Speakers

Olaf Piepenburg is Managing Director of PartitionBio. Between 2003 and 2018 he worked with Niall Armes as Chief Scientific Officer of TwistDx Ltd on the development and commercialisation of the Recombinase Polymerase Amplification (RPA) technology. RPA, the leading isothermal nucleic acid amplification approach, is fundamentally based on the dramatic increase of in vitro enzymatic activities in appropriately configured molecular condensates. Following his involvement with TwistDx, Olaf worked in senior positions in the private biotechnology sector (Head of Sequencing Biochemistry at Base4 Ltd, Head of Molecular Development at SenseBio Ltd), before joining the Scientific Operations department at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK as Head of Research. Olaf obtained his PhD in Molecular Genetics at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany and he completed post-doctoral studies with Sir Jim Smith at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, UK.