Management team

Martin Tolar

President, Chief Executive Officer, board member
Before joining Knome, Dr. Tolar held executive positions in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, most recently as Chief Executive Officer of NormOxys, Inc., where he successfully built and financed the business and advanced the company’s novel cancer therapeutics from a research project into clinical development. Prior to NormOxys, he was Chief Business Officer at CoMentis, Inc., where he led the company’s scientific and business growth and negotiated a landmark collaboration agreement with Astellas Pharma.

Prior to CoMentis, Dr. Tolar held a variety of leadership positions at Pfizer in roles in clinical development and business development, in which he was instrumental in a wide range of business development transactions and directed programs through all stages of clinical development and NDA submissions.

Prior to entering the private sector, Dr. Tolar was Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at Yale University School of Medicine. He trained in Neurology at the Boston Medical Center, received a PhD in Neuroscience, and published a number of scientific publications in the area of neuroscience and Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Tolar serves on the Board of Directors for Suven Life Sciences Ltd., a public biopharmaceutical company based in Hyderabad, India, focused on innovative drug development of novel first-in-class or best-in-class therapies through the use of GPCR targets, and Board of Directors for BELLUS Health, Inc., a public development-focused health company based in Montreal, Canada, concentrating on amyloid-targeting pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products.

Jorge Conde

Chief Strategy Officer, Co-founder, board member
Jorge Conde has spent his entire professional career in the biotechnology industry, working in finance, business development, marketing and operations. Prior to Knome, Mr. Conde worked in strategic marketing and operations at MedImmune, Inc. He has also worked in business development at Helicos Biosciences Corporation, a DNA sequencing company, and in the life sciences group at Flagship Ventures, a venture capital firm. Previously, Mr. Conde was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley & Co., specializing in the biotechnology and genomics industries. Mr. Conde has been named one of the top 35 innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MS from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from The Johns Hopkins University.

Jonas Lee

Chief Marketing Officer 
Jonas Lee has founded and managed several finance, internet, and high technology ventures that pioneered new markets and technologies, including Redbrick Partners, Poindexter Systems, GiftCertificates.com, and Integrated Computing Engines. Prior to his entrepreneurial activities, Mr. Lee served as a management consultant with Bain & Company. He is a graduate of Harvard Business School and Brandeis University.

Marc Rubenfield

Vice President of Operations
Marc Rubenfield has more 20 years of experience in genomics and genomic services. Prior to joining Knome, he was responsible for the sequencing services product line at Beckman Coulter Genomics, including the introduction of next-generation sequencing. Previously, he worked with Agencourt Biosciences, where he led many of the company’s largest sequencing and genomics projects, and with Genome Therapeutics Corporation (GTC), where he helped establish and build one of the first commercial DNA sequencing services. Earlier in his career, he was also involved in several pioneering genomic developments, including the early development and application of multiplex sequencing.

Board of directors (non-management)

Sundar Subramaniam

Chairman and Co-founder
Sundar Subramaniam is the Chairman of IBCC and Co-chairman of Knome. He is also the CEO of Sialix and general partner of Higher Moment Capital. Sundar has founded eight successful IT companies, four of which completed IPOs. He has previously served as Chairman of I-Cube, C-bridge, Open Environment Corporation, Worldstreet Corporation, Integrated Computing Engines, and as Managing Director of Cambridge Samsung Partners. Sundar graduated from Brandeis University with a major in Computer Science and Economics. He has an MBA from MIT and an MS from HST (Harvard-MIT Health Science and Technology).

Stéphane Bancel

Board member
Formerly the CEO of bioMerieux, Stéphane is currently a board member of BG Medicines Inc., ADVAMED, and chairman of the Board of bioThernostics Inc. From 2000 to 2006, Stéphane worked in the United States, Great Britain and Belgium for Eli Lilly laboratories, where he successively held the positions of Managing Director, Executive Director for Global Manufacturing Strategy, Global Supply Chain and U.S. Distribution, and Supply Chain Manager. From 1995 to 1998, Stéphane worked at bioMérieux in Japan where he was in charge of the industrial microbiology business for the Asia-Pacific region. Stéphane is a graduate of the Ecole Centrale Paris engineering school. He also holds a Master of Science in biochemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.

Scientific advisory board

George Church, Ph.D

Chief Scientific Advisor and Co-founder
Dr. George Church, Ph.D is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Center for Computational Genetics. He completed his Ph.D at Harvard in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology with Walter Gilbert, developing the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984. In that year he helped initiate the Human Genome Project while a research scientist at newly-formed Biogen Inc. Dr. Church later helped to found the Stanford, MIT, and Waltham Genome Centers. He invented the broadly applied concepts of molecular multiplexing and tags, homologous recombination methods, and array DNA synthesizers. His many innovations in genomics, computational biology, genetics and systems biology have been the basis for a number of companies. Dr. Church’s research focuses on integrating biosystems modeling with high-throughput data for haplotypes, RNA arrays, proteomics, and metabolites.

Yaniv Erlich, PhD

Advisor
Dr. Yaniv Erlich is Andria and Paul Heafy Family Fellow and Principal Investigator at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a bachelor’s degree from Tel-Aviv University at Israel and his PhD from the Watson School of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Dr. Erlich’s research interests are computational human genetics. He has extensive experience in developing new algorithms for high throughputs sequencing and to detect disease genes. In two of his studies, he identified the genetic basis of devastating genetic disorders. His lab works on a wide range of topics including developing compressed sensing approach to identify rare genetic variations, devising new algorithms for personal genomics, and using Web 2.0 information for genetic studies. Dr. Erlich is the recipient of the Harold M. Weintraub award, the IEEE/ACM-CS HPC award, Goldberg-Lindsay Fellowship, Wolf foundation scholarship for Excellence in exact science, and Emmanuel Ax scholarship, and he was selected as one of 2010 Tomorrow’s PIs team of Genome Technology.

David Goldstein, PhD

Advisor
Dr. David Goldstein is Professor of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology, Professor of Biology and Director of the Center for Human Genome Variation at Duke University. His work focuses on the use of modern genomics to help understand how human genetic variation influences disease. He received his PhD in Biological Sciences from Stanford University and was previously a professor of Genetics at University College London. In 2007, he was also appointed Honorary Professor at the Institute of Neurology at University College London in the UK. Dr. Goldstein is the author of more than 175 scholarly publications in the areas of population and medical genetics. He is the recipient of one of the first seven nationally awarded Royal Society/Wolfson research merit awards in the UK for his work in human population genetics. Dr. Goldstein was awarded the Triangle Business Journal Health Care Heroes Award for Innovator/Researcher in March 2008.

Anthony J. Sinskey, Sc.D

Advisor
Dr. Anthony Sinskey, Sc.D. is professor of Microbiology and Health Sciences and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Professor Sinskey has participated in the founding and development of over 15 biotechnology companies over the course of two decades, including Metabolix and Ge nzyme, Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, and Tepha, a medical device company. One of his current areas of research focuses on understand how technological innovations in basic sciences and systems biology can facilitate pharmaceutical drug development in personalized medicine.

Lincoln Stein, MD/Ph.D

Advisor
Dr. Lincoln Stein, MD/PhD. is a Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Platform Leader of Informatics and Biocomputing, at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR). He completed his MD at Harvard Medical School and his PhD at Harvard University in Cell Biology. He was an instructor at Harvard Medical School. From 1992-1997 Dr. Stein was Director, Informatics Core, at the MIT Genome Center, Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research. His specific focus has been on the integration and interpretation of data and developing visualization tools to help transform raw data into meaningful information. One of his primary objectives has been to make the human genome both accessible and navigable.