Manuel J Villa-Garcia Email & Phone Number

Greater San Diego Area

Greater San Diego Area

Manage the clinical-variant analyst group. Supervised all scientific content for the company. Coordinated new NGS clinical and wellness product-design and updates for existing product. Interface with all levels of the company to ensure scientific standards, including strategic planing with the executive, R&D, international business development, government-regulatory compliance, sales/training and legal (IP) teams .

Greater San Diego Area

Greater San Diego Area

• Designed and constructed highly productive yeast strains that overproduce bio-based chemicals and biofuels. Developed, HTP functional genomic screenings and transcriptional (microarray) assays of libraries of mutant yeast.• This position also involves technical writing and presentations of research data for a wide audience including international congress, industrial, government and venture capital investors and writing scientific paper and patents on behalf of Cornell University Biofuels Research Laboratory and The Cornell Center for Technology Enterprise & Commercialization.

• Secured and managed federal and state grants for proof of concept for a novel immobilized yeast fermentation process to produce bio-based products. Responsibilities also included training of graduate and undergraduate students as well as technician staff. This position required increasing industrial and academic relations management of laboratory human resources, purchasing, grant budgets and patent writing of successful applied research projects.

• Succesfully completed the metabolic engineering of a second generation yeast for the industrial production of a bio-based product named inositol.Trained graduates, international students and technical staff in traditional genetic yeast strain developing methods including: yeast transformation, mating, tetrad dissection and trait selection with differential growth media. In addition, trained students in yeast and bacteria metabolic engineering using modern molecular biology techniques including: gene KO, deletion and substitution, gene chromosomal integration, RT-PCR and FACS analysis.Received award for Innovation in Globalizing Undergraduate Education. International collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and I.T.E.S.M. for the development and testing of virtual chemistry labs and Java applets for chemical education. Complement CMU grant support from the HHMI /CMU grant to complete the virtual chemistry lab project.

• Strategic planning of the genetics division of Cerechem Corporation and leader of microbial improvement projects to overproduce bio-based chemicals by fermentation, Advisor to Cerechem’s president on partnerships with Mexican biotechnology and fermentation scale-up firms. Involved in writing and filing of two patents for industrial production of inositol by fermentation of proprietary yeast for a Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)-Cerechem partnership.

• Responsibilities included strategic planning and management of the research and academic activities of the center. Budget management, policy writing for industrial contracts and agreements, policy writing for intellectual property and management functions of HR resources, laboratories and equipment of the center.

Ph.D., Chemistry

M.Sc., Chemistry

B.Sc. (Lcq), Chemistry