Leadership
Leadership Team
Joshua Hoffman
Chief Executive Officer
Prior to Zymergen, Josh was a Partner at Norcob Capital and before that a Managing Director in Merchant Banking at Rothschild, where he was a member of the Management Committee. He began his career at McKinsey & Company where he served industrial and technology clients on matters of strategy, operations and organization. He holds a BA from University of California, Berkeley and an MA and MPPM from Yale University.
Zach Serber
Chief Science Officer and VP of Development
At Zymergen, Zach is responsible for our overall scientific direction. Prior to his work at Zymergen, he was the Director of Biology at Amyris and served as Principal Investigator on a DARPA contract to develop advanced tools for synthetic biology. Zach has 17 peer-reviewed publications in journals including Cell, Science and JACS, four issued patents, and worked as a research fellow at Stanford University Medical School. He has a PhD in biophysics from UCSF, an MSc in neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh and a BA from Columbia University.
Jed Dean
VP of Operations and Engineering
At Zymergen, Jed is responsible for building and operating the robotic workflows for genome engineering and high throughput screening. Prior to his work at Zymergen, he developed technology and automation for life sciences at Amyris and at the Stanford Genome Technology Center. He earned his bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from Purdue University and has a PhD in biochemistry from the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Aaron Kimball
Chief Technical Officer
At Zymergen, Aaron is responsible for building the data architecture to facilitate a robotics-driven approach to genome engineering. Prior to joining Zymergen, Aaron worked at several big data-oriented startups. He was the first employee at Cloudera, where he helped with a variety of big data challenges. In 2010 Aaron cofounded WibiData, the big data application company. Aaron has been working with the open-source project Apache Hadoop since 2007 and authored Apache Sqoop and MRUnit. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a master’s degree from the University of Washington in computer science.
Enakshi Singh
VP of Finance
Prior to joining Zymergen, Ena was focused on semiconductor investments at Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund. She spent the previous seven years in investment banking, initially at Salomon Smith Barney’s Latin America Group, later working for Merrill Lynch’s Technology Investment Banking Group. Ena studied at Cornell University and received her graduate degree at MIT Sloan School of Management.
Duane Valz
VP & General Counsel
Duane has counseled a wide variety of privately held and public companies on law, technology and business matters. Prior to Zymergen, Duane was a member of the Patent Team at Google, where he led strategic IP initiatives bearing on mobile, cloud, web, and open source technologies. He was also previously Associate General Counsel in charge of patent development at Yahoo! Duane began his career at Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin (now combined with Arnold & Porter LLP). He holds BA and JD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and serves on the Boards of Directors for the Level Playing Field Institute and the Boalt Hall Alumni Association.
Sandra Miley
VP of Marketing
Sandra is responsible for Zymergen’s marketing and communications. Prior to Zymergen, she was interim CEO of United Way Silicon Valley where she led the organization through a merger with United Way of the Bay Area. Sandra held various marketing leadership roles at companies including Vocera, Juniper, Brocade and Adobe. Sandra holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and serves on the board of the United Way Bay Area.