Dr. Charles Arntzen

Dr. Arntzen is the Founding Director of the Arizona Biodesign Institute and is the Florence Ely Nelson Presidential Endowed Chair at Arizona State University. Dr. Arntzen held previous faculty positions at the University of Illinois and Michigan State University, and visiting professorships in the Laboratoire de Photosynthèse du CNRS in France, the Department of Applied Mathematics in Canberra, Australia, and the Academia Sinica in Beijing, China. He also served as a research scientist with the USDA and as the director of the Michigan State University-Plant Research Laboratory (funded by the Department of Energy). In 1984 he joined the DuPont Company in Wilmington, Delaware as Director of Plant Science and Microbiology and was later promoted to Director of Biotechnology in the Agricultural Products Department. In 1988 he was appointed Dean and Deputy Chancellor for Agriculture at Texas A&M University, and subsequently served as Director of the University's Plant Biotechnology Program of the Institute of Biosciences and Technology.

Dr. Arntzen was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and to the National Academy of Sciences in India the following year. He has been a member of numerous national and international committees that serve general scientific interests, and in 2003 was awarded the Selby Fellowship by the Australian Academy of Sciences. He served as chairman of the National Biotechnology Policy Board of the National Institutes of Health, as chairman of the National Research Council's Committee on Biobased Industrial Products, and on the National Research Council's Committee on Space Biology and Medicine. He served for eight years on the Editorial Board of SCIENCE.

Dr. Arntzen served until 1998 on the Board of Directors of DeKalb Genetics, Inc. and on the Board of Directors of Third Wave Agbio, Inc. and on the Scientific Advisory Board for Sumitomo Chemical Company in Osaka, Japan until 2001. He now serves on the Board of Directors of Advanced BioNutrition, Inc., and is on the Advisory Board of the Burrill and Company’s Agbio Capital Fund and The Nutraceuticals Fund, and on the Scientific Advisory Boards of Advanced BioNutrition, Inc. In 2001 he was appointed as a member of President George W. Bush’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology in the Office of Science and Technology Policy where he participated on the task force on bioterrorism threat reduction technology and currently co-chairs the medical nanotechnology task force.

 

Dr. Roger Beachy

Dr. Beachy is the president and director of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, MO. He is recognized for his work in molecular virology, gene expression and biotechnology, in particular for development of transgenic plants that are resistant to virus infection. Dr. Beachy was born in Ohio in 1944. He received the B.A. degree from Goshen College (IN) and a Ph.D. in Botany and Plant Pathology from Michigan State University in 1972. After post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Arizona and Cornell University, in 1978 Beachy was appointed to the faculty at Washington University, St. Louis. In 1991 he joined The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, holding the Scripps Family Chair in the Department of Cell Biology, and as Head of the Division of Plant Biology. He was co-founder of the International Laboratory for Tropical Agricultural Biotechnology. In 1999 he accepted the position as founding president of the Danforth Center.

Dr. Beachy was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 and received the Wolf Prize in Agriculture in 2001. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received awards from the American Society of Plant Biologists and the American Phytopathological Society and was recipient of the Commonwealth Award. He continues to run an active research program at the Danforth Center. Beachy is a frequent speaker on the role of biotechnology in agriculture, and is a strong proponent for training of, and cooperative research with, scientists in developing countries. He is an advocate for implementation of policies of technology management that encourage sharing of intellectual properties, and research for the public good.

 

Dr. Maurice Buchbinder

Dr. Buchbinder has been practicing medicine since 1983 and was board certified in Internal Medicine in 1981. He was also board certified in Cardiovascular Disease in 1983. Dr. Buchbinder received his medical degree from the McGill University Faculty of Medicine in 1978. He served his internship specializing in Internal Medicine at McGill University and served his residency specializing in Internal Medicine at Stanford University Hospital.

After completing his specialty training, while in fulltime clinical practice Dr Buchbinder has founded several successful medical start ups in the device arena specifically addressing innovations in interventional cardiology. Throughout his entrepreneurial career Dr Buchbinder has made several contributions in the development of advanced devices for treatment of coronary artery disease in a minimally invasive way. Several of these start up companies have been acquired by major medical device manufacturers including Medtronic, Boston Scientific and Johnson and Johnson.

Dr. Buchbinder continues to be an innovator in the field. He is presently concentrating in partnership with others on expanding the reach of percutaneous techniques for treatment of valvular heart disease.

Dr Buchbinder has agreed to join the Finistere group as an active consultant to its lifescience fund and member of its Advisory Board.

