Emily Leproust is CEO, President, and Director of Twist Bioscience, a biotechnology startup located in San Francisco, California.

She founded Twist Bioscience with Bill Peck and Bill Banyai in 2013.

The company has developed a semiconductor-based technology that allows for DNA to be synthesized on a 10,000-well silicon chip ^[7].

This innovation allows for DNA do be designed faster and cheaper than traditional oligo synthesis technologies that are either based on glass or plastic platforms.

Twist has raised a total of $166 million to-date, including Class D funding round of $61 million in January 2016 ^[2].

Leproust was previously Director Applications and Chemistry R&D, Genomics Division at Agilent Technologies.

While at Agilent, she pioneered the SureSelect product line that targeted regions within the genome to study inheritable DNA linked to disease using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) ^[3].

She also led a business development and research team to develop Agilent’s Oligo Library Synthesis based on microarray DNA printing.

In April 2016, Leproust and Twist Bioscience secured a deal with Microsoft to store digital data in synthetic DNA ^[1].

This partnership, which also included the University of Washington, completed the proof-of-concept project of storing 202 megabytes of data encoding the rock band OK Go's music video for "This Too Shall Pass", copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in different languages, the top 100 books from Project Gutenberg, and the Crop Trust seed database ^{[4] [4]}.

Education

Leproust earned her M.Sc. in Industrial Chemistry from the Lyon School of Industrial Chemistry in France in 1995.

She then went on to receive her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry with an emphasis in Nucleic Acids Chemistry from the University of Houston in 2001.

She has over 30 scientific publications and holds over 20 patents ^[5].

Achievements

*Foreign Policy Magazine * named Emily Leproust one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015 ^[8].

She attended Women in Tech Festival 2016 as a speaker on the Futurama panel held at, in Mountain View, CA on March 30th, 2016 ^[6].

*Fast Company * magazine named Leproust one of the Most Creative People in Business in 2015 ^[0].

Legal

In February 2016, her former employer Agilent Technologies filed a lawsuit against Leproust over trade secret disputes based on oligonucleotide synthesis technology ^[9].