Michael W. Deem

Michael Deem is an experienced senior professional who has operated in senior management, Board, and advisor capacities with companies ranging from start-up, to rapid growth, to large multi-national companies. Deem is currently a General Partner at SmartHealth Catalyzer and CEO of a startup. Deem was the director of Drug Design at CuraGen Corporation ($100M exit). He was the 3rd person and performed all the original engineering calculations at Ion Torrent Systems ($2.3B exit). His intellectual bandwidth has benefited companies from a wide cross section of industries that include Life Sciences, Artificial Intelligence, Genomics, Data Science, Biotechnology, Energy, and Cancer Research. From 2021-2022 Deem was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Khosla Ventures. Michael Deem was previously the chair of Bioengineering at Rice University. He was the John W. Cox Professor of Bioengineering and Physics & Astronomy at Rice University from 2002-2020. He was the founding director of the Graduate Program in Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology at Rice University, the first PhD program in the US with 'Synthetic Biology' in the degree name. He was an assistant and associate professor at UCLA from 1996-2002. He received his BS from the California Institute of Technolgy in 1991, his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1994, and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University from 1995-1996.