Chemical industry veterans and company directors increase roles as company drives to commercialization
SAN DIEGO, May 11, 2009 – Genomatica, a sustainable chemicals company, announced today that the company’s board of directors has promoted Christophe Schilling to chief executive officer. In this role, Schilling will focus on bringing the company’s unique bio-manufacturing platform to commercial production. Schilling’s promotion recognizes his experience developing Genomatica’s core technology platform, coupled with a proven track record of driving company growth through interaction with the chemical industry and financial community.
Mark Burk will continue to serve as the company’s chief technology officer. Burk, who joined Genomatica in 2006 as senior vice president of research and commercial development, has been a key architect of the company’s product pipeline, and will continue leading the research and development team. In addition, Schilling is joined by William Baum as chairman, and welcomes board members and chemical industry veterans Warren Clark and Robert Pangborn to more official capacities as part of an extended management team. Clark brings critical expertise to the executive team as a proven industry leader in chemical process technology development, valuation, and licensing. Collectively this leadership team brings over 100 years of chemical industry expertise as the company begins to scale up and commercialize its breakthrough bioprocess for 1,4-butanediol (BDO).
“I am very excited and honored to assume full leadership of Genomatica, the company I helped found and nurture over the past nine years,” said Christophe Schilling, chief executive officer of Genomatica. “Our pipeline of sustainable bio-manufacturing processes will deliver the innovation and low-cost positions required to enable a much-needed transformation of the global chemical industry. Together with our commercialization partners, we have an opportunity to be the catalysts of change, improving the profitability and environmental impact of one of the world’s largest and most essential sectors.”
“The board strongly endorses Christophe’s new leadership role and his vision for the future,” said Josh Green of Mohr Davidow Ventures. “In the past 18 months, Genomatica has dramatically advanced its core technology and proven its market potential. Schilling brings a unique blend of all the right leadership skills required for this company to flourish.”
Schilling, together with Bernhard Palsson, founded Genomatica in 2000 and was the driving force in committing the company to its present course of enabling the transformation of the chemical industry through sustainable chemicals. Since the company’s inception, he has been instrumental in architecting the integrated technologies that are core to Genomatica’s value. Representing the entrepreneurial spirit of the company, Schilling successfully secured numerous early-stage commercial partnerships for Genomatica with global companies including Dow Chemical, DSM, Unilever, Verenium (formerly Diversa), and Kyowa Hakko. He has guided the company to over 30 federal research awards from agencies including the Department of Energy, National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. As president, he led successful efforts to attract and secure venture capital financing from the company’s current top-tier investment firms.
Schilling received his Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego, where he was a Powell Foundation and Whitaker Foundation Fellow. Schilling also holds a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Duke University where he was a Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Fellow. In 2003, he was named by MIT's Technology Review magazine as one of the top 100 young innovators under 35 whose innovative work in technology will have a profound impact on the world.
The new roles of Baum, Clark, and Pangborn bolster connections to the traditional chemical industry and offer critical skill sets necessary for effective commercialization of the company’s pipeline of unique bioprocesses for BDO, MEK and other chemicals.
Baum has served on Genomatica’s board of directors since 2006. He is currently the executive vice president at Verenium, a San Diego-based biofuels company developing cellulosic ethanol to meet the demand for renewable fuels and energy. Prior to joining Verenium, Baum was a senior executive at International Specialty Products and Betz Laboratories, both global specialty chemical companies. He brings extensive business development depth in industrial biotechnology and direct product marketing and business experience in the BDO value chain. Baum will serve as the chairman of the board of directors, effective immediately.
Clark will take on the newly created role of interim senior vice president of operations and process technology licensing. He is the former global director of technology licensing reporting to the executive vice president for the Dow Chemical Company, the second largest chemical company in the world. He served in various executive roles at Dow Chemical for 32 years. The addition of Clark to the leadership team furthers the company’s growing strength in chemical process engineering while bringing vital expertise in the licensing of chemical process technologies. Clark has conducted technology and market evaluations as well as economic valuations on over 150 chemical processes, in addition to leading the licensing efforts for many of these processes. With these added capabilities, Genomatica reinforces its rare status of combining best-in-class computational modeling and simulation with wet lab experimentation and process engineering to create a differentiated and complete platform for process development. Pangborn will take on a more active business development role as an executive advisor to Schilling and the team. He oversaw key elements of research and development at Dow Chemical from 1993 to 1998 as the company’s vice president of central and new business R&D, and served the company in various executive roles since 1976. Since then he has been involved in the formative years of a number of emerging companies in the area of industrial biotechnology and chemical catalysis.
Genomatica is a sustainable chemicals company enabling transformation of the chemical industry. The company develops groundbreaking bio-manufacturing processes to sustainably produce a variety of industrial chemicals that impact all major industries and provide the materials that comprise the world we live in. The company enables the production of sustainable chemicals through a compelling proprietary platform that fundamentally transforms the way in which natural processes can be used to convert low cost, renewable feedstocks into higher-value chemicals. Founded in 2000 by research scientists and engineers from the University of California, San Diego, Genomatica develops a broad range of biologically produced industrial chemicals from a variety of renewable feedstocks at a fraction of the cost.
A privately held company, Genomatica is backed by top Silicon Valley venture capital firms Mohr Davidow Ventures, Alloy Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Genomatica is based in San Diego.
For more information:
Emily Chamberlin Genomatica 10520 Wateridge Circle San Diego, CA 92121
echamberlin@ar-edelman.com 650-762-2945 phone