Leadership Team
Joe Victor
President & Chief Executive Officer
Joe Victor currently serves as RareCyte President & CEO and has been a Venture Partner/Venture Advisor with 5AM Ventures since 2016. Prior to joining 5AM Ventures, Mr. Victor served as CEO of Startide Sciences, a 5AM Ventures portfolio company chartered to identify and develop innovative technologies in the Life Sciences research tools markets. Prior to Startide, Mr. Victor served as CEO of DVS Sciences (acquired by Fluidigm Inc.) and Applied Precision Inc (acquired by GE Healthcare). He currently serves on the Boards of RareCyte, and Magnetic Insight. Mr. Victor also serves as an advisory board member to the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science and the UC Davis Ecosystem for Biophotonics Innovation. Mr. Victor previously held various executive management and technical positions in the high technology, aviation, and energy markets. Mr. Victor holds an MBA from UCLA and MS and BS degrees in engineering from the University of Washington.
Steve Reichenbach
Chief Financial Officer
Steve has over 35 years of financial, legal, HR and operations experience. Steve had been providing financial consulting services to RareCyte since 2016 but formally hired on in November 2021. Prior to his hiring, Steve had been the CFO for Precision Nanosystems (PNI) which was acquired by Danaher Corporation in mid 2021. Prior to PNI, Steve had been the site leader for Applied Precision Inc. (API), a GE Healthcare company, after API was acquired by GE in May 2011. Prior to API, Steve spent 13 years at Flow International Corp (a public company at the time - FLOW) in the machine tools space. Steve held a variety of rolls including CFO at FLOW. Steve graduated with a BA from the University of Washington.
Mark Capriani
Senior VP, Sales and Marketing
Mark has more than 30 years of experience in life sciences sales and commercial leadership in global markets. He has launched a number of new technologies and built robust sales and demand generation teams to drive sales success. He has worked with instruments, reagents, consumables and services for early stage, growth and mature companies. Mark has lead commercial teams for Bio-Techne, ATCC and Nexcelom (acquired by PerkinElmer). Most recently he was Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing at NanoTemper. Prior to that Mark worked in the pharma, medical device and diagnostics industry.
Leighton Howells
Senior VP, Biopharma Partnerships
Leighton has over 30 years of experience in developing, launching and commercializing new technology platforms for global markets. His technical and management career focused on the pioneer instrumentation and assays for High Throughput Screening, High Content Screening and highly multiplexed imaging to support pharmaceutical drug discover/development and diagnostics. With an extensive career at GE Healthcare in Life Sciences and Diagnostic business units, Leighton held leadership positions in R&D, Operations and Commercial organizations, additionally leading the acquisition and integration of several high-performance imaging companies. Most recently, Leighton was the Director of Operations, Pharma Services at NeoGenomics. Leighton holds a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from the University of West England, Bristol.
Tad George, PhD
Senior VP, Bio R&D
Tad has over 15 years of startup experience dedicated to creating scientific markets for novel instrumentation platforms that span basic research, drug discovery and clinical applications. Prior to joining RareCyte, Tad has held similar positions at Biodesy, Inc. and DVS Sciences, and was Director of Biology at Amnis Corporation. Tad completed his B.A. in Biochemistry from the Univ. of Texas at Austin, Ph.D. in Immunology from UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and post-doctoral training at Immunex Corp. in Seattle.
Steve Reese
Senior VP, Engineering
Steve Reese comes to Rarecyte from his previous role as Principal Systems Engineer within the Genomics and Cellular Research division of GE Healthcare. He has been involved with guiding the development of more than 20 automated fluorescent imaging systems during his 28+ years with Applied Precision, GE Healthcare, and RareCyte. Steve’s forte is managing multi-discplined development teams from problem definition through invention, design, and product execution for sophisticated fluorescent imaging applied to blood and tissue based biological samples. Steve holds B.Eng in Electrical Engineering from Yale University where he was awarded the Becton Prize for Engineering.
Eric Kaldjian MD
Senior VP, Clinical Research
Eric earned his MD and trained in pathology at the University of Michigan. He was a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute and is certified by the American Board of Pathology. Before RareCyte he was the Medical Director of Companion Diagnostics at Ventana Medical Systems/Roche Tissue Diagnostics. Eric’s pharmaceutical experience has included discovery research, toxicology, and exploratory and late phase clinical development at Hoffmann-La Roche and Parke-Davis / Pfizer. He was a director of clinical genomics at Gene Logic and Chief Scientific Officer at Transgenomic. He has degree in chemistry from Harvard and studied music at Trinity College, Cambridge, England.
Jim Cooper
VP, Finance
Jim Cooper has over 25 years of experience building and leading Finance and Accounting organizations. Jim’s responsibilities at RareCyte include Finance, Accounting, HR, Legal and Facilities. His industry experience includes technology, travel, manufacturing and life sciences, and he has held leadership roles in several public companies including Tableau Software, Cray Supercomputers, RealNetworks, and Getty Images. He holds a BA in Accounting from Seattle University and is a Licensed CPA.
Josh Nordberg, PhD
VP, Customer Success
Josh has over 20 years of experience in the life sciences with a deep knowledge of fluorescence microscopy and cancer-cell biology. In his over 10 years at RareCyte, Josh has contributed to the development and support of the complete portfolio of RareCyte’s products and holds 18 patents related to RareCyte’s technology. Prior to joining RareCyte, Josh earned his Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the University of Massachusetts Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and his B.A. in Biology from Wheaton College in Norton, MA.
Arturo Ramirez, PhD
VP, Biopharma Services R&D
Dr. Ramirez has extensive experience in molecular biology applied to diagnostics. During his tenure at RareCyte he has driven the development and commercialization of novel technologies for detection, characterization, and isolation of rare cells in blood. Dr. Ramirez leads the R&D team who design and optimize novel rare-cell assays as liquid biopsies. Dr. Ramirez and his team bring extensive experience and knowledge on the RareCyte platform to develop new applications and novel biomarker assays to support customer research programs and global clinical trials. Dr. Ramirez holds a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Washington and a BS in Chemistry from the University of Guanajuato in Mexico.