As an early pioneer in the high-throughput synthesis and sequencing of DNA, Dr. Leproust is disrupting markets to enable the exponential growth of DNA-based applications including chemicals/materials, diagnostics, therapeutics, food and digital data storage. In 2020, BIO presented her with the Rosalind Franklin Award for Leadership. Foreign Policy named her one of their 100 Leading Global Thinkers and Fast Company named her one of the Most Creative People in Business. Prior to Twist Bioscience, she held escalating positions at Agilent Technologies where she architected the successful SureSelect product line that lowered the cost of sequencing and elucidated mechanisms responsible for dozens of Mendelian diseases. She also developed the Oligo Library Synthesis technology, where she initiated and led product and business development activities for the team. Dr. Leproust designed and developed multiple commercial synthesis platforms to streamline microarray manufacturing and fabrication. She serves on the Board of Directors of CM Life Sciences and is a co-founder of Petri, an accelerator for start-ups at the forefront of engineering and biology. Dr. Leproust has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers – many on applications of synthetic DNA, and is the author of numerous patents. She earned her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from University of Houston and her M.Sc. in Industrial Chemistry from the Lyon School of Industrial Chemistry. 

Mr. Thorburn is a seasoned technology executive with more than 30 years of finance and operating experience in both private and public technology companies. Prior to Twist Bioscience, he served as Chief Sales Officer of Televerde, a demand generation and sales acceleration enterprise, focused on scaling the business internationally. Prior to Televerde, he served as interim CFO of several public and private companies including Enercore, Next Autoworks, Fisker Automotive and Numonyx (acquired by Micron). As interim CFO of Numonyx, he was responsible for coordination of the merger between ST Microelectronics and the Intel Flash Memory divisions as well as the financing to support the $2B revenue company. Before Numonyx, he served as chairman and CEO of ZiLOG, leading the successful turnaround of the business, public offering and ultimate sale to IXYS. Jim has served as an operator consultant to Texas Pacific Group (TPG), COO and Co-President of ON Semiconductor and led the buyout and IPO of ON.

Prior to ON Jim held various senior executive financial positions in the business units of National Semiconductor.

Mr. Thorburn is a former member of the Board of Directors for IXYS Corporation. He received his BSc (Hons.) in Agricultural Economics from the University of Glasgow and passed the Chartered Institute Management Accountant exams.

Patrick is a diversified and well rounded executive and serial entrepreneur with a wide range of experience in building, integrating and managing businesses across diverse market segments. His detailed understanding of highly technical manufacturing work flows and products is complemented by a proven track record of successfully creating organizations, product lines, technologies and processes to maximize performance. Prior to Twist Bioscience, Patrick consulted for a wide range of life science companies both to build start-up organizations and execute turnarounds. Previously, he served as President and CEO of Operon Biotechnologies Inc., a global leader of DNA synthesis services, where he turned around the business from net loss to profitability in a short period of time. He restructured the business, eventually negotiating a successful merger with Eurofins SA. Prior to Operon, he founded Xeragon, an international provider of RNA synthesis and bioinformatics products (now QIAGEN). Patrick received his MSc in Organic Chemistry, Analytical Chemistry, Molecular Biology, Genetics and Economics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He is an author of several issued patents.

Patrick has a strong track record of high-growth sales in bioreagent, B2B and custom manufacturing organizations. His technical background paired with his ability to identify customer's unmet needs make him the ideal fit to lead our commercial organization. Before Twist Bioscience, Paddy served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Enzymatics (recently acquired by QIAGEN), leading commercial activities for North America and Europe, delivering significant top line growth and expanding the base of business to business customers. Prior to Enzymatics, Paddy held positions with increasing commercial focus, including Director of Business Development at Agilent Technologies, Director of Product Development for Beckman Coulter Molecular Diagnostics, and multiple technical roles in product development within Invitrogen and GE Healthcare/Amersham International. In addition, Paddy currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Lasergen and previously served on the Scientific Advisory Board of Enzymatics. He holds a PhD in Nucleic Acid Chemistry from Southampton University and a BSc Hons in Chemistry from Heriot-Watt University.

Aaron is a proven biologics leader adept at managing teams to discover and develop novel first-in-class antibody therapeutics. Prior to Twist Bioscience, he served as Chief Scientific Officer of LakePharma, leading the California Antibody Center, which discovers novel antibody therapeutics for its clients. Prior to LakePharma, he oversaw all discovery research functions both as Vice President of Protein Sciences at Surrozen, and previously, as Vice President of Research at Sutro Biopharma, Inc. He also served as Senior Director of Antibody Engineering at OncoMed Pharmaceuticals, where he was responsible for human antibody lead discovery and he served as project team leader on several key antibody projects through IND filing. Before OncoMed, Aaron held positions of increasing responsibility at Dyax Corp., most recently as Senior Director of Lead Discovery, leading antibody, peptide, and small protein discovery using their proprietary phage display technology. He earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied MHC class II structure-function relationships. He is an author of over 30 peer reviewed papers and 40 issued patents in the antibody space.

Dr. Chen is a strategic thinker with proven track record of identifying, developing, and commercializing innovative products in NGS, synthetic biology, and other life science areas. He joined Twist shortly after the company was founded and lead product development for both the synthetic biology and NGS product lines. Dr. Chen conceived and implemented a new product line for NGS that includes synthetic controls for SARS-CoV-2 and other infectious diseases, developed gene synthesis and NGS target enrichment biochemistries, workflow, reagent kits, and infrastructure, and built the company’s prototype DNA synthesizer in collaboration with hardware, software, and silicon engineers, which later became a production-scale machine, serving as Twist’s foundation technology. Dr. Chen is the author of numerous peer-reviewed papers and issued patents in the field of oligonucleotide synthesis and application of synthetic oligonucleotides. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and B.Sc. in Chemistry from Peking University in Beijing, China. 

