Strategic leadership of multidisciplinary research teams that generate engineered microbes producing high value secondary metabolites and bio-based chemicals:- Delivered strains with improved natural products titre and productivity for commercial manufacturing.- Implemented state-of-the-art genetic engineering tools (e.g. CRISPR-Cas9).- Obtained EPA approval for commercial production of desired natural product.- Established Molecular Forensics capabilities to identify counterfeit, illegal products.- Devised and implemented intellectual property strategy. Conducted competitive technology, market, IP and FTO analyses.- Responsible for budgets.- Provided people leadership, coaching and mentoring to numerous scientists. Conducted performance management and career development. - Strongly advocated safety leading to excellent, ZERO-incident safety record.

Strategic leadership and management of the Microbial Development team with responsibilities to develop industrial strains for the commercial production of biodegradable plastics and industrial chemicals from renewable resources:- Delivered metabolically engineered strains with improved PHA titre and yield for commercial production. - Developed industrial C4 chemicals production strain that scaled to 60m3. - Engineered robust C3 chemicals strains for acrylic acid market. - Created proof-of-concept strains for C5 chemicals.- Implemented strategy and secured IP for engineered strains. - Established budgets, allocated resources, developed research plans and monitored progress to deliver results on time for all microbial R&D programs.

Strategic leadership and program management of the Molecular and Systems Biology teams to develop and deliver the Pfēnex Expression Technology Platform™ for production of pharmaceutical and industrial proteins:- Conceptualized and established foundation of core business by creating toolbox that identifies best host strains for high-level production of active, soluble proteins.- Established Systems Biology expertise including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolic network modelling. - Designed strategy and implemented bioinformatics infrastructure, including microbial strain database, genome annotation pipeline, and genome database.- Initiated, set-up and managed external technology research with academia (UCSD) and various companies (Genomatica, Syngene, Integrated Genomics).