Moderator
Arlene Dickinson

Arlene Dickinson is the CEO of Venture Communications and the General Partner of District Ventures Capital, a venture fund focused on helping market, fund and grow entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies in the food and health space.

She is a two-time best-selling author, accomplished public speaker, and is best known for her role as a Dragon/Venture Capitalist for over ten seasons on the multi-award-winning television series Dragons’ Den.

Ms. Dickinson’s leadership has been recognized many times, including Canada’s Most Powerful Women Top 100 Hall of Fame, the Pinnacle Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence, as well as PROFIT and Chatelaine’s Top 100 Women Business Owners. She is also a Marketing Hall of Legends inductee and a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Award. Dickinson serves as an Honourary Captain in the Royal Canadian Navy.

She sits on several public and private boards and is actively involved in supporting the community.

Featured Scientist
Dr. Daphna Rothschild

Daphna Rothschild grew up in Tel Aviv and had a passion for science from a young age. She completed her BSc at the Tel Aviv University and her MSc and PhD at the Weizmann Institute.

During her PhD in the Departments of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, she focused on the interactions between bacteria living in the human gut – the gut-microbiota as it aligns with health. She found that the gut-microbiome composition is mostly shaped by the environment with links between bacteria and human health including in disease like diabetes and obesity.

For her postdoc, Daphna was awarded the women in science scholarship from the Weizmann Institute, as well as the European Molecular Biology Organization scholarship.

She’s currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Departments of Developmental Biology and Genetics at Stanford University, focusing on solving the genetic code of the human ribosome, which displays high sequence variation with unknown function. This research could lead to treatments for disease.

When not in the lab, Daphna loves travelling and spending time with her husband and two daughters.