Dr. Norman is a Senior Program Officer in Quantitative Sciences at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She currently co-leads the Foundation's Big Data Knowledge Integration (Ki) initiative within Global Health (for details about the initiative, please visit www.hbgdki.org). Thea comes to the Foundation with more than 18 years of experience in science and business leadership in startup biotechnology most recently in ?big data? open science working at the leading edge of digital and mobile health. While in biotech, Thea co-invented two molecules that subsequently received FDA approval -- one for people (Linaclotide: first in class for IBS) and one for dairy cows (Pegbovigrastim: first in class for mastitis). On the business development side, Thea helped sign collaborations and led the resulting scientific alliances with: Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Company, Merck Inc, Merck-Serono, Pfizer Inc., Google and IBM. Thea holds a PhD in Chemistry (UC Berkeley) and her doctoral work was followed by two post-docs focused on combinatorial chemistry and then molecular biology and yeast genetics.