In the first keynote talk in GEN’s “The State of Multiomics and NGS” virtual summit, originally broadcast on April 23, 2025, Jacob Thaysen, PhD, CEO at Illimina, joins GEN deputy editor in chief, Julianna LeMieux, PhD.
In September of 2023, soon after the dramatic exit of Francis deSouza as Illumina’s CEO, the company announced that it had appointed a new leader, Thaysen. There was a lot of initial buzz about Thaysen. He had held multiple roles in his career but was an outsider to the tightly knit genomics community. Thaysen had started his career by building a start-up company that used MEMs for making small sensors, moved to a management consulting role, then to the cancer diagnostic company Dako, and most recently Agilent Technologies.
Regardless of his varied experiences, he was new to genomics when he stepped into his current role 18 months ago. A lot has changed over the last year and a half, both at Illumina and for Thaysen personally. In this fireside chat, he will discuss these changes and his vision for the future in detail.
The entire virtual summit, including sponsored talks with Joseph M. Beechem, PhD, from Bruker, Melanie Janczyk from Scale Biosciences, Robert Meltzer, PhD, from Illumina, Clare Paterson, PhD, from Standard BioTools, and Kian Sadeghi from Sampled, is available to watch free on demand: bit.ly/OMICS25
The post A Vision for Illumina: A Conversation with Jacob Thaysen appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
