Dr. Alila has been one of the founding members of Avie Nutraceuticals, LLC. He is also the founding President of Mika Foundation, a non-profit organization that was formed in 1998 to help HIV/AIDS orphans in a village in Tanzania called Mika, where Dr. Alila was born. He is currently the Chief Executive Officer of a successful biopharmaceutical company, Esperance Pharmaceuticals, now based in Houston, Texas (formerly in Baton Rouge, Louisiana). Dr. Alila considers himself blessed, yet agonizes about the poverty in the village where he was born. That is why he teamed up with the other founders of Avie to place corporate social responsibility (CSR) as the core mission of Avie. Mika Foundation is Avie’s current core CSR project to provide clean water, electricity, sanitation and education. Avie also supports soccer programs in Mika to promote cohesion and responsibility among the youth in the village. By supporting Mika Foundation Avie’s ultimate goal is to wipe out poverty and HIV/AIDs in the village of Mika.

For the last decade Dr. Leuschner’s research has focused on the development of anti-cancer drugs and imaging systems for invasive cancer detection in applications for prostate, breast, and ovarian cancers as Assistant Professor in the Department of Reproductive Biotechnology at Pennington Biomedical Research Center (PBRC) in Baton Rouge, La. She also served as an Instructor in the Department of Diet and Heart Disease at the Pennington Biomedical Center. She obtained her doctorate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Hannover, Germany with postdoctoral training at the Department of Technical Microbiology of Hamburg University, Germany.  She has published two book chapters, over 40 peer reviewed articles and holds several patents.  Dr. Leuschner is the recipient of the Nano50 2006 Technology Award.