LSWI Staff and Board

As President & CEO of Life Science Washington (LSW), Marc sets the strategic direction, guides policy priorities, and directs business operations to ensure our members have the talent, investment, and partnerships needed to sustain the industry’s robust growth and solidify Washington state’s reputation as one of the top life science clusters in the nation. Marc also serves as the Chair of the Life Science Washington Institute, which is an affiliated non-profit focused on supporting life science entrepreneurs and growing start-up companies in Washington.

Before taking the helm as President & CEO, Marc served as Vice President, Public Policy & External Affairs for LSW. Prior to joining Life Science Washington, he served as Director of Policy & External Affairs for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where he was actively involved in creating and advocating for several statewide bioscience initiatives including the Life Sciences Discovery Fund. He was also deeply involved in a range of PNNL’s philanthropic science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education partnerships and science education initiatives. Prior to moving to Washington state, Marc held a variety of policy and consulting positions in Washington, D.C.

Marc has served on several gubernatorial task forces including the Washington Clean Energy Leadership Council and the Life Science & Global Health Advisory Council.  Marc currently serves on the Tech Alliance Board as well as the Board of the Bothell Biomedical Innovation Partnership Zone. Additionally, Marc has previously served on a number of statewide trade association boards, including Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) and the Washington Clean Technology Alliance (WCTA).

Marc loves playing tennis, waterskiing, mountain biking, and Oregon Pinot Noir.

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Sean McClain, founder and CEO of Absci, started the company in 2011 with a bold goal to re-engineer E. coli to be an effective biomanufacturing system for twenty-first century biologics. Having accomplished that, and driven by the mantra “believe in the impossible,” Sean went on to build one of today’s most powerful platform technologies for drug discovery, which Absci is applying in pursuit of a vision to design drugs directly from patient tissues entirely in silico – with the click of a button. Uniquely merging cutting-edge machine learning AI with proprietary bioinformatics pipelines and high throughput synthetic biology methods, Absci takes protein-based drug discovery beyond nature’s boundaries to bring breakthrough medicines into the lives of patients with unprecedented speeds. Under Sean’s leadership, Absci has raised over $425M, become a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: ABSI), grown to more than 200 employees, acquired pioneering deep learning company Denovium and target discovery company Totient, and established partnerships with industry-leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies including Merck and Astellas. Sean, who studied biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Arizona, has been recognized as an “allstar” in the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 cohort in Science, named as an Entrepreneur of The Year 2020 Pacific Northwest Region Award Winner, included among the 2021 Endpoints News 20 Under Forty Biopharma leaders, and awarded the OEN 30th Anniversary Award. Sean serves as a board member for the Oregon Bioscience Association, the Oregon Translational Research and Development Institute, and Life Science Washington.

Katrina Rogers is a change expert with over 20 years of experience discovering, developing, and manufacturing medicines and related technologies. An expert in laboratory and technical operations, she is also an ASQ Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence and Pharmaceutical GMP Professional. She is an adjunct faculty member in the College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Washington State University Health Sciences Spokane, and she is active in the local bioscience industry. Her executive services firm specializes in helping entrepreneurs, investors, and leaders change the world with their new medicines and medical devices.

Dr. Young received her PhD from Vanderbilt University in Molecular Physiology & Biophysics in 2016 at which point she started working for Life Science WA with an interest in being at the interface of business and science. In her role there, she managed the Washington Innovation Network (WIN) Entrepreneur Mentoring Program where she worked with founders in their earliest stages. In 2017, she started working with Phase Genomics where she is now the Chief Operating Officer. Kayla has a passion for early-stage biotechnology companies and designing operational processes to help these companies be successful.