• Biobusiness

David Galas has had a mix of experience in business, government, and the academic world.  He helped found Keck Graduate Institute, serving first as Chief Academic Officer and then as Chancellor and Chief Scientific Officer.  Before coming to KGI, he served as president and chief scientific officer of Seattle-based Chiroscience R & D Inc., a company that conducts an integrated, multi-disciplinary research approach to drug discovery and development.  Chiroscience R & D Inc. was formed through the acquisition of Darwin Molecular Corporation, which Dr. Galas co-founded.  He began his tenure at Darwin Molecular Corporation in 1993 as vice president of research and development.

Dr. Galas served as director for Health and Environmental Research at the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Research from 1990 to 1993, where he was responsible for all life sciences research funded by the Department, including the DOE component of the Human Genome Project.  Before his service in Washington, Dr. Galas was a professor of molecular biology at the University of Southern California for twelve years.   

Dr. Galas received his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in physics at the University of California, Berkeley.  His current research interests focus on two areas.  The first is the development of new technologies for the amplification and analysis of nucleic acids.  This work is directed to enabling new methods for high throughput data acquisition needed to analyze a variety of biological systems, and to the development of new diagnostic techniques in medicine.  The second centers on the structures of biological networks and the analysis of their properties.  These studies have focused on the statistical structures of complex biological  networks and the properties and prediction of gene regulatory and protein-protein interaction networks.