Scienega's Founder and Principal is Christian Burks.

His work through Scienega and previous leadership roles have spanned startup and growth of early-stage biotech companies, not-for-profit funding, basic and applied research in academic contexts as well as oversight of large-scale genomics initiatives:

+ Entrepreneurial as well as advisory, oversight and consulting experience in biotech ...

Scienega was founded by Christian Burks in 2001 to provide consulting and advisory services to the life sciences sector.

Dr. Burks has co-authored numerous publications and served on national and international advisory, oversight, editorial, and review boards for a number of companies and other institutions in North America, UK and Europe. Recent examples include: AduroSys (Sunnyvale; Advisory Board), Juno Therapeutics (Seattle; Consultant), Resolution Bioscience (Bellevue; Advisory Board), Pregenen (Seattle; Board of Directors & Acting CEO), Sterisense (Toronto; Co-founder & Board of Directors), Genome Alberta (Calgary; Ten Year Review Panel), Biodiversity Institute of Ontario (Guelph; Board of Directors), and Cure First (Seattle; Advisory Board).

+ Cultivated an $800M portfolio of genomics projects in a not-for-profit knowledge economy engine ...

Dr. Burks was most recently President, CEO and a member of the Board of Directors for the Ontario Genomics Institute, a stand-alone not for profit company in Toronto that raised funds from federal, provincial, private and commercial sources to be deployed for genomics and proteomics research and development in Ontario.  During his tenure, OGI developed a portfolio of such projects with total budgets of $800M, and also developed novel and productive programs supporting its mandate to increase social and economic benefits of genomics research and public awareness of potential benefits as well as challenging issues arising from genomics research. Examples include: an investment fund to seed commercialization; a fund to seed delivery of promising leading-edge technologies as platform technology services; an annual prize for secondary school science teachers; research capacity-building workshops; a fund to catalyze increased open access publication practices; a prize for research publications focused on social and economic benefits; and a number of events pairing science and scientists with leading creative artists as well as the entertainment industry to explore new approaches to communicating about science in the context of genomics.

+ Executive management transforming companies from platform technology to drug discovery ...

Previously, Dr. Burks was Chief Scientific Officer with Affinium Pharmaceuticals in Toronto.  He oversaw research in a company which began with a focus on target discovery and characterization using functional and structural proteomics, and which then integrated forward into pre-clinical drug discovery based on a structure-guided drug discovery paradigm.  During his tenure, Affinium entered into and exceeded milestones on a major target characterization and prioritization deal with Pfizer.  He and his colleagues also created a substantial viral proteomics program with funding from Genome Canada through the Ontario Genomics Institute.

Prior to joining Affinium, Dr. Burks was Vice President and Chief Informatics Officer with Exelixis in South San Francisco.  He established the Informatics Department and built it into a 40 person, multi-group department spread across four sites in the U.S.A. and Germany. The Informatics Department included bioinformatics and cheminformatics in the context of target and drug discovery for pharmaceutical, agricultural biology, and plant biotechnology applications. He also contributed as a member of the senior management team as the company grew from 25 to over 500 employees and through three corporate acquisitions and an IPO. 

+ Established GenBank as the premiere global genomics resource for DNA sequences ...

Prior to joining Exelixis, Dr. Burks was in the Theoretical Biology & Biophysics Group (T-10) at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where as a post-doctoral fellow he was part of the team that created the NIH-funded global DNA sequence database resource, GenBank.  He went on to serve as Principal Investigator for GenBank, Group Leader for T-10 (with a staff of 65 computational and mathematical biologists), and laboratory-wide Program Leader for Computational Biology. His research group also created the first community resource digital listing of molecular biology database resources (LiMB), and a widely-used software tool for accurately scanning newly-sequence genomes for tRNA genes.

+ Educated at St. John's College and Yale University ...

He received his B.A. in the Great Books Program from St. John's College (Santa Fe) and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University.