Paula Green is an experienced human resources executive with a track record of developing and delivering high-impact people strategies, solutions, processes and tools that support leadership competencies to empower a high performing organization. Prior to Twist Bioscience, she served as Vice President, Head of Human Resources at QIAGEN, where she oversaw 50 human resources professionals supporting 4,000 employees through mergers and acquisitions, restructurings and other pivotal corporate transactions. She was the human resources manager for Operon Technologies (acquired by QIAGEN) where her responsibilities included creating strategy, overseeing benefits for all employees, and delivering training, recruitment and retention programs.  She also worked as a Human Resources Consultant for the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco. Paula holds a BS in Organizational Behavior from the University of San Francisco. 

Bill is a seasoned entrepreneur and silicon engineering expert. He has been a founder or first employee at four different start-ups and advises early stage startups. As VP of hardware engineering at Complete Genomics, he built their sequencing technology and delivered three generations of human genome chips and sequencers. Bill has twice been awarded multi-million dollar DARPA grants for the development of innovative technologies based on silicon micro machining. Bill’s career spans research, product development, and semiconductor device processing. He holds a PhD in Optical Sciences from the University of Arizona, an MS in Electrical Science from University of Michigan, and served as Staff Physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Mr. Kunz brings more than 20 years of experience in business operations and DNA synthesis expertise to Twist. Most recently, he served as President of Eurofins Genomics US, where he implemented a new synthesis platform and was responsible for increasing production volume for both the synthesis and sequencing businesses. Prior to serving as President, he served as Chief Technology Officer where his focus was building IT off-shore capacity and designing a new IT systems landscape for genomics services. Preceding his time at Eurofins, he served as Chief Information Officer of Operon Biotechnologies, Inc. where he built a global information technology team and developed and deployed a CRM, an e-commerce and a business intelligence system. Prior to joining the biotech industry, he held a variety of positions at various companies throughout Switzerland, including sales, QA and business analyst. Mr. Kunz received his B.S. in Engineering from the H.F. Technology and Management School (TGZ) in Zurich, Switzerland.

Erin joined Twist in June 2020, bringing demonstrated leadership in furthering industry agendas by working with key stakeholders and government officials. Previously, Erin led the expansion of a government affairs program at Gilead Sciences. Before that, Erin led the creation of government affairs programs at other companies including DaVita Rx. Erin’s tenure in government service began in recent Secretary of Energy and former Governor Rick Perry’s Office as an advisor on health care policy and finance, focusing on the coordination of state and federal resources and policy. Erin serves as adjunct faculty at the University of Houston Law Center where she teaches courses on legislative strategy, government affairs and public policy. Erin earned her J.D. with honors from the University of Houston Law Center, her MPH with honors from the University of Texas Health Science Center, and her B.A. with distinguished honors from Drew University.  

As a senior communications executive with over twenty-five years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, Angela excels in crisp messaging and consistent communications, increasing visibility among key stakeholders, as well as carrying culture and communication throughout the organization. Prior to Twist, she led her own consultancy practice for 20 years, working with biopharmaceutical, medical device and diagnostics clients to create key messages to implement effective communication across external audiences. Prior to starting her own consultancy, Angela headed the investor relations and corporate communications department for Exelixis, Inc. She spent several years at Russell-Welsh, Inc., a boutique healthcare communications agency, working with a variety of public and private clients on a broad range of communications services. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in cellular and molecular biology and a Bachelor of Arts degree in business marketing, both from the University of Washington. She currently serves as VP, Provisionals for her local chapter of National Charity League.

Dennis Cho is a seasoned in-house business attorney with a proven track record of agile strategic guidance and practical problem solving. Prior to Twist, he served as assistant general counsel at CytomX Therapeutics, where he was department head for all deals and contracts as well as day-to-day lead on compliance and numerous other legal subject matters. Prior to CytomX, Mr. Cho was the lead transactional attorney on antibody-related licenses and collaborations, major commercial agreements, and combination trials at Seattle Genetics. Before that, he spent nine years at Celgene as the lead West Coast attorney supervising over 100 business transactions, including in- and out- licenses, options, collaborations and M&A agreements, and held primary legal responsibility for Celgene’s alliances, equity investments and “big data” machine learning initiative. Prior to Celgene, Mr. Cho served as general counsel for four private and public companies. He earned his J.D. and a B.A. in Molecular Cell Biology (Genetics) from University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Hellmold joined Twist in October 2021, bringing more than 25 years of industry experience in product, technology as well as business development roles in semiconductor memory and data storage. He will be responsible for promoting, educating and driving market awareness and reception for DNA data storage. His expertise includes driving product roadmap leadership and establishing strategic relationships with ecosystem stakeholders to fuel the adoption of DNA data storage solutions across existing and emerging archive storage use cases. Before joining Twist, Mr. Hellmold was Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Business Development for Strategic Initiatives at Western Digital. Prior to Western Digital, Mr. Hellmold held executive management positions at Everspin, SandForce, Seagate Technology, Lexar Media, Samsung Semiconductor, Fujitsu and SMART Modular. Mr. Hellmold has been deeply engaged in various industry trade associations and standards organizations including co-founding the DNA Data Storage Alliance as well as USB Flash Drive Alliance. He holds an Economic Electrical Engineering degree (EEE) from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.