Emily Leproust

Board Member

Emily Leproust, PhD, has served on the Board of Directors at GeneDx (formerly Sema4) since July 2021.

Emily is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Twist Bioscience (Nasdaq: TWST), which manufactures synthetic DNA and DNA products for customers in a wide range of industries. Emily is recognized as an early pioneer in the high-throughput synthesis and sequencing of DNA. Her work is disrupting markets to enable the exponential growth of DNA-based applications including chemicals/materials, diagnostics, therapeutics, food and digital data storage.

In 2020, BIO presented Emily with the Rosalind Franklin Award for Leadership. She was also named by Foreign Policy as one of their 100 Leading Global Thinkers and by Fast Company as one of the Most Creative People in Business.

Prior to Twist Bioscience, Emily held escalating positions at Agilent Technologies, where she architected the successful SureSelect product line that lowered the cost of sequencing and elucidated mechanisms responsible for dozens of Mendelian diseases. Emily also developed the Oligo Library Synthesis technology, where she initiated and led product and business development activities for the team. She designed and developed multiple commercial synthesis platforms to streamline microarray manufacturing and fabrication.

In addition to GeneDx, Emily currently serves on the Board of Directors of CM Life Sciences and is a co-founder of Petri, an accelerator for start-ups at the forefront of engineering and biology. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers – many on applications of synthetic DNA, and is the author of numerous patents.

Emily earned her PhD in Organic Chemistry from University of Houston and her M.Sc. in Industrial Chemistry from the Lyon School of Industrial Chemistry.