In addition to Brooklyn, Nathan Bays lives at the intersection of biology, automation and data science. After an introduction to high-throughput screening at Exelixis in South San Francisco, Nathan became a founding member of the Automated Lead Optimization group at Merck Research Laboratories in Boston, MA. While at Merck, Nathan pioneered several platforms for drug discovery, including high-throughput flow cytometry screening for immune cell responses in whole blood. To achieve an industry-pioneering scale, Nathan developed innovations across automation, flow cytometry and data analysis. Nathan was then recruited to Eli Lilly in New York City to bring similar innovations to biomarker discovery for large molecules and help establish a small molecule discovery engine in New York City. To support immuno-oncology antibody development at Lilly, Nathan advanced quantitative flow cytometry in clinical assays to better model pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic relationships.
After enjoying a very productive decade in drug discovery, Nathan discovered a new level of scientific passion in biological engineering at Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston. Now the question of how to dramatically scale biology was truly front and center. Nathan thrived in this engineering environment with a true biological foundry dedicated to designing, building and testing new organisms at unprecedented scale and speed. At Ginkgo, Nathan lead a large assay development group to test engineered organism performance while simultaneously building a mammalian foundry to scale synthetic biology in areas like immune cell engineering, bioproduction, and environmentally-responsive ‘living therapeutics.’
TARA now provides a perfect home for Nathan in combining bioengineering with drug discovery. As Senior Director, Assay Technologies, Nathan is working to build and deploy both technical and cultural tools to maximize the expansive talent at Tara as it tackles the bold challenge of scaling the Tara platform to meet external demand and internal vision.
A Native Texan and first-generation college graduate, Nathan studied statistics at Texas A&M University, earned a B.S. in Molecular Biology from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of California, San Diego in the lab of Randy Hampton. While Nathan’s favorite hobby is avoiding hobbies, they can be found at a wide array of live music venues in New York City and beyond.