February 2008, Marco Island Florida – an exciting time in the world of NGS, the first pioneering papers were being published using short-read sequencing that are now every-day applications – ChIP, RNA-Seq, small RNA, the first whole genomes.
Over the past few years I’ve been interested in contributing back to the community I live in, but as a busy father-of-three (ages 3 to 9) there just isn’t the ability to ‘cold-call’ a local high-school and volunteer.
That is, until a family vacation took us to Colonial Williamsburg VA and a tour of the Governor’s Mansion. There was a person there with a ‘Wootton Patriots’ T-shirt, and, well, as Newsweek indicated it was one of the country’s top 100 high schools in their 2010 ranking, I thought I’d speak up and ask if he happened to be involved with the local high school.
“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson
This is a blog about next-generation sequencing and it’s intersection with marketing and business in general (primarily), which happens to be my particular area of professional expertise, having focused on next-generation sequencing since late 2006, when Illumina (my then-employer) acquired a startup called Solexa for $417M. I have had product development, product management, marketing (all in the San Diego area with Illumina) and key-account sales roles (in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US serving both the NIH and the entire SouthEast region with Illumina, RainDance Technologies and currently with Life Technologies). I am presently in a marketing role at Life Technologies Corporation (which used to be Applied Biosystems and Invitrogen Corporation), heavily involved with both the Ion Torrent PGM / Proton as well as the SOLiD / 5500 platforms. (More information about me can be found here; if you are interested in anything Ion Torrent and NGS market overall you’ve come to the right place.)