29th Annual
Baron Investment Conference

Joel S. Marcus, JD, CPA, is the Executive Chairman and Founder of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), the REIT that pioneered life science real estate from a specialty niche to a mainstream asset class and today is the preeminent and longest-tenured owner, operator, and developer uniquely focused on collaborative life science, agtech, and technology campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, including Greater Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, San Diego, Seattle, Maryland, and Research Triangle. Since co-founding the company in 1994 as a garage startup with $19 million in Series A capital and a mission to advance human health, he has led the remarkable growth of Alexandria into an S&P 500 company that as of June 30, 2022 has a total equity capitalization of $23.4 billion, ranking it in the top 10% among all publicly traded U.S. REITs. Alexandria, which celebrated its 25th anniversary as an NYSE listed company in May 2022, has a total shareholder return exceeding 2,500% as of December 31, 2021. 

In 1996, Mr. Marcus founded Alexandria Venture Investments, the company’s strategic venture capital platform, to invest in disruptive life science, agrifoodtech, climate innovation, and technology companies advancing transformative new modalities and platforms to meaningfully improve human health. Today, Mr. Marcus continues to lead Alexandria Venture Investments, which has been recognized by Silicon Valley Bank as the #1 most active corporate venture capital investor in biopharma by new deal volume for five consecutive years and by AgFunder as one of the top five most active U.S. agrifoodtech investors for the second consecutive year.

Prior to co-founding Alexandria, Mr. Marcus had an extensive legal career specializing in corporate finance and capital markets, venture capital, and mergers and acquisitions with special expertise in the biopharmaceutical industry. Mr. Marcus serves on the boards of directors of Applied Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: APLT), Frequency Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: FREQ), and Intra-Cellular Therapies, Inc. (NASDAQ: ITCI). He received his undergraduate and Juris Doctor degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles.  

Dr. Ajei Gopal has over 30 years of leadership experience in the software industry. For the past five years, Dr. Gopal has been president and CEO of S&P 500 company Ansys, the global leader in engineering simulation. Ansys helps the world’s most innovative companies engineer radically better products – from computer chips to rocket ships. During his tenure as Ansys CEO, Dr. Gopal has helped accelerate the company’s growth and doubling revenue and the number of employees.

Dr. Gopal has been on the Ansys board of directors for over a decade, initially as an independent member serving on the Audit Committee. He was also on the Citrix board from 2017 until 2021, where he served on the Compensation, the Technology, Data and Information, and the Nominating and Corporate Governance committees.

Dr. Gopal previously served as operating partner for Silver Lake Partners, where he worked with several of Silver Lake’s portfolio companies and was seconded as interim president and chief operating officer to Symantec. Prior to that, Dr. Gopal served as senior vice president and general manager of Hewlett Packard Software, executive vice president at CA Technologies, and executive vice president and CTO at Symantec, positions where he was responsible for software product and technology portfolios that drove billions of dollars in revenue.

Earlier, Dr. Gopal was the founder and CEO of Reefedge Networks, a wireless LAN security company, which was acquired by Symantec. Before that, Dr. Gopal held several roles at IBM Research and IBM’s Software Group. He began his career at Bell Communications Research in 1984.

Dr. Gopal holds 23 U.S. patents and has authored numerous papers and technical reports published in scientific conferences and journals. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, which has named him a distinguished alumnus.

Kirsten is Chief Executive Officer of Vail Resorts (MTN).  She was appointed to the role of CEO and the Board of Directors in November 2021.  Prior to becoming CEO, Kirsten served as EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Vail Resorts for over 10 years.  During her tenure as CMO, she led the growth of the company’s Epic Pass business and the vision to drive revenue through a data-driven approach, building the company’s analytics team and data-science team.  In 2019, Kirsten was recognized by Forbes as one of the top 50 Game-Changing Marketing Leaders on their CMO Next List.  Kirsten served on the Board of Directors for Stitch Fix (SFIX), a publicly-traded e-commerce company focused on personalized data-driven fashion, from March 2018 through May 2022. Before joining Vail Resorts, Kirsten worked for PepsiCo as CMO of the Quaker Division.  She also worked for Kraft Foods for 12 years and started her career with Ford Motor Company in Marketing.