Robert Hershberg, M.D., Ph.D., has served as a member of our Board since March 2020. He currently serves as the President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors of HilleVax, Inc. He has been a Venture Partner at Frazier Healthcare Partners since March 2020. Formerly, from April 2017 to March 2020, Dr. Hershberg was the executive vice president and head of business development and global alliances at Celgene (acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2019). He was employed in positions of ascending responsibility at Celgene since joining the company in 2014, including his role as Chief Scientific Officer from January 2016 to March 2020. Before Celgene, he served several roles at VentiRx Pharmaceuticals, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company which he co-founded in 2006 and was Chief Executive Officer from September 2012 until the company’s acquisition by Celgene in February 2017.
Dr. Hershberg currently serves on the board of directors of Adaptive Biotechnology (Nasdaq: ADPT) and Fate Therapeutics (Nasdaq: FATE). He previously served on the boards of directors of Nanostring Technologies, Inc. from 2015 to 2022, and Silverback Therapeutics from 2017 to 2022. He holds a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California, San Diego’s Affiliated Ph.D. program with the Salk Institute and an M.D. and a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Our Board believes that Dr. Hershberg is qualified to serve on our Board because of his scientific background, his senior management experience in the pharmaceutical industry, and his knowledge and perspective of the Company.
Christopher Gibson, Ph.D., is our co-founder, Chief Executive Officer since the company’s founding in November 2013. Dr. Gibson was also Chairman of our Board from the company’s founding until he asked, with the support of the rest of the Board, for Dr. R. Martin Chavez to accept a position of Chairman in January 2021.
Previously, Dr. Gibson was an M.D./Ph.D. student at the University of Utah. After obtaining his Ph.D., he withdrew from medical school to found Recursion. He has undergraduate degrees in bioengineering (B.S.) and managerial studies (B.A.) Rice University. He has served as a Founding Chairman of the Board of BioHive (the Utah life science collective and branding effort, composed of therapeutics, diagnostics, medical device and health IT companies, along with the companies that support them and the public sector) since November 2020. He also serves as a Board member of the Recursion Foundation (our not-for-profit entity seeking to promote corporate social responsibility) since November 2019, through which he is on the Board of Altitude Lab (an incubator/accelerator focused on creating the next generation of diverse biotech founder in Utah) since July 2020. Dr. Gibson previously served as a board member of BioUtah (the Utah life science industry association) from 2019 to 2023.
Dr. Gibson has also served on the Cures Acceleration Network Review Board since September 2020. Dr. Gibson is co-author of more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies in a variety of journals including Nature, Nature Protocols, Circulation, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Molecular Pharmaceutics, PloS One, and Diabetes. Our Board believes Dr. Gibson is qualified to serve on our Board because of his scientific and technical background and his knowledge and perspective of the Company.
Zachary Bogue, J.D., has served as a member of our Board since August 2018. Mr. Bogue brings to bear two decades of experience in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, attorney, and angel investor. Mr. Bogue co-founded DCVC, and he continues to serve as its Co-Managing Partner. Mr. Bogue led DCVC’s significant investments in Freenome, Planet Labs, Tala, Oklo and Gro Intelligence. Prior to co-founding DCVC, Mr. Bogue was an entrepreneur, founding three companies in Silicon Valley and an angel investor, with early investments in companies like Square, Inc. and Uber Technologies, Inc.
In 2015, the World Economic Forum named Mr. Bogue a Young Global Leader in recognition of his leadership at the intersection of transformative technology and urgent global issues, and he is active in the Davos community. Mr. Bogue graduated with honors from Harvard University in Environmental Science and Public Policy and earned his J.D. with honors from Georgetown Law School. Our Board believes Mr. Bogue is qualified to serve on our Board because of his technical background and his knowledge and perspective of the Company.
