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Mike Fero, Ph.D.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Prior to founding Teselagen, Dr. Fero was an NIH Quantitative Research Career Fellow and principal investigator at Stanford, studying the role of protein localization and the essential genomic elements needed for bacterial life. With Pat Brown and David Botstein Michael directed the development of the first full-genome human DNA microarrays. Before joining Stanford, he was VP of Software Engineering at Neomorphic, a computational genomics company acquired by Affymetrix, and a consulting scientist at Hyperparallel, a data mining company acquired by Yahoo!. Prior to his career in biotech, Michael was an Elementary Particle Physicist at MIT, CERN and SLAC where his work was vital to the measurement of the Left-Right Electroweak Asymmetry, which stands today as the worlds single best measurement of the Weinberg Angle. Michael has over 40 publications in peer-reviewed journals. Michael holds a Ph.D. in Elementary Particle Physics from the University of California at Irvine.
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Eduardo Abeliuk, Ph.D.
Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Dr. Abeliuk received his Ph.D. studying how bacterial cells divide using high-throughput genetic and molecular biology techniques. His work has been published in Journal of Molecular Systems Biology, Briefings in Bioinformatics, Journal of Molecular Micro, PLOS One and holds provisional patent app. USSN 61/501,073. While still a student at Stanford he started, built and sold the social networking company KissMe LLC and also founded Classroom.tv, Inc. KissMe was a popular social application, which hit a million users within the first few weeks and was acquired in 2009. Prior joining Stanford, Eduardo was at SMaL Camera Tech., an MIT startup acquired by Cypress Semiconductor. He also interned at Motorola, Synopsys and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Eduardo holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
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Nathan Hillson, Ph.D.
Founder and Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Hillson is a Research Scientist at LBNL and Director of Synthetic Biology at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and works towards the sustainable production of clean biofuels. Nathan directs the development of the JBEI bio parts registry, the characterization and standardization of biological parts, the computer-aided design of biological pathways and circuits invoking the standardized parts, and the automated assembly of the pathways and incorporation into microbial hosts. Nathan was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford where his work led to several publications and US Patent App. No. 60/900,628. Nathan holds a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard University.
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Praveen Kumar
Co-founder and Advisor
Mr. Kumar is a Partner at Scild Innovations LLC, an applied research and seed stage technology venture incubation fund. Praveen is also a member at the Band of Angels and was one of the founding industrial sponsors at BIOFAB. Praveen has been a technology entrepreneur for 10 years and an angel investor for over 5 years and has made early stage investments in ventures in the telecom, mobile, Internet and life sciences space. Praveen holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, India.
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Jay Keasling, Ph.D.
Scientific Advisor
Dr. Keasling is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at the U. of California, Berkeley. He is also Acting Deputy Lab Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Founding Director of the Synthetic Biology Department at UC Berkeley, and CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute. He is considered one of the foremost authorities in synthetic biology, especially in the field of metabolic engineering. In 2009, Keasling was awarded the first annual Biotech Humanitarian Award by BIO, the Biotechnology Industry Organization. In 2003 he founded Amyris Biotech. and served as Chairman and Member of its Scientific Advisory Board. In 2004, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded a shared $42.5 million grant to the Keasling Lab, Amyris Biotech., and the Institute for OneWorld Health to develop and distribute a low-cost malaria treatment. In 2006 Discover magazine awarded its first ever Scientist of the Year Award to Jay. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan.
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Adam Arkin, Ph.D.
Scientific Advisor
Dr. Arkin is Director of the Synthetic Biology Institute and of the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and the Dean A. Richard Newton Memorial Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Bioengineering. He is also co-director of the Virtual Institute of Microbial Stress and Survival, director of bioinformatics at the Joint Bioenergy Institute, and co-director of BIOFAB (International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology). His research centers on uncovering the evolutionary design principles of cellular networks and populations and exploiting them for applications in health, the environment, and bioenergy. He was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2007 and, and has been profiled in Time Magazine as a “future innovator". A member of the University of California at Berkeley faculty since 1999, he earned his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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