Leadership
Thomas J. Kelleher, PhD – Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Thomas Kelleher is a biotechnologist with more than 30 years of leadership experience in the industrial production of recombinant biopharmaceuticals, antibiotics and industrial enzymes. He has worked for and with consulting engineering firms to complete seven commercial production facilities. He was a Director of Process Development at Amgen during the 12-year expansion of its commercial sales from $9 to $20 billion/yr. Dr. Kelleher was the Senior Director of Manufacturing and Process Development at Cubist where he led manufacturing, process development, plant construction and long-term contractual supply agreements for the FDA Licensing of Cubicin, an antibiotic of last-resort for Vancomycin Resistant Enterococcus (VRE) and MRSA “super bugs”. Cubicin was the first new-class of antibiotic in 32 years. It has now served 2 million patients and has licensed sales that exceeded $1 billion dollars in 2012. Prior to these leadership assignments, Dr. Kelleher held positions of increasing responsibility at Biowork-IMS Inc., ZymoGenetics/Novo Nordisk, Chiron/Cooper Laboratories and Millipore/Worthington Biochemicals. Kelleher’s Ph.D. thesis was on lignocellulosic biochemistry in fungi.
His areas of expertise include :
- Production of recombinant biopharmaceuticals, antibiotics and enzymes
- Industrial consultation for process development
- GMP production of injectables and biologicals
Thomas W. Jeffries, PhD – President and Founder
Dr. Jeffries has forty years of leadership experience in microbial biochemistry, physiology and metabolic engineering of yeasts. Throughout his career he has directed research and development into renewable fuels, chemicals, and materials – as well as sustainable technologies. He began working full time to build Xylome in January of 2013. Dr. Jeffries’ professional experience includes roles as Scientist, Senior Scientist and former Director of the Institute for Microbial and Biochemical Technology at the USDA Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. As a USDA Professor, he taught Biotechnology and Industrial Microbiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 20 years, and retired in 2012 as Emeritus Professor. Dr. Jeffries provides strategic direction to the scientific team by selecting yeast platforms, commercial targets and metabolic approaches, and he conducts process and strain development.
His areas of expertise include :
- Physiology and metabolic regulation of yeasts and fungi, genetics and biochemistry of yeasts,
- Fermentation, yeast metabolic engineering, genetic transformation, expression analysis, and genomics
- Thermochemical and biochemical pretreatments for the bioconversion of cellulosic and hemicellulosic materials to fuels and chemicals.
Joanna D. Bundus, PhD – Director of Research
Dr. Bundus has joined Xylome with advanced degrees and professional experience in genetics, molecular biology, and genome analysis. From an early start in yeast research as an undergraduate at Western University in London, Canada, she completed a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto where her research productivity resulted in several grants and awards including a L’Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science Award. She was the Lead Teaching Assistant (among 40 TA’s) for an undergraduate first year biology class of 1800 students, and supervised eight undergraduate student projects, which resulted in two publications. Following post-doctoral positions at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dr. Bundus has joined the Xylome team to lead its molecular biology and strain development research.
Her areas of expertise include :
- Evolutionary and population genetics
- Large scale experimental design and data analysis
- Genome sequence analysis
José Miguel Laplaza, PhD – Principal Scientist
A molecular geneticist by training that has successfully led metabolic engineering, fermentation, and process development teams. Dr. Laplaza has over twenty years of biotechnology experience in industrial and governmental settings. Prior to joining Xylome, he was CTO of Circular Industries, working on producing chemicals from used cooking oil. Previously, he was the founder of Levadura Biotechnology, where he developed a new way of making polyketides from fermentation as a precursor for cannabinoids. In addition, he was VP of Development in Verdezyne, where he developed and commercialized the production of bio-based dodecanedioic acid by fermentation, among other projects. He worked at Cargill, where he contributed to multiple projects for different business units in molecular biology and fermentation. In addition, he was a microbiologist at the Forest Product Laboratory of the US Forest Service, where he used biotechnology to add value to cellulosic sugars. Dr. Laplaza received a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of California, Davis. His dissertation was on protein degradation in plants and yeast.
His areas of expertise include:
- Alternative Yeasts Genetics and Physiology
- Synthetic Biology
- Fermentation
- Process Development
- Scale-Up and Tolling