Our Stratum leadership team brings decades of experience in dermatology, drug discovery and development, genomics, and biotech innovation to help redefine the way we test and treat skin diseases. Our mission is to be your translational medicine partner delivering state-of-the-art, highly accurate, objective, multi-omic information to improve dermatologic patient care.

Jelena Ostojic, Ph.D.., is a biologist with more than 10 years of experience in the fields of genomics, signaling and metabolism. Dr. Ostojic holds Masters degrees in Genetics and Functional Genomics, as well as a PhD in Cell Biology. Prior to joining DermTech, Dr. Ostojic was a Staff Researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where she has uncovered novel regulatory roles of genetic switches in integrating cues from major signaling cascades in pigmentation and melanoma. At DermTech, Dr. Ostojic heads the Biomarker Discovery group and is focused on using DermTech’s non-invasive platform to add to the company’s biomarker portfolio and its multiomic technology offering.

John Whitaker is an experienced bioinformatician with extensive experience in applying genomics to biomedical research questions. Prior to DermTech, John held roles at UC San Diego, Janssen and, most recently, Denovo Biopharma where he led biomarker efforts. At Denovo, he identified a genetic biomarker that predicts response to Liafensine (anti-depressant) and incorporated novel biomarker approaches to increase the companies mechanistic understanding of therapies. At UCSD Dr. Whitaker developed machine learnings methods for genomics and helped produce the first draft of the human epigenome. Dr. Whitaker has published in top journals, including, Nature, Cell, Nature Methods and PNAS.