GRAND RAPIDS — Empirical Bioscience LLC has elected Richard Leach, Ph.D., vice president of business development at Complete Genomics Inc. and an expert in human genome sequencing, to its board of directors.
With more than 18 years of experience in genome sequencing and its application in fields such as personalized medicine, Leach will give Empirical Bioscience a perspective on how to grow its existing and prospective markets for reagents used in polymerase chain reactions of human, animal and plant DNA, company officials said.
For the past three years, Leach has served as an officer at Complete Genomics, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that used proprietary technology to sequence more than 15,000 whole human genomes for research customers. Before joining Complete Genomics, Leach was vice president for five years at deCODE genetics, a Reykjavik, Iceland-based bio-pharmaceutical company that developed a personal genome scan to enable individuals to determine their susceptibility to a range of common diseases and other traits.
He also served as scientific and business consultant for five years at the Shady Grove Center for Preimplantation Genetics in Rockville, Md., founder and Chief Science Officer at Teneo Sciences, senior field applications scientist at Affymetrix Inc., scientist in the Division of Experimental Therapeutics at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and visiting scientist at the National Cancer Institute.
Leach holds a doctorate in molecular biology from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.
