Chris Gibson, Ph.D., is the Co-Founder and Board Chair of Recursion.
Chris developed the technology and approach that seeded Recursion as part of his MD/PhD work in the lab of Co-Founder Dr. Dean Li (current President of Merck Research Labs) while at the University of Utah. After completing his Ph.D., Chris left medical school to build Recursion into the rapidly growing company it is today. Chris is a graduate of Rice University with degrees in bioengineering and management.
Chris serves on the Board of BioHive, the public-private partnership driving expansion of Utah's life-science ecosystem, the fastest growing in the nation. Chris is also active as an advisor and mentor, both formally and informally, of many young biotech founders. Chris enjoys cycling on both the road and the trails that cut through Utah's great wilderness, as well as spending time with family.
Robert Hershberg, M.D., Ph.D., has served as a member of our Board since May 2020. Dr. Hershberg is the Chief Executive Officer, President, and Chair of the Board of HilleVax, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of novel vaccine candidates. Since 2020, he has also been a Venture Partner at Frazier Healthcare Partners. 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 joined Celgene in 2014 and was employed in positions of ascending responsibility, 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 is a member of the board of directors of Adaptive Biotechnologies, FATE Therapeutics, Scientific Advisory Board of Danaher Corporation, Dragonfly Therapeutics, Skyhawk Therapeutics, and the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. Rob 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.
Zack is co-founder and co-managing partner of Data Collective (DCVC), a venture capital fund that invests in entrepreneurs applying deep tech to transform giant industries. Zack brings to bear over 15 years of experience in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur, advisor, attorney and angel investor, backing brilliant people changing global-scale businesses, helping create tens of billions of dollars of wealth for these entrepreneurs while also making the world a markedly better place. Zack’s current and prior investments in this regard include Planet Labs, Uber, Zymergen, Merlon Intelligence, Square and Tala. In 2015, the World Economic Forum named Zack 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. Zack serves on the non-profit boards of the East Palo Alto Charter School and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Zack graduated with honors from Harvard University in environmental science and earned his J.D. with honors from Georgetown Law School.
Blake earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Rice University. He followed it with a year researching and building real-time navigation software for surgical procedures at the M.E.Mueller Institute in Bern, Switzerland. In 2005, he co-founded an e-commerce company, BuildASign.com, which currently employs over 350 in Austin and brought in over $80 million in revenue in 2015. After moving to an advisory role in the business, Blake completed a Ph.D. in bioinformatics at UT Austin in the Marcotte Lab, using machine learning to exploit new experimental techniques in rapidly mapping protein complexes. He loves sunshine, mountains and snow.
Dr. Namandjé N. Bumpus served as the FDA’s Principal Deputy Commissioner until December 31, 2024, after joining the agency in August 2022 as Chief Scientist. As Principal Deputy Commissioner she played a pivotal role in shaping the agency’s strategic direction and driving its day-to-day operations. She worked closely with the FDA Commissioner to spearhead key public health initiatives, strengthening regulatory frameworks, modernizing enterprise systems, and enhancing laboratory testing capabilities. She was also one of the foremost drivers of strategy for integration of AI into regulatory science at the agency. Prior to the FDA, Dr. Bumpus was an endowed professor and chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she also served as an associate dean. She earned a Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Michigan and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute. Her prior research has spanned across drug metabolism, drug-induced toxicity, mass spectrometry, and infectious disease pharmacology. Dr. Bumpus has received several honors, including the Presidential Early Career Award, the John J. Abel Award, and the Leon I. Goldberg Award, and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Zavain invests at the intersection and union of cutting-edge biotech and software. Zavain was previously a General Partner at Lux Capital where he led investments in companies including Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), which uses automation and deep learning to develop novel therapeutics; Enveda Biosciences, which applies cutting edge machine learning to next generation metabolomics to probe our planet’s dark chemical space for new medicines, Runway, which is putting machine learning tools into the hands of creators; Hugging Face, an open-source company democratizing Natural Language Processing; and Thrive Earlier Detection, an early cancer detection company acquired by Exact Sciences for 2.15 billion in 2020.
Previously Zavain was an investor at Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Prior to VC, Zavain 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.
Zavain holds a BS in symbolic systems and an MS in computer science from Stanford where he was a researcher at the Stanford AI Lab. He has been a Lecturer at Stanford having taught seminars in Cryptocurrencies, Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy, and Venture Capital. Zavain is a first-generation immigrant from Kashmir.
Dr. Khan has deep expertise in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, spanning biological, chemical, and medical science, computational and data science, and general business leadership, with a focus on driving substantial patient and business value. As the Chief Data Science Officer and Global Head of Strategy and Portfolio Organization, for Innovative Medicine R&D at Johnson & Johnson, Najat played an integral role with the senior leadership team in building an industry-leading pipeline that delivered multiple transformational medicines. She has been a pioneer in driving the impact of data science/AI at scale while establishing a top-tier diverse data science team, underpinning her commitment to innovation and excellence at the intersection of healthcare and technology. Dr. Khan co-chaired Johnson & Johnson’s Data Science Council, where she has played a key leadership role in driving the adoption of data science across the company to achieve business impact and deploy best practices for data use, AI, ethics, as well talent recruitment and development.
Dean is the President at Merck Research Laboratories. He has served as VP of Translational Medicine or in other roles at Merck since 2017. Prior to his move to the large pharmaceutical company, Dean was on the cutting-edge of translational medical research at the University of Utah for more than two decades. 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. Dean 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. Dean also served as interim CEO of Associated Regional University Pathologists (ARUP), the nation's third-largest clinical reference laboratory, from 2015 to 2016. Dean trained at Washington University in Saint Louis before coming to Utah to work as a post-doc in the laboratory of Mark Keating.
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.
Elaine Sun is a 30-year life sciences and financial industry veteran with a track record of building and creating value for early- to late-stage biopharmaceutical companies. She is currently the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at Mammoth Biosciences, an in vivo gene editing therapeutics company co-founded by Nobel laureate and CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna. She previously was SVP and CFO at Halozyme Therapeutics, a commercial-stage biotechnology company, and served as CFO and Chief Strategy Officer at SutroVax (now Vaxcyte), a developer of innovative vaccines. Earlier in her career, she advised pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies on M&A and financing transactions valued in excess of $50 billion, including as Managing Director at Evercore Partners and Merrill Lynch. Ms. Sun currently serves on the Board of Dynavax Technologies (NASDAQ:DVAX), a commercial-stage vaccines company as well as Asher Biotherapeutics, a clinical-stage precision oncology company, and holds a BA from Wellesley College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.