Interim Directorate

Michael Birt, PhD, is director of the Center for Sustainable Health at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute (www.biodesign.asu.edu) and Professor in the W. P. Carey School of Business. He is also executive director of the Pacific Health Summit as well as Affiliate Investigator at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Prior to his current position, Birt was Senior Vice President at The National Bureau of Asian Research (www.nbr.org) and the founding director of NBR's Center for Health and Aging. He has extensive experience in the private sector and the academic world as well as non-profits. In his academic career, Birt was an assistant professor at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and Wellesley College. He has served as a visiting professor at Keio University under a faculty grant from the Japan Foundation and as a nominated recipient of a Ministry of Education faculty appointment at Hitotsubashi University. He received his PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University and is fluent in spoken and written Japanese. He also completed the Certificate Program in Gerontology at the University of Washington.

Birt's private sector experience includes the successful launch, development and stock sale of a leading U.S.-Asia biomedical business development company, a U.S.-registered corporation with offices in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. He also founded Infoplan Consulting, a division of McCann-Erickson Hakuhodo, a leading advertising and market research firm located in Tokyo. He has consulted for many of the world's leading healthcare, medical technology, and consumer product companies. He is co-author of Negotiating the Gray Maze: The Business of Medicine in Japan (1997) and has written articles for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, as well as numerous industry consulting reports. He recently authored "Chronic Neglect: Meet the Developing World's New Health Emergency—the Rich World's Diseases" in Foreign Policy (September/October 2006).

Birt also personally funded and led the Pacific Health Alliance, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation, which focused on the development of educational exchange and collaboration programs between U.S. and Japanese healthcare delivery systems in the field of hospital infection control.

Birt joined NBR in 2003 to launch the Center for Health and Aging. In 2004, he became the founding executive director of the Pacific Health Summit and worked closely with the Summit's founding co-chairs, George F. Russell, Jr. and William H. Gates, Sr., and current chair, Dr. Lee Hartwell, to make the Summit a premier event on the global health calendar. The Pacific Health Summit welcomes 250 top leaders from science, industry, and policy to Seattle each June to discuss how to realize the dream of a healthier future through the effective utilization of scientific advances and industrial innovation combined with appropriate policies for prevention, early detection, and early treatment of disease. The Summit is co-presented by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and NBR, which serves as the Summit Secretariat. his PhD in electrical engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984.

Dr. Joshua LaBaer is one of the nation’s foremost investigators in the rapidly expanding field of personalized medicine. Formerly director of the Harvard Institute of Proteomics (HIP), he was recruited to ASU’s Biodesign Institute as the first Piper Chair in Personalized Medicine.

Dr. LaBaer’s efforts involve leveraging the Center’s formidable resources for the discovery and validation of biomarkers—unique molecular fingerprints of disease—which can provide early warning for those at risk of major illnesses, including cancer and diabetes. This work is carried out in conjunction with the Partnership for Personalized Medicine, a multi-institution effort that includes the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Phoenix and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute in Seattle.

Dr. LaBaer completed his internship and residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a clinical fellowship in Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, both in Boston. He is a board certified physician in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology and was an Instructor and Clinical Fellow in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has contributed more than 60 original research publications, reviews and chapters. Dr. LaBaer is an associate editor of the Journal of Proteome Research, Analytical Biochemistry, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards for the Proteome Society, Promega Corporation, Lumera-Plexera Corporation, Barnett Institute, and a founding member of the Human Proteome Organization.

 

Neal Woodbury, PhD, is co-director of the Center for Innovations in Medicine. Woodbury leads a team that seeks to develop molecular devices and nanoscale hybrid electronics for use in biomedicine, environmental remediation and monitoring, threat detection and agriculture. His research into the structure/function relationships in photosynthesis led him to realize the awesome potential of harnessing the energy of light to direct chemical reactions.

Looking at the diversity of nature, Woodbury clearly sees that there must be a molecular formula in the form of a heteropolymer sequence that has almost any desired function or property - a molecular cure for disease, a sensor for a toxin, and a complex molecular matrix for computing or display. One must simply use the right basis set of chemical monomers and search the sequence space until an answer is found. His efforts have been directed at building synthetic systems that can do this: speed up natural evolution.

Woodbury is an advocate of interdisciplinary science as a means of providing researchers greater vision in addressing real-world problems. Woodbury's body of published work includes more than 75 published articles and studies. He had been a member of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biophysics Panel for the past year; a current member of the NSF IGERT Panel; and an associate editor of Photochemistry and Photobiology. He has served as the Director of the Photosynthesis Center at ASU and is an active member of the American Chemical Society, Biophysical Society and American Photobiology Society.

Woodbury received his B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of California at Davis and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington.

Deputy Director

 

Lee Cheatham, PhD, is the deputy director of the Biodesign Institute.  In addition he serves as the general manager of the Biodesign Impact Accelerator, a new initiative focused on dramatically streamlining and improving the commercial translation of scientific innovations and discoveries generated by the institute.

In his role as deputy director, Cheatham oversees all day-to-day aspects of the Institute's strategy, business growth and administrative functions. In his role as general manager of the Biodesign Impact Accelerator, he will be responsible for program development and oversight of all operations.

His professional career spans more than three decades. From 1998-2009, Cheatham served as executive director of the highly successful Washington Technology Center (WTC). WTC is a leading technology-based economic development organization. It supports and performs research that leads to commercialized innovation. Under Cheatham's leadership, WTC expanded access to capital for Washington's small growing companies through the creation of the WTC Angel Network and the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) assistance program. WTC focused on connecting companies to industry resources with initiatives such as the annual "Washington's Innovation Summit" and WTC's federally funded nanotechnology research program.

Prior to his position at WTC, Cheatham served in diverse roles that include: founding a startup company providing software, technology, training and consulting to the real estate sector; serving as vice president of product engineering for the largest library technology company; leading a large public/private consortium to renew the US textile industry; and, working in a variety of research, engineering and management roles at one of Department of Energy's multiprogram national laboratories. Cheatham has been a frequent speaker on technology, policy and economic development issues. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984.