Team
Acting President / CEO: William Gordon III, PhD, MBA
Chief Scientific Officer: Theodore Clark, PhD
Chairman, Board of Directors: R. Douglas Kahn, MBA
Scientific Advisory Board:
Kathleen Collins, PhD
Jacek Gaertig, PhD, Chairman
Martin Gorovsky, PhD
Eduardo Orias, PhD
Aaron Turkewitz, PhD
Dr. Gordon is a technology executive and entrepreneur with 20 years experience in the financial and telecommunications industries. He is currently Managing Partner of WEG Family, LLC, a private investment company. His original training prior to his business career was in the fields of molecular and cellular biology.
Bill’s management experience ranges from start-ups to large publicly traded companies. He was most recently Founding Partner and CFO of Callahan Associates International, a private US investment group that acquired and managed a cable franchise of 20 million homes in Europe between 1996 and 2001. Previously he was Vice President of Alliance Capital Management in New York where he oversaw investments portfolios holding in excess of $10 billion in assets. Prior to Alliance Capital he was Vice President of Dimensional Fund Advisors in Santa Monica, Ca. where he directed the marketing of a number of innovative investment products for the firm which grew from $2 to $6 billion in assets under management during his tenure.
Bill holds a BS in Biological Sciences from Wayne State University in Detroit, a Ph.D. in Cellular Biology from the Zoology Department of UC Berkeley and an MBA from The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania. Bill spent 5 years at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories on Long Island in New York working in the laboratory of Dr. James Watson carrying out three years of research for his Berkeley Ph.D. as well two years of post-doctoral work as a fellow of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. His research was on cellular infrastructure of normal and cancerous cells growing in tissue culture employing various highly purified antibodies against key cellular proteins to label and identify their distribution in cells under both light and electron microscope examination.
Ted is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Cornell University. He has more than 20 years experience in cell and molecular biology, and has worked extensively with Tetrahymena and other ciliates. Dr. Clark received his baccalaureate degree in Applied Biology from the School of Engineering at Columbia University in New York, and his PhD in Cell and Developmental Biology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Following the completion of his dissertation he moved to Yale University as a postdoctoral fellow where he first became acquainted with Tetrahymena.
Ted spent more than a decade at the University of Georgia where he began efforts to develop Tetrahymena as a high-level expression system for membrane proteins. This work culminated with the successful expression of membrane antigens from Ichthyophthirius, and the development of an effective prototype vaccine against ‘white-spot’, a protozoan disease that has major impact on commercial aquaculture worldwide.
Ted is currently a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Tetrahymena genome sequencing project; is a member of the Board of Reviewers for the Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology; and, will co-organize the FASEB Summer Conference on Ciliate Molecular Biology. He has been a keynote speaker at numerous scientific meetings, and has served on review panels for a variety of granting agencies including the USDA and NOAA. Ted co-founded Tetragenetics Inc. in 2004.
Doug is a technology executive and entrepreneur with 25 years experience in the software and telecommunications industries. He is currently President of Camden Group, Inc., a consulting and investment company providing strategic assistance to technology businesses in transition. His management experience ranges from start-ups to large publicly traded companies. He was CEO of PanAmSat, the world’s leading satellite services company with annual revenues in excess of $800 million. Previously, he served as President and CEO of Easel Corporation, taking it from its early stage venture capital days to a successful IPO and beyond.
Doug holds a BS in Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from Stanford. He has taught courses in Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation at the Northeastern University Graduate School of Business and has been a frequent guest lecturer at the Harvard Business School, Kauffman Foundation and Babson College. He was the recipient of the Entrepreneur of the Year award, the SBANE New Englander award for innovation and achievement and his company was named to the Software 100. He has been an active member of the technology community in Massachusetts since 1980 and served as a Trustee of the Massachusetts Software Council for 10 years. He has also served as a director of ServiceSoft Corporation, Advanced Visual Systems, American Software Association and the Cornell University Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise Council.
Scientific Advisor
Kathleen Collins, PhD
Kathy is a Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at University of California, Berkeley. She has joint affiliation with the Division of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Division of Cell and Developmental Biology. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and conducted postdoctoral training at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Her research interests include principles of protein and RNA co-folding and co-function in cellular ribonucleprotein complexes, with particular emphasis on the chromosome end maintenance enzyme telomerase. As an Assistant Professor, she held a Burroughs Wellcome Fund New Investigator Award in the Pharmacological Sciences. Her insights into telomerase biogenesis and function were recognized by the American Society of Cell Biology with the ASCB/Promega Early Career Life Scientist Award in 2002.
