Paul Bernasconi Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Paul Bernasconi is an accomplished science leader with more than 25 years of R&D leadership experience across a wide range of biotech and agtech companies. He is the owner of Bernasconi Consulting, Inc, guiding agribusiness organizations toward their growth aspirations, from short-term, high-risk projects to multi-year, multimillion-dollar programs. He is Chief Scientific Officer at Oerth Bio, accelerating R&D as it pioneers first-in-the-world protein degrader science for ag, and he is fractional COO of SOLASTA Bio, a spin-out of the University of Glasgow.
Dr. Bernasconi is the former Global Function Head of Molecular Biology at BASF Biosciences in Research Triangle Park, where he led an international department of 120 scientists responsible for all molecular biology and gene editing activities. He is also former director of BASF Crop Protection, leading insecticide biology and molecular biology. In this role he was part of the team that developed Versys, an insecticide with a novel mode of action introduced to the market in 2018. He is former Director of Biochemistry at Syngenta, responsible for high throughput screening programs in herbicide, insecticide and fungicide discovery. While at Syngenta, he contributed to the commercialization of two herbicides and initiated the research on Dicamba tolerant soybean. Dr. Bernasconi also served as Director of Operations at start-up Amphora Pharmaceuticals.
He holds more than a dozen patents in insect control, agrochemicals, microbiome manipulation and genome editing.