Management Team
Robert Chess Chairman and CEO
Rob currently serves as Chairman of Nektar Therapeutics, in addition to his work at OPX. Nektar Therapeutics is a publicly listed company (NASDAQ: NKTR) that develops improved pharmaceutical products using its innovative drug delivery platforms. Rob joined Nektar in 1991 as its first non-founder employee, and was the company’s CEO through 1999. Since 1999, he has served as Nektar’s Chairman and was also the acting CEO in 2006. Rob was previously the co-Founder and President of Penederm, Inc., a publicly-traded dermatological pharmaceutical company that was sold to Mylan Laboratories. He has held management positions at Intel Corporation and Metaphor Computer Systems (now part of IBM), and was a member of the first President Bush’s White House staff. Rob serves on the Board of Directors of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), is Co-Chairman of BIO’s Intellectual Property Committee, and has served as Chairman of BIO’s Emerging Company Section. Rob is Chairman of Bio Venture for Global Health, a member of the Board of Directors of Metabolex, and is on the Board of Trustees of the California Institute of Technology and the Committee for Economic Development. He is a member of the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses in Entrepreneurship and Management of Health Care Innovation, and is an Adjunct Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Health Policy. Rob received his B.S. degree in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. from Harvard.
Michael Lynch M.D., Ph.D. Chief Scientific Officer
Mike received an A.B., in anthropology as well as a B.S. and M.S. in biomedical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, followed by a Ph.D. in Chemical & Biological Engineering from the University of Colorado in 2005 and an M.D. from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in 2007. Mike has nearly a decade of research experience in the life sciences, including the fields on molecular biology, protein thermodynamics, microbiology and metabolic engineering, and is the primary inventor behind OPX’s platform technologies.
Ryan Gill Ph.D. Scientific Advisor
Ryan is the Patten Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Ryan has more than a decade of experience in the development and application of new genomics tools for metabolic and strain engineering purposes. Ryan has been at CU since 2001, after doing post-doctoral research at MIT from 1999-2001 and PhD research at the University of Maryland from 1995-1999. Ryan Gill received an NSF CAREER award as well as an NIH Career Development Award in 2005.
Erik Warnecke Controller
Erik received a B.S. in both Accounting and Finance at Indiana University. He worked as an auditor at Ernst & Young from 2002-2004 and as an Associate Manager at The Siegfried Group, a consulting firm specializing in Sarbanes Oxley compliance and financial reporting, from 2004-2007 when he came to OPX.