Thermo Fisher Scientific is dedicated to improving the human condition through systems, consumables, and services for researchers. For more information please visit their website.

Country: United States

BGC member image
Shantanu Kaushikkar
Principal Investigator

Shantanu is director of product marketing for microarray platform and genotyping, initially for Affymetrix Inc, which is now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific. Shantanu directs several microarray genotyping product lines for precision medicine studies, including the NIHR BioResource projects. He is lead for business development and work package 9 which deals with accreditation for the BGC.

Shantanu was responsible for leading the efforts in ensuring that Axiom genotyping technology was adopted by large precision medicine studies such as Finnish Biobank and Taiwan Precision Medicine. He started his career in in medical imaging and has held various positions at University of Washington in St. Louis (Missouri), Imatron Inc (California) and Affymetrix Inc. Shantanu has been with Affymetrix and Thermo Fisher Scientific for over 20 years in different positions in research and development and in product marketing. He holds a masters in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland (Ohio), an MBA from Santa Clara University, Santa Clara (CA) and a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Bombay University in India.

BGC member image
Claire Bloor
Alternate to PI

Claire is the Thermo Fisher Scientific Genotyping Specialist for Northern Europe. Claire has a BSc in Biochemistry and a PhD in Medicine. She has been involved with the Axiom Blood Typing Array and its development since the initial discussions back in 2015. She provides critical support for the commissioning of the GENETITAN-MC genotyping platforms at several of the blood services participating in the Blood transfusion Genomics Consortium.

During the last 15+ years Claire has worked for a number of Life Science Companies and has over 10 years of experience focusing on Genotyping with Affymetrix and then more recently Thermo Fisher Scientific. Claire holds a BSc in Biochemistry and a PhD in Medicine

BGC member image
Jeremy Gollub

Jeremy is Director of Bioinformatics for Thermo Fisher Scientific microarray business. He has made seminal contributions to the design and validation of the Applied Biosystems Axiom Universal Blood Donor Typing and UK Biobank research arrays which will be validated in the Blood transfusion Genomics Consortium project. He is co-lead for work package 6 which deals with clinical bioinformatics.

BGC member image
Tahar van der Straaten

Tahar started his career in 1993 as research technician at dept of Virology in LUMC, he then changed department to reumatologie and infectious diseases where he did his PhD. In 2004 he started the pharmacogenetic lab at the LUMC hospital pharmacy. In 2018 he left LUMC and took up his role as Field Application Scientist microarrays at Thermofisher.

BGC member image
Melissa Schreiner

Melissa has over 14 years of experience in the biotechnology industry. She pursued an early career focusing on Quality Assurance with various biotech companies including Transgenomic Inc (a cardiac genetic testing company) Protein Sciences (manufacturer of the FluBlok vaccine) and the Jackson Laboratory of Genomic Medicine.

Melissa began her Product Management career over eight years ago at PerkinElmer Inc, where she played a vital role in managing the core service business and commercializing the Education Services portfolio.

For the past two years at Thermo Fisher, she held various Product Management roles including Global Service and Support where she supported CSD, qPCR, and Microarray and is currently a part of the Microarray Human Genotyping Product Management team managing the clinical research portfolio (Pharmacogenomics, Carrier Screening and Blood Typing).