Dawn Thompson

Background

About Dawn Thompson

I’m a senior scientist and corporate vice president with 20+ years of experience leading collaborative teams through cutting-edge exploration in the fields of biology, genetics, and genomics. Building technology platforms for early-stage companies from the ground up, I’ve developed innovative techniques across the pharmaceutical, living medicine, commodity chemical, and agricultural industries. I drive stakeholder engagement, designing business strategies that raised $100M+ for multiple companies through investor financing and strategic relationships with Fortune 500 partners. Recognized for my contributions to innovation and mentorship, I’ve received awards and grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Genomic Centers for Infectious Disease, and the Broad Institute. I’m an active international presenter, advisory board member, and editorial board member, and have authored and contributed to 30+ publications. I continuously explore new frontiers blending my expertise in evolution and genomics with an interest in microbes. As VP of Microbiology and Automation at LifeMine Therapeutics, I built scaled platforms for fermentation, strain engineering and next generation sequencing (NGS) to crack the evolutionary code of biosynthetic gene cluster encoded small bioactive molecules. As the head of NGS at Gingko Bioworks, I used state-of-the art methods to drive organism engineering, identifying common themes and design principles to create new organisms for our customers. I continue advancing the goal of innovation in biological engineering and identifying green alternatives that decrease costs, labor, and resource use.Key Accomplishments:• Initiated global conversations on scientific advancements as chair and speaker at 18+ international conferences, and scientific advisory board member at Genomics and SynBio Institutes. • Led collaborative effort between Gingko Bioworks and Fortune 500 partners, delivering technical success to customer’s in-house product. Received patent approval for engineered microbe deployed to production.• Developed powerful platform for comparative functional genomics at Broad Institute, constructing novel, experimental methods to study regulatory frameworks to elucidate principles of regulatory circuits evolution underlying cellular phenotypes.Specializations: microbiology, synthetic biology, CRISPR-based strain engineering, fermentation, automation, functional genomics, molecular genetics, NGS, RNA seq, ChIP seq, gene regulation, experimental evolution, single cell genomics, regulatory circuits, transcriptomics