Dr. Cenk Sumen is an internationally recognized expert in advanced therapies. He is currently Chief Scientific Advisor at MaxCyte, the world’s premier non-viral cell engineering platform company, after having led innovation initiatives for nearly two years as its Chief Scientific Officer. Prior to this role, he was the Chief Technology Officer and a Board Member at Stemson Therapeutics, a visionary regenerative medicine company developing treatments for aging hair and skin. Dr. Sumen has held numerous technical and business management roles in industry, with increasing responsibility for Thermo Fisher Scientific, Hitachi Chemical Advanced Therapeutics Solutions, PerkinElmer, Stemcell Technologies, Life Technologies, and Invitrogen. He has specialized in building innovation partnerships, advancing process development, and establishing sustainable manufacturing platforms for cell and gene therapies. As an academic scientist, Dr. Sumen worked with Nobel Prize winner Dr. James P. Allison at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to develop better methods for tracking the T cell response in cancer immunotherapy. He also spent three years at Harvard learning intravital imaging with Dr. Ulrich von Andrian. Dr. Sumen received his BS in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from Leland Stanford Junior University. He has over 20 publications with a combined total of more than 7,500 citations (h-index = 13). He has also taught graduate students for over a decade as an Adjunct Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering.