Chairman and CEO, CAMBIA

Richard is the Chairman and CEO of CAMBIA, and the founder of the BiOS Initiative. He is a native of Santa Cruz, California and lives in Canberra Australia. He received his PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Colorado. Richard is the inventor of some of the most widely used enabling technologies in agricultural biotechnology, and has pioneered the biological open source movement. He has worked in dozens of countries as a United Nations molecular biologist, and troubleshooter for the Rockefeller Foundation. CAMBIA is an unusual organization melding intellectual property informatics and databasing, in-house molecular biotechnology and new cooperative technology development and sharing paradigms.

Until recently, the only award he'd won - and of which he was inordinately proud - was a Music Certificate from the Bank of America while in High School Band (1973). However, events in the last few years have ruined this hitherto unblemished record of obscurity, with honors from the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, Scientific American, Wired magazine, the American Society of Plant Biology, and extensive features in diverse press from The Economist and Wall Street Journal to Science, Nature and Nature Biotechnology, from Newsweek to The New York Times and Red Herring.

He lives with his wife Osmat, a molecular plant pathologist, and 4.5 year old daughter Tanja on their small heritage apple breeding orchard in Googong, New South Wales, and lives for music, woodwork, and procrastinating on repairs to irrigation pipes. His most important scientific and life inspirations include the great jugglers Airjazz, and extraordinary musicians Mike Marshall, Chris Thile, John Fahey and others, as well as scientists such as Richard Feynman and Jane Goodall.