 2015 CEO and President of Latin America — leading 2,000+ people and revenues exceeding US$1.2B across 16 countries.

He has served as Global President of Malnutrition Partnerships & Programmes and Chairman of Africa Improved Foods (Rwanda), and today founded and leads MMA Mentoring and Consulting, alongside numerous board and advisory roles in nutrition and sustainability.

A chemist by training, Luca Rosetto began at Dow before spending more than 27 years at DSM (from Gist-Brocades). He held senior roles from a fermentation site in Capua, Italy — which he transformed into a CMO unit — through Director of Safety, Health & Compliance and Business Unit Director Europe/Americas, with full P&L responsibility over ~€230M in annual sales.

After four years as VP Corporate Operations and Responsible Care at DSM HQ, he became Senior VP Operations for DSM Nutritional Products in Kaiseraugst, following DSM's acquisition of Roche Vitamins & Fine Chemicals — ending his corporate career in 2023 as Executive VP Operations and a member of the DSM Executive Committee.

In 2023 he founded Rosetto Consulting (Therwil, Switzerland), collaborating with startups across the pharma and nutritional-ingredients space.