• Francesco De Rubertis, Ph.D., Investor Director
• Sam Eletr, Ph.D., Chairman of the Board
• Donald Fitzmaurice, Ph.D., Board Observer
• Mir Imran, Board Observer
• Thierry Jean, Ph.D., Outside Director
• Seppo Mäkinen, Investor Director
• Philippe Peltier, Investor Director
• Thomas Willis, Ph.D., Outside Director
• Piero Zucchelli, Ph.D., Founder Director

Francesco De Rubertis, Ph.D., Investor Director
Francesco is the Partner responsible for the firm's life sciences practice as well as Index's networks within the scientific community. His areas of expertise include biotechnology and biopharmaceuticals. He joined Index in 1998 and has served on the board of numerous companies including Genmab, Bioxell, Addex, Parallele, 7TM and Pangenetics. Prior to joining Index, Francesco was involved in post-doctoral research in genetics at the Whitehead Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is also the author of several publications in international scientific journals including Nature. Francesco has a BA in Genetics and Microbiology from the University of Pavia and a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Geneva. He is also a CFA charter holder. «back to top»

Sam Eletr, Ph.D., Chairman of the Board
Sam Eletr currently serves as the interim CEO of Population Genetics, a seed-stage company which he co-founded. He also currently serves as a Director of Faust Pharmaceuticals. In the past, he served as a Director of Third Wave Technologies, a NASDAQ-listed DNA-based diagnostic products company, as a Director of i-STAT, a point-of-care diagnostics company acquired by Abbott Laboratories, and of Solexa, a genomics company, recently acquired by Illumina. From 1992 to 1999, Sam Eletr served as Chairman of the Board of Lynx Therapeutics, a publicly-traded genomics company that was merged with Solexa. In late 1979, he co-founded Applied Biosystems, Inc. (now the Applied Biosystems Group of Applera Corporation), a developer and manufacturer of protein and DNA synthesis and sequencing instruments and reagents, where he served as Chairman and CEO from its founding until 1987. Prior to co-founding Applied Biosystems, he was Manager of an Analytical and Medical Instruments Group at the Hewlett-Packard corporate research laboratories in Palo Alto. Sam Eletr obtained an M.A. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Biophysical Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Prior to his M.A., he studied Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Grenoble, France. «back to top»

Donald Fitzmaurice, Ph.D., Board Observer
Donald Fitzmaurice is a Director of the General Partner of ePlanet Fund II based in the fund’s London office. He is also an Adjunct Professor at University College Dublin in Ireland. With over one hundred and fifty publications and patents to his name, he is established as a leading researcher in the field of nanotechnology. Recently, he was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy and was awarded the Boyle-Higgins medal. He founded a number of start-ups to exploit his research including NTera, an innovative display company, and TopChem, a company developing specialized process technology to the pharmaceutical sector. Currently, Prof. Fitzmaurice is serving his third term as a member of the Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council, the body responsible for advising the Irish national government on scientific developments. In his capacity as a Venture Partner in the ePlanet Fund I, he led the investments in HPL, SpinX and BiancaMed. Donald Fitzmaurice’s interests extend beyond nanotechnology, to the two other key enabling technologies – biotechnology and information and communication technology. He is particularly interested in the convergence of these key enabling technologies and the emergence, as a result, of innovative and disruptive technologies that address the unmet needs of major markets. «back to top»

Mir Imran, Board Observer
Mir Imran acts as a Venture Partner and Senior Advisor for DFJ ePlanet’s Silicon Valley office, where he focuses on global life sciences and technology investments. He is the Founder and President of InCube, Inc., a Silicon Valley incubator for medical and Internet companies. Through this incubator, and prior to its establishment, he founded numerous medical and high technology companies. Mir Imran currently serves as a Director for Surface Genesis, CardioVasc, NovaSonics, JStreetData.com and IntraPace. He was also a Founder and Director of Percusurge, a marketer and developer of circulatory system devices, which was eventually acquired by Medtronic in 2000, as well as of Cardiac Pathways, a developer of catheters that was acquired by Boston Scientific in 2001. After three years of research in bioengineering at the Rutgers Medical School in the United States, Mr. Imran developed numerous medical devices and obtained close to 200 patents in his name. He holds a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Bioengineering from Rutgers University. «back to top»

Thierry Jean, Ph.D., Outside Director
Thierry Jean is Chairman and CEO of Cerep, a French-based drug discovery company, which he founded in 1989. Prior to this, he was a research fellow at the CNRS, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Thierry Jean currently also serves on the Board of Directors of Leem Recherche, an association for the promotion of pharmaceutical research in France. A Doctor of Biochemistry and a Paris University graduate, Thierry Jean completed a three-year post-doctorate programme at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. «back to top»

Seppo Mäkinen, Investor Director
Seppo Mäkinen is a Senior Partner of Bio Fund Management Oy Ltd, and has served as a Board member since founding the company in 1997. In addition to his service on the Board, funding work and investor relations, he is in charge of finding investment targets in the fields of diagnostics and medical technology. Seppo Mäkinen sits on the boards of several of Bio Fund's portfolio companies. Prior to founding Bio Fund, Mr. Mäkinen served for 10 years as Director of the venture capital group at Sitra, and was at that time Director on the board of several diagnostic companies. Before that, he worked in sales and marketing at Millipore Oy, in the Waters Chromatography Division. He has a background in physical and analytical laboratory and research work, and earned a M.Sc. in Physical Chemistry at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland in 1979. «back to top»

Philippe Peltier, Investor Director
Philippe Peltier has nearly 10 years of experience as a venture capital investor with Auriga Partners. Philippe has been an early stage investor in numerous successful healthcare companies including Innate Pharma (EuroNext Paris : IPH), Spine Next (acquired by Abbott) as well as Tigenix (EuroNext : TIG). He currently serves on the Board of Directors of several portfolio companies including Mutabilis (France), Nautilus Biotech (France), Novagali Pharma and SpinX Technologies (USA). Prior to joining Auriga Partners, Philippe Peltier was an equity analyst with HSBC-CCF Securities, covering biotech and biopharma public stocks. He holds a MS in Molecular Biology from the University of Paris VII and a MS in finance from ESSEC (Paris). «back to top»

Thomas Willis, Ph.D., Outside Director
Tom Willis joined Affymetrix following the acquisition of ParAllele BioScience, a company he co-founded with researchers from Stanford University in the US in 2001. Tom served as CEO of ParAllele from its founding until July 2003, when he assumed the role of Chief Scientific Officer and became a member of the company’s Board of Directors. Tom Willis received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University, in 1996, after which he joined the Stanford Genome Technology Center (SGTC) to work of DNA sequence analysis instrumentation. He held several positions at the SGTC including Associate Director in charge of technology development. While at SGTC, Mr. Willis was the co-inventor of the Molecular Inversion Probe technology for high throughput genotyping. «back to top»

Piero Zucchelli, Ph.D., Founder Director
Piero Zucchelli currently oversees the research and product development strategy at SpinX Technologies, which he founded following the invention of the Virtual Laser Valve (VLV) technology. Prior to founding SpinX, he was a physics researcher in the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Rome, Italy, and a staff member in the Experimental Physics division of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, where he spent 11 years pursuing and managing innovative developments in photonics, electronics, detection technologies, software and data analysis. Piero Zucchelli received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of Ferrara, Italy, for work performed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), in the US, and CERN respectively. He has published more than 70 international scientific publications and has been referee for various physics journals. In 2005, he was awarded the international “Caterina Tomassoni and Pietro Felice Chisesi” prize for a revolutionary idea in the field of physics, the beta-beam. «back to top»