Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner

Tom has been an entrepreneur in the biotech industry for the past decade.

After receiving his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 1996, he joined the Stanford Genome Technology Center (SGTC) to work on DNA sequence analysis technologies.

He held several positions at the SGTC including Associate Director in charge of technology development. While at SGTC, Dr. Willis was the co-inventor of the Molecular Inversion Probe technology for high throughput genotyping. In 2001, he co-founded ParAllele BioScience to develop and commercialize this technology.

As its founding CEO, he led ParAllele through two rounds of VC financing and grew the company to over 80 employees. In 2005 ParAllele was acquired by Affymetrix at which time Tom served in several management positions at Affymetrix. He left in 2007 to pursue new startup opportunities.

In addition to his role as CEO of Sequenta, Tom serves on the boards of SpinX Technologies and Boreal Genomics.