Management

Management Team

Joel Jessee is the CEO and CSO of Molecular Transfer, Inc. Joel has been in product development for life science reagents for over thirty years. Prior to founding MTI, Joel was Vice President of R&D at Life Technologies/Invitrogen and at Atto Biosciences. He spent twenty years at LTI where he developed and introduced some of the most well recognized products for transformation, transfection and gene expression. Joel received a Master’s degree in biology from Virginia Tech and is an inventor or co-inventor on numerous patents.

Jonathan M. Auerbach, Ph.D. Jonathan is CTO and Founder of GlobalStem which he established in 2006. Prior to this he worked for ATCC where he established a new stem cell program. He was a post-doctoral fellow at NIH, NINDS Laboratory of Molecular Biology from 1997-2001. He received his BS degree from Northwestern University in neurobiology, a M.Sc. in Neurobiochemistry from Tel Aviv University and a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Jonathan has over 20 scientific papers and book chapters in stem cell and neuroscience research.

Daniel Komarek is the COO of Molecular Transfer, Inc (MTI). Dan has over twenty years of business, technical and operational experience with start-up biotech, life science companies and the government. Prior to working at MTI, he consulted with biotech companies in the US and Europe to help develop and commercialize proprietary technologies. Prior to starting his own consulting business, Dan spent six years at BD Biosciences (formally Atto Biosciences) as the Director of Business Development of the BioImaging Division. There he focused on product development of instrumentation and software for the high content screening market. Prior to joining BD, Dan was Senior Manager of the Gene Discovery Services program at Life Technologies/Invitrogen where he oversaw the development and management of a contract service program. He has also held management and technical positions at Bioreliance, Oncologix and USDA-ARS. Dan holds a Biochemistry degree from the University of Maryland.

Gulilat Gebeyehu, Ph.D. is the Executive Vice President and Director of R&D at Molecular Transfer, Inc. Prior to joining MTI in the summer of 2002, Gulilat was Director of Research at Life Technologies/Invitrogen where he worked for 20 years. While at Life Technologies, he set up an organic chemistry laboratory and led a group of chemists that developed non-radioactive nucleic acid detection products including, the Ultrapure™ and transfection product lines. The chemistry group under Gulilat's direction was responsible for developing reagents and techniques for fast and high throughput oligonucleotide synthesis. He was also the lead chemist of a team of scientists that developed transfection reagents such as Lipofectin™ and the Lipofectamine™ family of products. Gulilat received his training at Brandeis University (BA) and New York University (PhD in Organic Chemistry), and was a visiting fellow at the National Cancer Institute 1981-1983.