Biomatters Board of Directors
Greg Casagrande — Chairman
Greg promotes entrepreneurialism. He is an investor and a mentor to several young NZ based hi-tech companies. In addition to chairing Biomatters, he is a founding board member of the Ice Angels, a network of angel investors, Chairman of English-To-Go, an online provider of English language education, and Director of Calcium, a provider of digital promotional tools.
Greg is the founder South Pacific Business Development Foundation of Samoa (SPBD), a charitable microfinance organization that provides over 9,000 poor families with meaningful opportunity for self-employment. He is a frequent speaker at microfinance events globally, serves as a Director for PlaNet Finance, a leading, Paris based, microfinance support network, Founding Director of Microfinance Pasifika and served on the UN’s Board of Patrons for its International Year of Microcredit – 2005.
Through 1998, Greg recorded significant achievement with Ford Motor Company, Mazda Motor Company and Coopers and Lybrand in Financial Management, Product Development, Manufacturing and Sales and Marketing positions. He lead teams in the US, Europe and Japan and was honored to be the youngest-ever Buchou (Division General Manager) of any major Japanese corporation.
Greg has an MBA in Finance and Marketing from Kellogg, an MS in Accounting from NYU Stern and a BA in Economics from Colgate University. He is also a CPA.
Dr Alexei Drummond — Director
A co-founder of Biomatters and the “father” of Geneious, Alexei has published over 30 scientific articles in international peer-reviewed journals including Science and Nature and is an expert on coalescent-based population genetics and bioinformatics software development.
For the past three years Alexei has been based at the University of Oxford, only recently returning to New Zealand to take up an academic position within the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland and also to work on Geneious. He has helped attract other top international bioinformaticians to contribute to Geneious, and will continue to guide its development through commercialization.
Alexei was the winner of the University of Auckland’s Science PhD of the year in 2002 and is also a previous winner of the New Zealand programming competition.
In 2007, he was the winner of the Royal Hamilton Memorial Prize for Contributions to Computational Biology.
Visit Alexei's academic homepage.
Aki von Roy — Non-Executive Director
Aki has spent over 30 years in big pharma, notably withSchering AG, Squibb and Bristol-Myers Squibb, in various roles such as Managing Director, Executive Vice President, President in the UK, NZ, Sweden, USA, Germany and Eastern Europe.
More recently, Aki has spent over 10 years in the biotech industry, involved in 15 start up/merger ventures as a consultant and/or investor. Living in NZ since 2000, Aki considers himself as a bio-entrepreneur , and has been the founder CEO of Proacta and CoDa Therapeutics,
Chairman of publicly traded Phylogica (AUS), Genesis (NZ), plus White Biotech (AUS) and Phytomedics (USA). Aki is currently an active Board member of Corra life sciences (USA), Biomatters (NZ) and publicly traded Wool Equities and it’s subsidiary Orico Ltd (NZ.)
Aki is also a member of the Investment Committee of BioPacificVentures (NZ$100 million fund) and an active partner in INVENTAGES (international venture capital group with US$1.8 billion under administration, operating out of Geneva, Nassau and Auckland,) investment committee member of Cure Kids (NZ) and an Advisor to the New Zealand Foundation of Research, Science and Technology (FRST) and NZ BIO.
Gray Treadwell — Non-Executive Director
Gray co-founded Task Technology Ltd, a profitable systems supplier in New Zealand, which grew to a staff of 40 by taking the majority of the market for oil company point of sale systems from the incumbent supplier, as well as delivering overseas installations, until the sale of the business in 1991.
Gray was a shareholder and director of Binary Research Ltd with its founder Murray Haszard, as it grew from a few people in New Zealand to a worldwide success story. Gray was responsible for achieving the successful sale of the business of Binary Research (Ghost software) to Symantec in 1998.
Gray has been directly involved in 3 other successful startups.