Kathy has served on numerous grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health and the California Cancer Research Coordinating Committee. She has also served as monitoring editor for The Journal of Cell Biology. At Berkeley, she has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate level courses including structural biology of proteins and nucleic acids, cellular biochemistry, and methods and logic of research discovery.
Scientific Advisor
Jacek Gaertig, PhD, Chairman
Jacek is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cellular Biology at the University of Georgia. He completed his undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Warsaw. As a postdoctoral associate at the University of Rochester he explored the molecular biology of ciliated protozoa. Together with Marty Gorovsky, Jacek has developed methods for DNA-mediated transformation and gene targeting in Tetrahymena. He also continues his studies on the cytoskeleton of Tetrahymena with emphasis on the role of tubulin gene isotypes and post-translational modifications.
Jacek established an independent research program as an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia in 1995. His long-term research interests include the biogenesis of complex microtubular organelles such as cilia, and the use of Tetrahymena thermophila as a system for foreign gene expression and surface protein display. He has given numerous lectures at institutions in this country and abroad, and has served on peer review panels for scientific journals and funding agencies including the National Science Foundation. His research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society, and the National Science Foundation.
Marty is the Rush Rhees Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago and his postdoctoral training at Yale University. His principle research interests are the role of histones and histone post-translational modifications in chromatin structure and function, the function of small RNAs in DNA sequence elimination and rearrangement during macronuclear development and cilia biogenesis in Tetrahymena thermophila. His laboratory has played a major role in developing the molecular genetic techniques that led to recent decisions by the NIH and NSF to sequence the genome of Tetrahymena thermophila as a model for research in cell biology and genetics. His work was cited as one of the major contributions to Science Magazine’s election of RNAi as “Breakthrough of the Year” in 2002.
Marty received the University of Rochester Cancer Center Davey Memorial Award for outstanding cancer research. He has served on grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the American Cancer Society. At Rochester, Marty chaired the Biology Department for 12 years, has served on the joint Medical School-Biology Committee, the Executive Committee of the Medical Scientist Training Program, as well as the Executive Committee of the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Cluster. Dr. Gorovsky is the founder of graduate courses that have become mainstays of programs for graduate students in both the Medical School and the Biology Department.
Scientific Advisor
Eduardo Orias, PhD
Dr. Orias earned his PhD in Zoology in 1960 at the University of Michigan, where he studied mating type differentiation in Tetrahymena. He joined the UCSB faculty in 1959. He has served as Guest Professor at the Biological Institute of the Carlsberg Foundation in Copenhagen, Denmark; Visiting Professor in the Anatomy Department at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in Protistology, Universities of Camerino, Pisa and Padova, Italy; Guest Investigator in the Department of Molecular Biology of the University of California at Berkeley, CA, and as Invited Foreign Investigator in the Department of Developmental Biology of the Mitsubishi Kasei Institute of Life Sciences, Machida, Tokyo, Japan.
He has served as President of the international Society of Protozoologists, member of the Genetics Study Section of NIH, and of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Protozoology, International Microbiology and Acta Protozoologica. Dr. Orias was a co-organizer of the 2nd International Ciliate Molecular Genetics meeting held at UCSB in July 1986 and has recently organized international sessions and meetings on Tetrahymena Genomics. He currently serves as Coordinator of the International Tetrahymena Genome Project.
Scientific Advisor
Aaron Turkewitz, PhD
Aaron is Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD at Harvard University and did his postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco. His principle research interests are in membrane traffic in Tetrahymena thermophila, specifically in the pathways involved in regulated exocytosis via dense-core granules, and in internalization via coated pits (which in ciliates are called "parasomal sacs").
His laboratory has played a major role in identifying genes in both of these pathways and in determining their activities, which has included pioneering a number of approaches in ciliates. His laboratory also spearheaded the effort to generate ESTs (expressed sequence tags) for Tetrahymena, which became an important tool for the larger genome sequencing effort.
Aaron has served as an ad hoc reviewer for the National Science Foundation and on NIH grant review panels. At the University of Chicago, Aaron won the 2000 University award for excellence in graduate teaching, and is also committed to undergraduate instruction.
