Lorenzo Berti

Lorenzo brings his deep experience, strong expertise and passion for scientific discovery and engineering innovation to their leadership team at Pleno. His love of taking on challenges and stewarding big ideas has endured from his early career in academics and research through his work at Element Biosciences leading a team that pushed the boundaries of surfaces, chemistries and hardware for DNA sequencing. Prior to Element, Lorenzo spent many years at Illumina working with world-leading research and product development teams, contributing many innovative technologies that deeply impacted the performance of today’s next generation sequencing (NGS) systems and consumables. Particularly, he was part of the HiSeqX chemistry development team that made the $1,000 genome a reality. He has successfully steered multiple advanced biotechnology products from concept to launch. While living in Italy, Lorenzo received a Laurea in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry, both from the University of Bologna. He was also appointed as a tenured researcher for the National Research Council where he worked on advanced nano biomolecular systems. In the United States, he furthered his academic career as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley working on new high-throughput DNA sequencing chemistries for the DOE Human Genome Project. As an adjunct faculty at both the Department of Oncology and Department of Molecular Medicine at UC Davis, he started, and successfully secured funding for, a research program to apply nanotechnologies to the development of new therapies for cancer treatment. Lorenzo has published 26 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters and has been awarded 9 patents. He was recipient of a Susan G. Komen for the Cure research grant for his early work on nanoparticles for targeted drug delivery and is recipient of the UC Davis Academic Federation Innovative Development Award.