 

William Goodwin

William A. Goodwin is the principal and founder of Goodwin International Consulting Services Inc., a management consulting practice providing consultative services in leadership, and change management, and consultative services and training in sales and relationship management to both domestic and international clients. He is the co-author of The Executive Agenda, Executive Relationship Building, and Sustaining the Executive Relationship development programs which have been delivered to over 6,000 participants worldwide. He is also a frequent public speaker with appearances at over seventy-five Industry, Trade, and Economic Development events.

Prior to founding GICS Inc., Mr. Goodwin spent twenty-seven years in executive management with Western Electric, AT&T, Ameritech, and Rockwell International in a variety of management disciplines including sales, marketing, and operations. Among the highlights of his management career was a significant development role in the AT&T divestiture process leading to the creation of Ameritech. During his tenure in the telecommunications industry, Mr. Goodwin was the founding Chairman of the National Telework and Telecommuting Association; a Washington D.C. based Trade Association. During his career Mr. Goodwin established a reputation as an outstanding general manager, communicator and career mentor.

 

Dr. Nicholas Kalaitzandonakes

Dr. Kalaitzandonakes is the director of both the Economics and Management of Agrobiotechnology Center (EMAC) and the Missouri Agricultural Product Utilization and Incubation Center at the University of Missouri, Columbia. These professional appointments are held concurrently with his academic appointment as MSMC Endowed Professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Dr. Kalaitzandonakes is perhaps most respected for his understanding of the economics of agricultural biotechnology. He has published extensively in both academic as well as professional journals of in the field of agribiotechnology economics. His most recent book focused on examining the global economic and environmental impacts of agricultural biotechnology. As one of the lead principal investigators, he is currently responsible for a major USDA National Research Initiative study that examines the growth of agribiotechnology in China and the competitive impact that this will have on the U.S. soybean industry. He has also received grants from the Environmental Protection Agency to study the economics of low phytate feed crops in the state of Missouri. Dr. Kalaitzandonakes has also been tasked by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to investigate entrepreneurship and the formation of bioscience technology clusters.

Dr. Kalaitzandonakes’ expertise has been called upon a number of times to testify for both national and state level committees. He has been called upon to serve as a consultant to the Advisory Committee on Agricultural Biotechnology to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. He has also testified before the House Committee on Small Business on technology and value-add opportunities in the farming sector.

 

Dr. Jay Kunin

Jay Kunin, a Venture Partner at Finistere and member of our advisory board, has over 30 years experience as an entrepreneur, business consultant and investor, along with an extensive technical background. He has been founder or principal of three companies, and an investor, director or consultant for dozens of large and small firms. He assists investors and corporate management in technology analysis, due diligence and strategic planning, and has been an advisor or consultant for several venture capital firms. He is an active member of the Tech Coast Angels investment group, where he is a member of the San Diego network Board of Directors. He currently serves as a Director of several entrepreneurial firms in tissue engineering, benefits administration software, and military healthcare software and network engineering, and as an advisor to startup companies in computational bioengineering, FDA validation services and genome informatics. He is also a founding Board Member of the Life Sciences – I.T. Global Institute.

A consultant in management, financing and business development for technology-based com¬panies, Mr. Kunin has focused on medical and pharmaceutical Information Technology and regulatory compliance. Clients have included such firms as Biogen Idec, Genentech, Amgen, Scripps Clinic, Oracle (Clinical), as well as other biomedical companies, software firms, and CROs. He began his consulting career as a practice manager with Hammer & Co., Inc., the firm that developed the original business process re¬engineering concepts, where his clients included large financial, manufacturing, health-care and technology companies in the US, Europe and Latin America, as well as entrepreneurial firms worldwide. He has served as interim CTO or CIO for numerous technology and biopharmaceutical companies. He also serves as a senior consultant to Incubators New Zealand and the International Centre for Entrepreneurship in Auckland, NZ, and as a Visiting Fellow with the Australian Institute for Commericalisation.

Mr. Kunin co-founded and served as President of RxSys International, a producer of electronic products for the pharmaceutical industry, which he led through an IPO. He was later Director of I.T. at Scios, Inc., a public biopharmaceutical company now owned by J&J. He was a principal of Securities Industry Software Corp., where he served as VP Technology, then as VP International when the company was acquired by Citicorp. He has also been VP of Engineering at GolfWeb, a pioneering venture-funded Web publisher and e-commerce company, which was acquired by CBS SportsLine; VP of Development at International Risk Control, Inc., a financial software company; and Director of I.T. and Process Design for Teknekron Pharmaceutical Systems, a clinical and regulatory systems integration firm.

