Dr. Nicole Paulk is the CEO, Founder, and President of Siren Biotechnology and has dedicated her career to advancing the field of gene therapy. With nearly two decades of expertise, Nicole has been at the forefront of developing cutting-edge advances to propel the field of gene therapy forward for a wide range of diseases. Nicole has held various leadership positions in academia and industry and most notably was an Assistant Professor of AAV Gene Therapy in the UCSF Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics before leaving to found Siren. Nicole has a B.S. in Medical Microbiology, a Ph.D. in Viral Gene Therapy and Regenerative Medicine from OHSU and completed her Postdoctoral Fellowship and Instructorship in Human Gene Therapy at Stanford University prior to starting her lab at UCSF. Nicole is a pioneer in the development of next-generation AAV platforms for gene repair, gene transfer and gene editing, directed evolution for novel engineered capsid evolution, and comparative multi-omic approaches to interrogate translational AAV biology.