Dr. John D. Burczak

John received his Ph.D degree in biochemistry from Michigan State University in 1984, working with Emeritus professor Chuck Sweeley, and spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher, working with James Rothman at the Stanford University Medical Center. He spent eight years at Abbott Laboratories, bringing four FDA approved diagnostic tests to the market. One of these was the first FDA approved diagnostic to screen the U.S. blood supply for HTLV-I/II. He spent five years at SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals where he launched the Molecular Diagnostics Department, which developed a menu of diagnostic tests for genetic diseases for SmithKline Beecham Clinical Laboratories. SmithKline Beecham Clinical Laboratories became the largest genetic testing center in the United States. Later he was part of the leadership team which founded Di-aDexus, a biotechnology joint venture SmithKline Beecham and Incyte Pharmaceuticals.

John joined Amersham, Ltd. in 1999. His R&D organization developed the instruments and reagents for the biosciences research market. One-third of the Human Genome was se-quenced using instruments and reagents de-veloped by his Amersham R&D team. In 2004, GE Healthcare acquired Amersham, and John served as Global Head of Product Devel-opment for the GE Healthcare-Life Sciences business. While at GE Healthcare, Life Scienc-es launched approximately 20 new products per year. In 2008, he moved to the GE Global Research Center as Chief Scientist leading a portfolio of projects around molecular imaging.