Transforming life sciences

The Team

Founded by genomics and synthetic biology experts, we have spent decades solving complex biological problems and are passionate about creating life-changing AI solutions that will revolutionize life sciences as we know it.

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Toby Richardson

CEO & CO-FOUNDER



Toby Richardson

Ph.D

Toby brings over two decades of experience leading bioinformatics teams, and developing products and commercializing genomics software. Toby spent ten years at Diversa Corporation, where he successfully isolated and evolved industrially useful enzymes, one of which was commercialized to produce ethanol by Syngenta “Enogen”. He also ran and managed an enzymology and informatics group and his team developed some of the first tools to annotate, store, and mine large metagenomic datasets from environmental samples. Toby then went to Synthetic Genomics Inc. (SGI) and served as VP of Informatics. He was responsible for setting up the informatics and software engineering departments and led the development and implementation of SGIs proprietary genomics software platform Archetype®.

Toby holds a Biochemistry degree and is a graduate from the University of Surrey, England. He is the author of more than 30 peer reviewed publications and is an inventor on more than 20 patents. Toby has served on the board of Agracast since 2015.

Outside of work, Toby enjoys travelling, sailing, hiking, chess and Badminton

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Ariel Schwartz

CTO & CO-FOUNDER



Ariel Schwartz

Ph.D

Ariel has over 20 years of professional experience in Data Science, Computational Biology, and Machine Learning. Ariel earned his B.Sc. in Information Systems Engineering (Summa Cum Laude) from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.  His first hands-on experience with data analysis was in his role as an IDF intelligence officer, and later as an Information Systems Engineer at Intel Corp., where he developed decision support systems for project and resource management. At UC Berkeley, he got interested in the computational biology field, through his research work with Prof. Marti Hearst on text mining algorithms for biomedical text, and later on he devoted his Ph.D. thesis to probabilistic algorithms for biological sequence analysis working with Profs. Gene Myers and Lior Pachter. As a postdoctoral scholar in the Ideker lab at UCSD, Ariel worked on protein-protein interaction mapping strategies, and tissue-specific transcription factor network analysis.

Moving back to industry, Ariel joined Synthetic Genomics Inc. (SGI) in 2008, where he spent ten years leading the adoption of the then emerging Next Generation Sequencing technologies, helping to advance large research projects using integrated genomics approaches with diverse application, including algal biofuels, microbial solutions for agriculture, organ xenotransplantation, phage engineering, and more. In his role as the Director of Computational Biology, he recruited, developed, and managed a highly skilled group of Ph.D. level computational biology scientists, promoting a culture of innovation, engagement, collaboration, integrity and respect. He envisioned, initiated, and led the development of D-SPACE, a disruptive deep learning platform for protein functional annotation, discovery and engineering.

Outside of work, Ariel enjoys spending quality time with his family and playing violin and viola in community orchestras and chamber music groups around San Diego.

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Imad Ajjawi

CBO & CO-FOUNDER



Imad Ajjawi

PhD, MBA

Imad has over 15 years of professional experience in the biotech arena, spanning technical, managerial, business development, consulting and entrepreneurial roles. He is the author of numerous patents, manuscripts and grants, resulting in over $60 million in funding through strategic partnerships. Prior to founding Denovium, Imad was part of the corporate business development team at Synthetic Genomics Inc (SGI). He was responsible for out-licensing technology and providing strategic direction to a number of business units including DNA technologies, computational biology, and translational medicine. Earlier during his SGI tenure, Imad was the lead genomics scientist of the Algae Biofuels group. His breakthrough work engineering algae biofuels was published in Nature Biotechnology and featured in numerous prestigious media outlets including WIRED, Forbes, Bloomberg, KPBS and NPR. Imad was a post-doctoral fellow at Michigan State University and earned his PhD in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology from the University of Nevada Reno. He received his MBA from the University of California San Diego.

Evenings and weekends, Imad enjoys time with his kids and would love to find more time for old hobbies such as cycling, soccer, hiking, home brewing and paddle boarding.

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Gregory Hannum

CSO & CO-FOUNDER



Gregory Hannum

Ph.D

Gregory has more than 13 years of experience in bioinformatics, clinical statistics, and applied machine learning. He was a Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at Synthetic Genomics Inc, where he pioneered state-of-the-art research into genome assembly and genome resequencing approaches. He also served as the product owner for the Archetype web genomics platform and was a chief contributor to SGI’s bioinformatics and machine learning capabilities. At Sequenom he led the development of a fetal diagnostic computational pipeline, including a novel DNA signal processing algorithm.

Gregory received his PhD in Bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego. His thesis included the development of a human aging clock based on DNA methylation, and its relationship to gender, tissue, disease, and genetics. He is an author of more than 16 publications and 4 patents.

Outside of work, Gregory enjoys gardening, cooking, camping, gaming, and philosophy.

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Jonathan Eads

VP of software engineering



Jonathan Eads

MS

Jonathan has over 20 years of experience in software engineering, designing large-scale data-centric systems and building purpose-driven engineering teams. He has worked on large-scale distributed systems and SaaS application development in genomics and bioinformatics, video transcoding/editing, and test automation data management. Jonathan received his Masters in Chemistry and Biochemistry from UCSD, where he studied the biochemistry of proteins found in snake venom with a focus on Fasciculins, potent inhibitors of Acetylcholinesterase. His interests in computer programming began during graduate school where he studied at the San Diego Supercomputer Center building homology models of proteins.

He started his software engineering career at Diversa Corporation engineering some of the first large-scale metagenomic data analysis systems. He went on to work in large-scale video transcoding at Eyespot, as the Director of Application Technology developing one of the first web-based video editors, voted “Far and away the easiest editor on the Web” by PC Magazine. Jonathan later joined Synthetic Genomics in 2007 in the role of Senior Director of Software Engineering. At Synthetic Genomics, Jonathan built a team and led the development of SGI’s proprietary genomics software platform Archetype®, a comprehensive genomics annotation platform that managed the processing, storage, and analysis of metagenomic, microbial, and eukaryotic sequence annotation data. The platform was used for managing data to research environmentally friendly technologies for corporate partners ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, Monsanto, and the Asiatic Centre for Genome Technology. He joined Mozilla in 2011 and worked as the tech lead software engineer building report systems to support large-scale custom continuous integration technology. Jonathan has been working as an independent consultant since 2014 building software and systems for a variety of Biotechnology companies, including building the first version of Phylosbioscience’s Galaxy application.

Jonathan is also an avid composer, sound designer, jazz musician and hiker.