Asuragen Personnel

As a service provider the quality of our work reflects the quality of our people. Accordingly, we take great pride in the data we generate for our clients and the personnel who generate that data. Our staff has decades of cumulative array target preparation experience and RNA isolation experience with a broad range of human samples. Our bioinformatics group is equipped and experienced with current tools and "best practices" experience for gene expression profiling, pathway analysis, and biomarker discovery and validation. To support our staff and ensure client satisfaction, we have systematic training and qualification procedures for all laboratory and informatics staff, and we monitor key performance metrics on a daily basis for each of our staff. All new staff members must complete extensive hands-on training and pass performance metrics including yield, quality, repeatability, and speed of processing before handling any customer samples. This training and qualification is performed independently for any protocol Asuragen offers, so clients can be assured their samples are being processed by an experienced operator no matter the protocol. As you can see below, our key management and scientific staff have long-standing involvement in the field of gene expression analysis and service. To our core, we are an organization dedicated to client success.

Key staff:

Matt Winkler, Ph.D. - CEO/CSO, Dr. Winkler founded Ambion in 1988, grew it to $58M in revenue and sold the research products division in 2005 to Applied Biosystems. He is the founder of Asuragen. Prior to founding Ambion he was an Associate Professor of Zoology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has a B.S. degree in Genetics and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of California at Berkeley.


Rollie Carlson, Ph.D. - President, Dr. Carlson joined Asuragen in April 2006 from Abbott Laboratories where he served as Vice President, Business Development & Licensing. Prior to this position, Dr. Carlson was Global General Manager and Vice President, Molecular Diagnostics at Vysis, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Abbott Laboratories. Dr. Carlson has served in various senior sales, marketing, and business development positions. He received his Ph.D. in 1984.


Scott Hunicke-Smith, Ph.D. - VP and General Manager, Services, Dr. Hunicke-Smith joined Ambion in July of 2003 as Director of Business Development, Instrumentation. He was promoted to Vice President, Business Development in March of 2004 and to Vice President, Ambion Services in September of 2005. Prior to joining Ambion, Dr. Hunicke-Smith served as founder and CEO of GeneMachines, a molecular biology equipment firm, from 1997 through March of 2003. Dr. Hunicke-Smith also served on the Board of Directors of Silicon Genetics, a bioinformatics software firm, from 1998 until Agilent acquired it in 2004. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in the laboratory of Ron Davis in 1997 and is an inventor on seven issued patents.


Fred Fletcher, Ph.D. - Director of Operations, Services, Dr. Fletcher earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from Baylor College of Medicine in 1990. Dr. Fletcher brings 20 years of experience in molecular biology to his current position as Director of Operations for Asuragen Services. In that capacity, he has direct responsibility for Asuragen's regulated (cGLP) Service laboratories. Dr. Fletcher also serves as the Laboratory Director for Asuragen's CLIA laboratory. Dr. Fletcher's professional career includes 4 years as a bench scientist with Immunex in Seattle, WA and ten years with Amgen in Thousand Oaks, CA as a scientist and manager. Dr. Fletcher retired from Amgen in 2003 as Head of Functional Genomics. In that position, he had responsibility for Amgen's molecular biology service cores, including those for DNA sequencing, oligonucleotide synthesis, and microarray-based gene expression analysis, among others.