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Leadership TeamGenstruct has assembled an impressive list of industry leaders to manage the company. Our leadership team hails from both top tier pharmaceutical companies as well as successful entrepreneurial organizations, and boasts a combined experience of nearly 100 years.Chris Varma, Ph.D. - President & CEO Keith O. Elliston, Ph.D. - Co-Founder & Director Christopher Z. Thomajan - Chief Financial Officer Louis Latino - EVP, Sales Dexter Pratt - VP, Innovation & Knowledge Julian Ray, Ph.D. - SVP, Technology & Engineering Renée Deehan Kenney, Ph.D. - Senior Director, Scientific Research Andrea L. Matthews - VP, Commercial Operations William M. Ladd, Ph.D. - Senior Consultant Navin Chandra, Sc.D. (1960-2004) - Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer  President & CEO Chris Varma joined the Genstruct team in July of 2009. He is also a Partner at Flagship Ventures where he focuses on investments in healthcare and life sciences. Dr. Varma has significant management experience in clinical development, regulatory strategy, business development, sales, and marketing in the pharmaceutical industry. Prior to Flagship, Dr. Varma was with Novartis Pharmaceuticals where he served most recently as Director of the Tekturna (aliskiren) marketing team responsible for all Medical Marketing, Medical Strategy, and Professional Promotions activities in the U.S. Chris also oversaw Tekturna’s extensive clinical development programs, and played a key role in the FDA approval, CMS reimbursement coverage approval, and successful commercial launch of Tekturna in early 2007. Previously at Novartis, Chris was Director of Business Development & Licensing where he identified several in-licensing opportunities and drove key transactions. Prior to that, Dr. Varma focused on corporate strategy working directly with the Novartis Pharma CEO in Basel, Switzerland. Before Novartis, Dr. Varma was a consultant for Millennium Pharmaceuticals working on special projects in the Personalized Medicine Group. Before Millennium, he worked for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the Office of Combination Products coordinating and managing reviews across the major Centers. Early in his career he co-founded Epitrope Corporation, a company that developed server-side solutions for wireless telecom carriers. Dr. Varma holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology (HST), a M.S. in Management from Stanford University, and a M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. to top  Co-Founder & Director Keith Elliston is an experienced entrepreneur and intrapreneur who has dedicated his career to the development of leading-edge technology for drug discovery. Dr. Elliston spent over 10 years with Merck Research Laboratories, where he served as the director of bioinformatics, and the scientific director of the Merck Gene Index project. He then joined Bayer Pharmaceuticals where he founded their global genomics and bioinformatics efforts, and was the section head of Genomics and the worldwide head of Bioinformatics. In 1997, Dr. Elliston joined Gene Logic as chief scientific officer and pioneered the development and application of molecular profiling to drug discovery. He was responsible for the development and management of six pharmaceutical research partnerships representing over $350 million in potential revenues. In 1999, Dr. Elliston founded Viaken Systems, where he was chairman, president and CEO. Dr. Elliston has been an advisor to Oak Investment Partners, Atlas Ventures and other biotechnology venture capital groups, and has participated in the early stage development of a number of successful biotech companies. Dr. Elliston received an M.S. in genetics from the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from Rutgers University. to top  Chief Financial Officer Mr. Thomajan has 18 years of experience in a variety of industries, including Biotechnology, Investment Banking, Software, Internet Services, and Telecomm. He has extensive experience in raising debt and equity, has been involved in numerous M&A transactions, and has managed the Operations of several start-up companies during rapid revenue growth. He was a Founding Partner of America’s Growth Capital, a boutique investment bank focused on emerging growth technology companies, and was the early stage CFO/VP Operations for Asurion Corporation which has grown to over $1 billion in revenues. He was also the CFO for a pioneering Internet company, Delphi Internet Services, which was acquired by News Corporation in 1993. Mr. Thomajan received a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.B.A. from Columbia University. to top EVP, Sales Mr. Latino joined Genstruct in 2008, bringing almost 30 years of senior sales management and direct sales experience. Prior to joining Genstruct, he was VP of North America, Life Sciences Sales and Support for Accelrys, Inc., a developer of a broad range of technologies, including computer-aided-molecular-design and scientific business intelligence software. He honed his life sciences expertise as VP of Worldwide Sales for Geneformatics and as a regional sales manager for Biosym Technologies. Mr. Latino has also held sales positions at other technology companies, including Superscape Group, Mitchell Management Systems and BIW Cable Systems. Mr. Latino earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Boston College. to top  VP, Innovation & Knowledge Dexter Pratt began consulting for Genstruct in 2002, and joined the company as its director of Biological Systems Modeling in 2003. While with Genstruct, Mr. Pratt has served as a technical team leader, software developer and platform architect, while also performing as biology project leader, team member and principal investigator for Genstruct’s internal and partnered projects. Mr. Pratt has an extremely strong background in artificial intelligence. He was a member of the