TrialSpark is rebranding to Formation Bio, effective December 5, 2023. Click here to learn more.

The future of medicine is here.

TrialSpark's teams and technology dramatically accelerate clinical trials.

About Us 2021

CEO & Co-Founder

Ben Liu

Ben Liu is the co-founder and CEO of TrialSpark. He received his DPhil at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, leveraging machine-learning, AI, and big-data to develop diagnostics and therapeutics for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. During his graduate work, he observed the way clinical trials bottlenecked the development of new treatments for patients, compelling him to start TrialSpark. Before TrialSpark, Ben graduated from Yale where he was awarded the college’s highest honor at graduation and received his MPhil with distinction in Computational Biology from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge as a Paul Mellon Fellow.

Linhao Zhang is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at TrialSpark. He oversees our Product, Engineering, and Operations teams, focused on steering company strategy and ensuring operational excellence for all clinical development activities at the company. Before TrialSpark, Linhao worked in Engineering at Oscar Health and Salesforce.

Gavin Corcoran is the Chief Development Officer at TrialSpark. He oversees the scientific and medical input to the drug development process from the business development efforts to identify new products through the medical oversight of clinical trials to the regulatory filings and approval of the products. Prior to joining TrialSpark, he held several senior leadership roles including the CMO at Allergan and Stiefel where he provided oversight of the regulatory approval of many products across a number of therapeutic areas. His academic training is in infection diseases and he was on the faculty of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio, TX prior to joining the pharmaceutical industry over 20 years ago.

James Leslie is the Chief Financial Officer at TrialSpark. Prior to joining TrialSpark he spent eleven years as a CFO at PE and VC-backed growth stage companies in the healthcare (Celmatix), insurance (TitleVest) and education (Flatiron School) industries. Prior to becoming a CFO, was an investment banker in the Restructuring and Reorganization Advisory at The Blackstone Group. James earned his BA from Vassar College and MBA from Columbia Business School.

Melissa is TrialSpark’s Chief People Officer, leading the People Operations, Talent and Legal departments at TrialSpark. Her departments focus on building a talented and diverse team, creating an equitable and inclusive environment where every individual is set up to thrive and providing strategic legal guidance to the business. Melissa came to TrialSpark from Birchbox where she spent 8 years designing and building the Global People and Talent function. Prior to that she ran Recruitment at Harvard Business School, supported Consultant Recruitment and Corporate HR at Oliver Wyman - Delta and was an Executive Team Lead in Human Resources at Target.

Investor Logo - Sequoia
Investor Logo - Thrive Capital