LEADERSHIP - Management Team
Richard Hamilton
President and Chief Executive Officer
Mr. Richard Hamilton has been the chief executive and a board member of Ceres since 2002. The prior four years he served as the company’s Chief Financial Officer. In addition to his leadership role at Ceres, he currently sits on the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Biomass R&D Technical Advisory Committee, the Keck Graduate Institute Advisory Council and is a founding member of the Council for Sustainable Biomass Production. He has also been active in the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), where he has served as Vice Chairman of the organization and has chaired its Food and Agriculture Governing Board, where continues to serve as a governing board member. Mr. Hamilton frequently speaks before policymakers, business leaders and scientific organizations regarding biotechnology, biofuels and energy crops. He has addressed the House Agriculture Committee, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the National Academy of Sciences, among others. Earlier in his career, Mr. Hamilton was a principal at Oxford Bioscience Partners, one of the leading investors in the genomics field and a founder of Ceres. From 1990 to 1991 he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School. Mr. Hamilton holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Vanderbilt University.
Richard Flavell, FRS, CBE
Chief Scientific Officer
Dick Flavell joined Ceres in 1998. From 1987 to 1998, he was the Director of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England, a premier plant and microbial research institute. He has published over 200 scientific articles, lectured widely and contributed significantly to the development of modern biotechnology in agriculture. His research group in the United Kingdom was among the very first worldwide to successfully clone plant DNA, isolate and sequence plant genes, and produce transgenic plants. Dr. Flavell is an expert in cereal plant genomics, having produced the first molecular maps of plant chromosomes to reveal the constituent sequences. He has been a leader in European plant biotechnology, initiating and guiding a pan-European organization to manage large EU plant biotechnology research programs more effectively. In 1999, Dr. Flavell was named a Commander of the British Empire for his contributions to plant and microbial sciences. Dr. Flavell received his Ph.D. from the University of East Anglia and is a Fellow of EMBO and of The Royal Society of London. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Paul M. Kuc
Chief Financial Officer
Paul Kuc joined Ceres in 2008 as Chief Financial Officer, following a 12-year career with Monsanto, where he held various regional and global finance positions, including posts in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the United States. At Monsanto, among other responsibilities, he developed and implemented international costing and financial systems for the seed and agricultural biotechnology company. Mr. Kuc began his career at pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. He holds a Master’s of Science degree in Economics from the University of Lodz, Poland and an MBA from the Ivey Business School, University of Western Ontario, Canada.
Wilfriede van Assche
Senior Vice President & General Counsel; Secretary
Ms. van Assche joined Ceres in 2000. She has more than 20 years of legal experience, primarily in the plant biotechnology industry. Until 2000, Ms. van Assche was the General Counsel of the plant biotechnology and seed divisions of Aventis, a leading life sciences company. Previously , she was the General Counsel at Plant Genetic Systems N.V. Ms. van Assche holds law degrees from the University of Leuven and the College of Europe and is a member of the State Bar of California.
Kenneth Feldmann
Vice President of Research and Development
Ken Feldmann joined Ceres in 1997 as its first Research Manager. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of Plant Sciences at The University of Arizona. Prior to that he held research positions at DuPont and Sandoz Crop Protection, where he pioneered the field of forward and reverse genetics in plants. This research earned him the Martin Gibbs Medal from the American Society of Plant Biologists in 2001. Dr. Feldmann has published more than 80 scientific articles on the analysis of plant developmental and metabolic pathways. He holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Ohio State University.
Peter Mascia
Vice President of Product Development
Peter Mascia joined Ceres in 1999 as Director of Product Development. Before joining Ceres, he was the Worldwide Biotechnology Manager at Cargill, where he was responsible for licensing and commercialization of biotech traits such as Bt corn. He was also involved in Cargill's corporate biotechnology and genomics strategy and biotech portfolio analysis. Dr. Mascia was also a senior examiner for Cargill's Chairman's Quality Award. He conducted postdoctoral research in plant molecular biology at the University of Minnesota and holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Iowa State University.
Anna Rath
Vice President of Commercial Development
Anna Rath has been the Vice President of Commercial Development at Ceres since 2007, having served as the company’s business development director since 2004. In her current role, she oversees strategic partnerships and product commercialization activities for the California-based seed and traits developer. A frequent speaker on the importance of specialized energy crops and feedstock supply, Ms. Rath has provided expert testimony to the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Energy, Science and Technology, which oversees legislation involving renewable energy production. Prior to joining Ceres, she was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, specializing in pharmaceuticals, telecom and high-tech. She holds a JD from Yale Law School and an MS in Human Genetics from the University of Michigan.
Michael Stephenson
Vice President of Operations
Michael Stephenson joined Ceres in 2008 as vice president of operations. Prior to joining the company, Stephenson was general manager for one of the brands of AgReliant Genetics, the fourth largest field seed company in the United States. He also served as the president of Great Lakes Hybrids prior to its merger into AgReliant. In addition to his commercial experience, he has chaired the American Seed Trade Association’s corn and sorghum division, and served as President of the Soybean Research Foundation, among others.
Steven Bobzin
Director of Technology Planning, Protection and Acquisition
Prior to joining Ceres in April of 2003, Steve Bobzin built natural products discovery programs for Galileo Pharmaceuticals and Monsanto's Consumer Health and Nutrition sector. There, Dr. Bobzin helped pioneer the application of hybrid analytical technologies, such as LC-MS and LC-NMR, to the identification of natural products from plants and other natural sources. Prior to these endeavors, he spent six years as part of the high-throughput screening team in the pharmaceutical discovery programs of G.D. Searle and Monsanto. Dr. Bobzin holds a Ph.D. in Natural Products Chemistry from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy.
John Bouck
Director of Information Technology
John Bouck joined the company in 2006. Previously, he was the Director of Informatics at UCB, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Belgium. Earlier in his career he was an Assistant Professor and Director of Bioinformatics at Baylor College of Medicine, where he contributed to the sequencing and publication of the human genome. Dr. Bouck holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Genetics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Roger Pennell
Director of Trait Development
Roger Pennell holds a Ph.D. from University College London. He performed post-doctoral research at the John Innes Institute and Wageningen Agricultural University, and in 1990 was the recipient of a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which he used at University College London and, from 1995, at the Salk Institute. For all of this time, Dr. Pennell studied cellular and molecular aspects of plant growth, development and disease resistance, and has published more than 40 scientific papers on these subjects. Dr. Pennell joined Ceres in 1998 as a Manager of Trait Development, and became a Director in 2002. Dr. Pennell is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of California at Los Angeles and a frequent reviewer for the scientific press.
Steven Thomas
Director of Bioproducts
Prior to joining Ceres in 2005, Steve Thomas served as a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the U.S. Dept. of Energy. At NREL, he worked for the previous 13 years in the DOE-funded Biomass Program to develop an economically viable process for conversion of lignocellulosic biomass feedstock materials to produce useful renewable fuels and chemicals. His work at NREL spanned several areas, including cellulose enzymology, cellulose genes and heterologous production systems, biomass compositional diversity and its effect on conversion process economics, and biomass conversion systems. Dr. Thomas holds a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of California at Los Angeles. He did his postdoctoral studies in plant lipid biochemistry in relation to chilling tolerance at The Plant Cell Research Institute and ran PCRI’s molecular biology service labs as a staff scientist. Dr. Thomas is also an Affiliate Faculty member of the Biology Department at Colorado State University.