Members of the Leadership Team

Paul A. Rhodes, Ph.D. - CEO and Founder

Dr. Rhodes founded Next Gen after opening the Sanger Institute office of Mountain View, California-based Specific Diagnostics (www.specificdx.com) in Sepember 2016.  In building Specific, he has overseen research and development of microbiology diagnostic systems deploying grant funds from 3 major NIH grants along with a recently awarded CARB-X (Combatting Antimicrobial Resistance Bacteria) grant.  Specific's work has attracted the participation of a distinguished Scientific Advisory Board, including the current and past President of the American Society for Microbiology, reflecting the potential impact of its metabolomic technology on microbiology diagnostics.  He founded Next Gen to bring whole genome sequencing of pathogens to the same microbiology laboratory customers and stakeholders.  He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from NYU Medical School, a M.S. in Physics from Stanford, and a A.B. Magna cum laude in Physics from Harvard, and was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford from 2005-2007. 

eugene bragin - CTO and founder

Mr. Bragin has spent over 10 years in leadership of bioinformatics teams on the Sanger Institute Campus in Hinxton, UK, leading an ENSEMBL team developing a leading genome browser, a DECIPHER team developing the world's foremost annotated database of inherited disease-causing variants, and then co-founding the Sanger-based company Congenica, which has successfully commercialized DECIPHER, as its founding head of product development.  He has thus combined world-class bioinformatic application development, developing open source tools used world-wide, with customer-facing bioinformatic product development.  He leads an expert team at Next Gen responsible for both pipeline development and the Next Gen Dashboard, a unique interactive information service that puts the analyzed results of all pathogen WGS run at the fingertips of our users each morning.  Mr. Bragin received a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and a M.S. in Bioinformatics from the University of Cranfield, UK. 

dr. tom weaver - chief strategy officer

Dr. Weaver has had 30 years of experience in the application of genomics for fundamental research, pharmaceutical development and clinical diagnostics - both in academia as the director of MRC genomic and genetic infrastructures in Cambridge and Oxford, and in commercial organizations where he participated in the founding of several genetics companies, including Hexagen, acquired by Incyte where he was director of technology development, before founding Geneservice which was acquired by Source Bioscience, a leading DNA sequence service provider.  He also founded Congenica, a Sanger Institute spin-out which is applying genome analysis to diagnose patients with rare disease, and most recently PetMedix, a novel therapeutics company based on genome engineering in mice.  Dr. Weaver was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge and MRC Lab for Molecular Biology after receiving his Ph.D. in Oncology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also obtained a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Biochemistry.