Leadership

Dr. Abeliuk earned his Ph.D. studying bacterial cell division using high-throughput genetic and molecular biology techniques. His research has been published in international journals, and he holds patent US9150916.

During his time at Stanford, he founded and sold KissMe LLC and established Classroom.tv, Inc. KissMe reached one million users within weeks before being acquired in 2009. Before Stanford, he worked at SMaL Camera Tech., an MIT startup purchased by Cypress Semi, and interned at Motorola, Synopsys, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

He holds a M.S. in BioEngineering and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Dr. Fero currently serves as Chief Information Officer at Twist Bioscience, where he leads enterprise technology strategy and operations.

Previously, he was an NIH Quantitative Research Career Fellow and principal investigator at Stanford, researching protein localization and essential genomic elements for bacterial survival. Working with Pat Brown and David Botstein, he directed development of the first full-genome human DNA microarrays.

He served as VP of Software Engineering at Neomorphic, a computational genomics company acquired by Affymetrix, and as consulting scientist at Hyperparallel, a data mining firm purchased by Yahoo!. He has authored over 40 peer-reviewed publications and holds a Ph.D. in Elementary Particle Physics from UC Irvine.

Dr. Hillson is recognized as an expert in biological computer-aided design and manufacture, with over eight years leading interdisciplinary teams of software engineers, laboratory automation specialists, and biologists on synthetic biology infrastructure for biomanufacturing.

He has led major synthetic biology initiatives at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute, where he directed development of DBTL workflows and biological design standards. His work has resulted in numerous peer-reviewed publications and open-source tools that have become foundational to the synthetic biology community.

He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in microbiology at Stanford and earned his Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard.

Richardson is a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, working at the Joint BioEnergy Institute on large-scale synthetic biology projects.

She has developed tools for rapid, automated design of multikilobase synthetic genes and automated design of modular synthetic chromosomes. She received the Turock Award for Promising Young Scientists and the Jupur Dinesh Thekdi Award from Johns Hopkins University.

Richardson holds a Ph.D. in Human Genetics from Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Arkin directs the Synthetic Biology Institute and Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and holds the Dean A. Richard Newton Memorial Professorship in UC Berkeley’s Bioengineering Department.

He co-directs the Virtual Institute of Microbial Stress and Survival, oversees bioinformatics at the Joint Bioenergy Institute, and co-directs BIOFAB. His research focuses on evolutionary design principles of cellular networks for applications in health, environment, and bioenergy.

Named a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2007 and profiled in Time Magazine as a “future innovator,” he earned his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from MIT.

Dr. Wilson founded and serves as Chief Science Officer at Nalo Therapeutics. Previously, he was Chief Science Officer at Oxford BioTherapeutics, leading research at PDL BioPharma through its transition to Facet Biotech, Abbott Laboratories, AbbVie, and Oxford.

He has managed internal scientific reviews and implemented new pipeline strategies. Wilson was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford and Director of Computational Biology and Genomics at EOS Biotechnology and PDL BioPharma.

He holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Oregon Health and Science University.