Management Team
Rich Thayer
MANAGING PARTNER
Mr. Thayer is Managing Partner of Halteres Associates, a bioscience consultancy, and serves as a business, market and strategy advisor in the biotechnology and life sciences sectors. He is also the Chief Executive Officer of The Catalysis Foundation for Health, an organization addressing gaps in global healthcare caused by inefficiencies in disease diagnosis and monitoring. With more than 20 years’ experience in Biosciences, Mr. Thayer was previously Vice President and Head of Business Development at Roche Molecular Diagnostics, which included responsibility for strategic planning, and was Vice President, Head of their $260MM Global Blood Screening Business Unit. Prior to joining Roche, he co-founded and served as Chief Financial Officer and a member of the Board of a medical diagnostics company called Praxsys Biosystems. While at Praxsys, Mr. Thayer oversaw finance, corporate and manufacturing operations and was an inventor on two issued patents. He was also Director of the Blood Screening and Infectious Disease Business Unit at Chiron Corporation where he managed product development and manufacturing programs involving over 60 products and 200 employees. Mr. Thayer started his career at Chiron in the DNA sequencing laboratory where he was a member of the hepatitis C virus discovery team. He has an MBA from the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley and a BS in Biochemistry from the University of California, Davis.
Kristi Whitfield
PRINCIPAL AND CONTRACTS MANAGER
Mickey Urdea
FOUNDING PARTNER
Dr. Urdea is Founder and Partner for Halteres Associates. He also founded and served as Chief Executive Officer of Tethys Bioscience, a proteomics-based diagnostics company that has been involved in the prevention of type-2 diabetes (assets acquired by HDL), and was CEO of Quantum Dots Corporation (assets acquired by Life Technologies). Additionally, Dr. Urdea is a founder and the Chairman of Catalysis Foundation for Health (CFH), a non-profit organization addressing gaps in global healthcare caused by inefficiencies in disease diagnosis and monitoring; CFH is developing potential biomarkers for tuberculosis bacterial load with a grant for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. Urdea is a member of the University of California at San Francisco Leadership Council for Global Health. He serves as a consultant to the life sciences industry and is on the scientific advisory boards and boards of directors of a number of biotechnology and diagnostics companies. Prior to his current activities, Dr. Urdea founded the Nucleic Acid Diagnostics business at Chiron Corporation, where he pioneered viral load assays for the human hepatitis B, hepatitis C and immunodeficiency viruses; his team introduced the first commercial viral load assays for all three viruses. Dr. Urdea also headed the Oncology Diagnostics business unit at Chiron. He then became business head of the Molecular Diagnostics group and Chief Scientific Officer at Bayer Diagnostics. He has served as an advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for over ten years. Dr. Urdea is an author on over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications and has more than 125 issued and pending patents. He received his BS in Biology and Chemistry from Northern Arizona University, his PhD in Biochemistry from Washington State University, and had an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at San Francisco. Read Dr. Urdea’s commencement address to the 2010 graduating class at Washington State University.
