Veronica Ponce de Leon joins Genohm
Lausanne (Switzerland) and Durham (NC, USA), 03.29.2016: Veronica Ponce de Leon joins Genohm as Vice President of the US branch Genohm Inc. to lead the development of its business in the States.
Veronica Ponce de Leon is a US-Colombian citizen. She received her PhD in Biochemistry at the EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2009 and further specialized in genetics and new genetic engineering technologies. In parallel to her scientific career, she moved on to start her own company, Innovation Therapeutics, with the goal to cure eye diseases through ex-vivo cell therapy. In 2014 she won an InnoPACCT grant and the Isabelle Musy prize for women entrepreneurs for her entrepreneurial endeavors.
Veronica declared on her decision to join Genohm: “Throughout my scientific career I realized the importance of digitizing lab experiments. The typical paper notebooks and excel sheets we used for our daily lab work made it very difficult to keep track of our results and the changes we made in our experiments. I remember literally printing, cutting and pasting images of DNA on a regular basis on those notebooks and our writing was hard to read by our PIs. When I was working close to the technicians at the mice transgenomic platform of the University of Lausanne, handling orders, tracking animals in the animal facilities, experiments, and shipping and reporting, I realized data management and tracking was increasingly becoming a necessity in the Life Science field. It is therefore very important to have a laboratory and data management platform that is running smoothly to support the challenges that scientists have to meet every day. Especially with the emergence of novel fast-result generating technologies in genome sequencing in all scientific and medical fields. Once I discovered SLims, the platform developed by Genohm, I was surprised by the simplicity and flexibility of the platform, not to mention that the interface is pretty cool to look at and interact with. Therefore, I took the challenge to join Genohm to lead its US branch and develop its business there”.
Frederik Decouttere, CEO of Genohm, commented on the decision of Veronica to join Genohm: “We are delighted that Veronica has accepted to join Genohm to lead our US branch Genohm Inc. and the development of our business in the States. We have been looking for a long time for somebody with the right experience, competences and attitude for this challenge. From our first meetings, we have found out that we share the same values and have the same vision on the future of Life Science. We strongly believe that with her scientific background and her entrepreneurial spirit, she is the right person to drive our US growth. We are confident that she we will be able to execute the ambitious plan that we share for the development of Genohm Inc.”
