Leadership
Senior Management Team
Willem ‘Pim’ Stemmer, Ph.D., CEO, Amunix
Pim has repeatedly invented technologies that have led to successful companies and products. In 2003, he founded Avidia after inventing its Avimer technology. In 1997, he founded Maxygen (MAXY) to commercialize the DNA Shuffling technology, now called Molecular Breeding, which lead to the founding of both Verdia and Codexis (CDXS). Prior to Maxygen, Pim was a distinguished scientist at Affymax where he invented DNA shuffling technology. Before that, he worked on antibody fragment engineering at Hybritech. He completed post-doctoral work on phage display of random peptide libraries and antibody fragment expression in E. coli at the University of Wisconsin. Pim obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin for his work on bacterial pili/fimbriae involved in host-pathogen interaction. Pim has over 60 research publications and 96 issued US patents. His portfolio of patents from Maxygen was ranked as the #1 portfolio in pharma/biotech for 2003 by M.I.T.'s Technology Review, and #2 in a review of the 150 largest pharma and biotech companies by The Wall Street Journal in 2006. Pim received the Doisy award, the Perlman award, the NASDAQ VCynic award, and most recently, the National Academy of Engineering’s Draper Prize. He has also given over 300 invited presentations.
Volker Schellenberger, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer
Volker has 17 years of industry experience in protein engineering and drug discovery. He headed Genencor’s Protein Engineering department, where he invented Combinatorial Consensus Mutagenensis, selection by micro-compartmentalization as well as mutator technology. In addition, he initiated and led a collaboration with Seattle Genetics with focus on antibody-enzyme fusion proteins. Prior to his work on biotherapeutics, Volker led projects optimizing enzymes for industrial applications as well as microbes for metabolic pathway engineering. Volker received his Ph.D. from Leipzig University in 1986 for studies on protease catalyzed peptide synthesis. After postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Protein Research in Pushchino (Russia) he moved to the University of Göttingen where he developed a novel method for the production of peptides from recombinant peptide-multimers. After a postdoc with Bill Rutter at the University of California, San Francisco he joined Genencor in 1994. Volker is author of over 40 scientific papers and inventor of more than 70 issued or pending patent applications. He is also the recipient of the Karl Lohman award of the German Society of Biochemists.
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