Your first PharmaSUG conference can be overwhelming – there’s so much to do and see! Stop by our First Timers’ Drop-in Session for an overview of the conference. Several experienced attendees will be on hand to help you navigate the conference, point out key features, provide tips and advice, and answer your questions. You can “drop in” anytime that is convenient for you. All conference attendees are welcome, even if it’s not your first time! 🙂

After the opening session, we’ll head immediately into our opening mixer where you can mingle with other attendees and enjoy light appetizers and drinks. It’s a great chance to catch up with old friends and make some new ones as well!

Tareef Kawaf, CEO of Posit PBC
Between Hype and Reality: Posit’s Blueprint for Responsible GenAI in Life Sciences

We live in a world where AI promises to be both the panacea for innovation and efficiency gains, while simultaneously potentially upending our idea of work as we know it. For pharmaceutical and clinical development, this promise is tempered by critical needs for safety, validation, and traceability.

Today, we will outline the journey we have taken as an organization in our relationship with GenAI. From a starting position of total skepticism, we have developed a disciplined approach and blueprint for our customers, including leading Life Science and Pharmaceutical organizations, that has shown tremendous promise.

This talk will focus on the foundational “how” by addressing key questions:

• How can Life Science and Pharmaceutical companies leverage GenAI tools responsibly?
• What must be true for that to be the case?
• And how can we build the right checks and balances for quality, validation, and reproducibility?

No predictions about the future will be provided. Instead, this talk will be grounded in our latest learnings from our experiences with GenAI for regulated data science, as well as the adoption we are seeing from our customers

Tareef Kawaf has been leading Posit Software, PBC  (formerly RStudio, PBC) for over 13 years. Posit is committed to creating a self-sustaining organization that significantly advances open-source tools for enhancing human knowledge. Posit’s commercial products are utilized by thousands of organizations, including a majority of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies, for use cases ranging from regulatory statistical analysis and clinical reporting to drug discovery and beyond. More broadly, Posit’s data science toolchain, based on open-source, is used to extract and share data insights in production environments, while millions of users rely on the open-source tools and libraries it maintains. In 2019, Posit transitioned from a C-Corp to a Public Benefit Corporation to align with its long-term vision of creating an organization that can consistently drive a positive impact for the long term (preferably 100 years).

Leaving so soon? Think again! Wrap up your PharmaSUG conference at our Closing Session. We’ll announce the Best Paper winners, introduce next year’s conference co-chairs, and get a sneak peak at PharmaSUG 2027.

As always, there will be TONS OF DOOR PRIZES!