Mr. Kunin teaches in the UCSD Bioscience Regulatory Affairs program, as instructor in "I.T. Management in FDA-regulated Industries" and serves on the Advisory Committee of the Product Innovation Development program. He also serves on the UCLA Anderson School of Management’s Biotech Executive Program Advisory Board. He has had teaching appointments at the University of Denver Graduate School of Business and in MIT's Computer Science Department. As a Management Fellow at UCSD CONNECT, he works on educational, financial and mentor¬ing programs, serves on the Financial Forum Committee, on Springboard and CCAT panels, and with the Canberra/California Bridge program. He also serves on the Board of the I.T. Management Institute at the University of San Diego’s Business School, on the Steering Committee of the District Attorney’s Computer and Technology Crime High-Tech Response Team, and on the MIT Educational Council. He holds a BS in Physical Sciences and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT.

 

Dr. Animesh Ray

Dr. Ray worked on mechanisms of homologous recombination with Franklin W. Stahl (Oregon) and Ethan R. Signer (MIT). He is currently Professor, Systems Biology, at the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences in Claremont, California. He was Associate Professor Adjunct at University of California San Diego, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Rochester. He is the lead principal investigator of a large NSF-funded collaboration with several physicists, computer scientists and mathematicians, which focuses on understanding how complex gene-regulatory networks in living cells are wired together in a coherent functional whole.

Dr. Ray's work on homologous recombination has centered on the role of DNA double strand breaks in repair and recombination of chromosomes in yeast and plants. Starting in 1991, Dr. Ray began investigating gene regulatory mechanisms during development in plants. By 1994, his laboratory had discovered a new genetic pathway for specifying ovule development in flowering plants. Soon afterwards, his laboratory cloned and patented a gene now named DICER-LIKE1 (DCL1) that controls the production of micro RNA in flowering plants and thereby controls a large number of genes required for essential plant functions, including flowering, embryogenesis and seed development. This work helped extend the role of RNA silencing to plant development. Around this time his laboratory also showed that the plant embryo sac emits a long-distance signal that guides pollen tubes into the egg chamber for accomplishing fertilization.

In 1995, inspired by the pioneering work of Dr. Leonard Adleman of the University of Southern California, Dr. Ray became interested in exploring the potential of biological systems for computing and information processing. In 1996, collaborating with a computer scientist colleague Mitsunori Ogihara, Dr. Ray designed the first set of parallel logic gates with DNA, which was able to compute the solution to a Boolean Circuit-a logical framework important for many types of computation. This and their subsequent studies, along with those of several other scientists, helped launch a new field of research: molecular computing. His work in molecular computing was featured widely in the public media, including the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, by the British Broadcasting Corporation, and in the Times/Random House book "One Digital Day: How the microchip is changing our world". Ogihara and Ray were nominated for Discover Magazine 1997 Invention of the Year award. Since late 2001, Dr. Ray's laboratory has begun to investigate modeling and mathematical analysis of complex gene regulatory pathways using data-integration methods.

 

Dr. Mary Walshok

Dr. Walshok is the Dean of the University Extension and Associate Vice Chancellor of Public Programs at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She is responsible for a large number of publicly focused academic initiatives including University Extension, Summer Sessions, UCSD-TV and UCTV, UCSD CONNECT, San Diego Dialogue, UCSD Civic Collaborative and Executive Education, all self-supporting academic programs of the University of California, San Diego. Extension offers more than 2,000 continuing education courses annually serving more than 40,000 students. CONNECT is a globally renowned program that fosters high tech enterprises and "bridges" the university to local business and industry.

Dr. Walshok also serves as an Adjunct Professor in UCSD’s Department of Sociology, teaches one upper division or graduate course a year, serves on a variety of Ph.D. committees, supervises independent study students, and lectures on campus. In addition, she is a Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School Economics since 1998, and also holds an appointment in the Department of Continuing Education at Oxford University.

Dr. Walshok has been decorated with the rank of Knighthood, First Class, of the Royal Order of the Polar Star by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, in recognition of her significant contribution to the development of entrepreneurship in Sweden. She has also been honored by the City of San Diego with a Mayoral Proclamation declaring May 2, 2002 as "Dr. Mary Walshok Day," for work in Sweden and the United States on entrepreneurship, leadership and community service. In addition, she was elected International Social Science Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 1999.

 

Dr. Roger E. Wyse

Dr. Wyse has more than 27 years of experience as an internationally recognized plant scientist and business consultant and, prior to joining Burrill & Company in 1998, he had served deanships at Rutgers University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was Dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Dr. Wyse holds a PhD in Plant Physiology from Michigan State University and is a Fellow of several professional societies. Dr. Wyse served as co-CEO of Third Wave AgBio; was founding President and CEO of Pyxis Genomics, a fully integrated animal genomics company; and is the Board Chairman for Chromatin, CreAgri, Efficas, and the Alliance for Animal Genome Research; he is also a member of the Boards of Directors of Cibus Genetics, Emerald BioAgriculture, Pyxis Genomics, Sciona, the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, and the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley.