Our Team

Management

 

Philip Benfey, PhD
Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer
Philip is a Distinguished Professor and former Chair of the Biology Department at Duke University (Durham, NC) and Director of Duke’s Center for Systems Biology in the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. Philip has more than 25 years of experience in genomics and plant biology and is one of the key thought leaders in these areas. His research has led to discoveries and new methods that provide unique capabilities to understand plant development. Before coming to Duke, Philip was the founding director of the Center for Comparative Functional Genomics at New York University (New York, NY). He has eight patents issued in his name, in addition to having authored hundreds of papers in the field. In 2004, Philip was named a Fellow of the Association of Arts and Sciences. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Developmental Cell, Developmental Biology, BMC Plant Biology, and Differentiation. He received his PhD in cell and developmental biology from Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) and did postdoctoral research at Rockefeller University (New York, NY).

Douglas Eisner, JD, MBA
Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer
Doug is an attorney and has been involved in a number of technology ventures. He worked as a consultant providing advice in marketing and business strategy to local technology startups Zycare and Bruce Technologies through the Small Business and Technology Development Center (all Chapel Hill, NC). He began his career as a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (New York, NY) and subsequently practiced civil litigation in New York City where he gained expertise in the areas of contracts, corporate law, and intellectual property. He was also Vice President and General Counsel at an Internet startup RiskContinuum (New York, NY). Doug received his BA from Brown University (Providence, RI), JD from Boston University (Boston, MA), and MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University (Durham, NC).

Tedd Elich, PhD
Vice President & Director of Research
Tedd has over 20 years experience in plant biotechnology research. Before joining GrassRoots he was Director of Biochemistry at Cropsolution (Morrisville, NC), a biotechnology company that focused on small molecule discovery for the agrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. Additionally, Tedd has led agronomic trait discovery efforts at the Fortune 500 agricultural company Monsanto (St. Louis, MO) and biotechnology startup Akkadix (La Jolla, CA). Tedd received his BS degree from the University of Wisconsin (Madison, WI), his PhD from the University of California (Davis, CA), and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute (La Jolla, CA).

Les Klimczak, PhD
Vice President, Computing and Enabling Technologies
After 14 years of research in microbial and plant biochemistry, Les was involved for the last 12 years in leading computational activities at biotechnology and biomedical research organizations with particular focus on large-scale and high-throughput technologies in genomics and drug discovery. His interests are centered on experimental design, process automation, and development of databases and data analysis pipelines. Les came to GrassRoots from the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (Madison, WI), a DOE-sponsored research consortium, where he was the founding Chief Informatics Officer. Previously, he was a consultant in research informatics and biostatistics, in particular on several projects at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Bethesda, MD), and led chemo- and bioinformatics programs at biotechnology startups Psychiatric Genomics (Gaithersburg, MD) and Akkadix (La Jolla, CA). He has a doctorate in microbial biochemistry from the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, and did postdoctoral research at the Plant Science Institute, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA).
 

Scientific Advisory Board

 

Steve Briggs, PhD
Professor, UC San Diego, Member National Academy of Sciences

Ben Scheres, PhD
Professor, University of Utrecht, Winner Spinoza prize

Richard Twigg
Graduate student, Duke University, Benfey Lab

Detlef Weigel, PhD
Director, Max-Planck-Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany, Member National Academy of Sciences

Sue Wessler, PhD
Regents Professor, University of Georgia, Member National Academy of Sciences

Lothar Willmtzer, PhD
Director, Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Golm Germany

Rick Young, PhD
Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Member Whitehead Institute