President and Founder: Ofelia Utset, M.D., M.B.A.  

Dr. Utset is President of Deluge Biotechnologies. She was previously the Medical Director of Biomarker Development at OPKO Pharmaceutical’s Jupiter campus. Prior to moving to Jupiter in 2009, she was on the Internal Medicine faculty at UT Southwestern Medical School and also served as Associate Program Director of the Internal Medicine Training Program at St. Paul Medical Center in Dallas. In addition to academic medicine, her professional experience includes over 20 years of private practice in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. Ofelia holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Miami and earned her medical degree from the University of California San Francisco. She completed her Internal Medicine Residency and a Pulmonary/Critical Care Fellowship at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio. She is a graduate  of the Executive MBA program at Florida Atlantic University.

 

Scientific Advisory Board Chair and Founder:   Professor Thomas Kodadek, PhD.

Prof. Kodadek is a leader in the field of chemical biology, which involves the development of chemical tools to monitor and manipulate important processes in biology and medicine.  His laboratory has also made important contributions to our understanding of how genes are rearranged and expressed.  He has received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for “exceptionally creative research”, the Makeneni Award from the American Peptide Society and the Arthur C. Cope Senior Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society.  He was elected to the National Academy of Inventors in 2017.  Prof. Kodadek was the founding Editor of Molecular Biosystems, the chemical biology journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK and is a member of several editorial boards. He sits on the Scientific Advisory Boards of Opko Pharmaceuticals and Ra Pharmaceuticals, as well as Deluge. He is currently Professor of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute.

 

Senior Staff Scientist: Eric Koesema, Ph.D.

Dr. Koesema has extensive experience as a molecular biologist and protein biochemist, acquired from over 10 years working in the biotech industry. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Central Florida and completed his doctoral work at The Scripps Research Institute. His skills include expertise in chemical biology, in vitro transcriptomics, and cell signaling mechanisms.

 

Senior Staff Scientist: Nick Paciaroni, Ph.D.

Dr. Paciaroni is an expert in DNA-encoded library (DEL) synthesis and design, with a diverse background in synthetic organic and medicinal chemistry. He received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Clemson University and earned his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences with a concentration in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Florida. After a post-doctoral fellowship in Prof. Kodadek’s lab at The Scripps Research Institute, he joined the Deluge team where he focuses on developing new DNA-compatible chemistries and designing custom DELs.