Blake Borgeson, Ph.D., a co-founder of the Company, has served as a member of our Board since the company’s founding in November 2013, and served as our Chief Technical Officer from November 2013 to July 2018. Dr. Borgeson earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from Rice University. From 2003 to 2004, Dr. Borgeson worked as a software research intern at M.E. Mueller Institute at Bern, Switzerland, researching and building real-time navigation software for surgical procedures. From 2005 to 2016, he co-founded an e-commerce company, BuildASign.com. In August 2016, Dr. Borgeson was awarded a Ph.D. in biology for his bioinformatics work at UT Austin. Dr. Borgeson has served on the board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley since September 2018, which focuses on doing foundational mathematical research to ensure smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact. Our Board believes Dr. Borgeson is qualified to serve on our Board because of his technical background and his knowledge and perspective of the Company.
Zavain Dar has served as a member of our Board since September 2016. Mr. Dar is currently a Founder and Managing Partner of Dimension, a technology and life science investment firm, a position he has held since March 2022. At Dimension, Mr. Dar invests in the union of cutting-edge biotech and software. From 2014 to 2022, Mr. Dar was a General Partner at Lux Capital, a tech venture firm where he invested in companies leveraging machine learning and AI to augment and replace physical-world functions including biology, language, manufacturing and analysis. In addition to leading Lux’s investment in Recursion, Mr. Dar also led Lux’s investments in Thrive Detect (acquired by Exact Sciences), Creyon Bio, LabGenius, Tempo Automation, Braid Health, RunwayML, Primer, and CryptoNumerics (acquired by Snowflake).
Additionally, he is a founding investor in Anagenex. Prior, Mr. Dar was a founder and computer scientist. At Discovery Engine (acquired by Twitter) he engineered machine learning and AI systems across a proprietary distributed computing framework to build web-scale-ranking algorithms. Mr. Dar has a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a M.S. in Theoretical Computer Science from Stanford University where he was a researcher in Stanford’s AI Lab. Our Board believes Mr. Dar is qualified to serve on our Board because of his technical background and his knowledge and perspective of the Company.
Dean Y. Li, M.D., Ph.D., a co-founder of the Company, has served as a member of our Board since its founding in November 2013. Dr. Li has served as Executive Vice President and President, Merck Research Laboratories since January 2021. Dr. Li previously served as Senior Vice President of Discovery Sciences and Translational Medicine, Merck Research Laboratories from November 2018 to December 2020. He joined Merck in February 2017 as Vice President and Head of Translational Medicine.
Before joining Merck, Dr. Li was conducting medical research at the University of Utah from July 1994 to March 2017. During his time at the university, he co-founded multiple biotech companies stemming from research from his laboratory, including Recursion, Hydra Biosciences and Navigen Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Li served as the H.A. & Edna Benning Professor of Medicine and Cardiology, the vice-dean of research at the University of Utah Health Science Center, and as the chief scientific officer of University of Utah Health Care. Dr. Li also served as interim CEO of Associated Regional University Pathologists, the nation’s third-largest clinical reference laboratory, from June 2015 to August 2016.
Dr. Li holds an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and a B.S. in Chemistry from The University of Chicago. Dr. Li trained at Washington University in Saint Louis before moving to the University of Utah to work as a post-doctoral scientist in the laboratory of Mark Keating. Our Board believes Dr. Li is qualified to serve on our Board because of his scientific background, his senior management experience in the pharmaceutical industry, and his knowledge and perspective of the Company.
Franziska Michor, Ph.D., comes to Recursion after serving on Exscientia's board of directors since May 2023. Dr. Michor is the Charles A. Dana Chair in Human Cancer Genetics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a Professor of Computational Biology and of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University. Dr. Michor obtained her undergraduate training in mathematics and molecular biology from the University of Vienna, Austria, and her PhD from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Afterwards, she was awarded a fellowship from the Harvard Society of Fellows. From 2007 until 2010, she was an Assistant Professor in the Computational Biology Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Michor is the director of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Evolution. She has been the recipient of the Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Alice Hamilton Award, the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science, the 36th Annual AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research, and others. Dr. Michor’s laboratory investigates the evolutionary dynamics of cancer initiation, progression, response to therapy, and emergence of resistance.