research staff at the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he worked on the team developing LISP hardware prototypes. In 1981, he joined LISP Machine, Inc., where he became the director of the User Interface Group and participated in the design and implementation of both hardware and software, including the development of a 1,000 chip LISP processor. In 1989, Mr. Pratt joined the CYC project, where he spent seven years developing novel knowledge representation systems and inference mechanisms for a groundbreaking, large-scale common sense reasoning system. Mr. Pratt has extensive startup experience, having served as the CTO for two internet media companies: Webkick and CineMetrix, where he was the technical architect of their respective platforms. Mr. Pratt received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Yale University. to top SVP, Technology & Engineering Dr. Ray has more than 18 years of experience in designing, developing and deploying innovative solutions to challenging technology and information management systems problems. Prior to joining Genstruct, Dr. Ray was the chief technology officer (CTO) at auctionPAL, a venture-backed, technology-enabled, business-to-consumer services company. He co-founded C2GLogistics, an Internet startup providing a suite of web-based services and mobile applications with a large customer base in the life sciences industry. Dr. Ray has also served as a senior software scientist at Intergraph Corporation and director of the Transportation Research Center at the University of Tennessee. He has presented more than 30 technical papers at professional and academic conferences and authored a dozen peer-reviewed articles in academic publications and conference proceedings. Dr. Ray received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the University of Tennessee and his B.S. from Reading University in the United Kingdom. to top Senior Director, Scientific Research In her current role at Genstruct, Dr. Kenney is responsible for managing the company’s scientific research programs and is instrumental in supporting its business development efforts. With Genstruct since 2006, she has led nine successful commercial projects, including a collaboration with Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, which received the 2008 Bio-IT Best Practices Award in the area of Drug Discovery & Development. Dr. Kenney studied bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and received her Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley. The focus of her dissertation research was on the understanding of mechanisms of chromosome condensation and sister chromatid cohesion in spindle assembly and cancer. to top  VP, Commercial Operations Andrea Matthews joined Genstruct in 2003 and has been integrally involved in driving the progress of the company’s scientific and technology development by managing its pharmaceutical research projects. As director, Alliance Management, Ms. Matthews is responsible for coordinating the alliance activities of the company, managing various business activities within Genstruct’s consulting organization and supporting the sales organization. With her expertise in project management, alliance management, scientific research and sales, Ms. Matthews will focus on project identification definition, as well as project scoping and project management. Ms. Matthews received her B.A. cum laude in biochemistry and molecular biology from Boston University and was named one of Mass High Tech's "People to Watch Under 30" in 2007. to top  Senior Consultant Bill Ladd has over 18 years experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, primarily in the areas of statistics and bioinformatics. Prior to joining Genstruct, Dr. Ladd led Analytic and Life Science Product Strategy as senior director of Analytic Applications at Spotfire. Earlier in his career, Dr. Ladd was the director of Bioinformatics Methods at Gene Logic and led the statistical analysis efforts of the Biological Data department at Merck. Dr. Ladd earned his Ph.D. in statistics with an emphasis in biostatistics from the University of Wisconsin. He holds an M.S. in statistics from Rutgers University and a B.S.E. in chemical engineering from Princeton University. Dr. Ladd's work has been published in a wide range of scientific journals. to top  Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Navin Chandra was an artificial intelligence technology pioneer, educator and entrepreneur. He was an inventor on numerous technology patents, and his research have resulted in several widely cited publications and a book entitled Exploration and Innovation in Design now a classic in the AI in Design field. After receiving his doctorate from MIT in the 1980's, Dr. Chandra joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in Computer Science as well as Civil Engineering. In 1993, he joined IndustryNet as director of Internet Commerce. In 1997, he transitioned to Time0, a business unit of Perot Systems, where he was responsible for a large government grant for information integration that yielded a number of key technologies he commercialized. Dr. Chandra subsequently started SkyIron Services, a company designed to help small businesses through web based business services and knowledge networks. With the turn of the millennium, Dr. Chandra saw the opportunity to apply his artificial intelligence and systems design expertise to biology. His vision for combining case-based reasoning and frame-based knowledge representations for biology were realized with the launch of Genstruct. As CTO, he designed and oversaw the initial development of Genstruct's platform, which enables scientists to identify mechanisms in biological systems using causal modeling. Dr. Chandra passed away on January 29th, 2004, but his innovative spirit and determination will continue to be part of Genstruct's future. to top |
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