Deborah J. Neff
Chair of the UC Davis Foundation
Deborah J. Neff is a veteran of the life sciences industry, with a proven record of developing innovative technology, a track record of commercializing successful new products and building market leading global businesses. She is the President of DJN Consulting, LLC, providing executive management, business strategy and operations consulting in Life Sciences. Most recently she was CEO at Evanostics LLC, an early-stage company developing a “near patient” system for drugs of abuse testing in forensic and clinical settings. Prior to that role, she was the Chief Operating Officer at Complete Genomics Inc, (CGI), developing and commercializing an integrated, large-scale super sequencer to provide clinicians and clinical researcher the tools for producing high quality whole genomes and exomes. Deborah held previous CEO roles at two early-stage startup companies, Predicant Biosciences which was founded to develop technology for use in proteomics based clinical testing, and at Pathwork Diagnostics Inc, where she built the company and successfully launched an FDA cleared/CLIA/CAP certified diagnostic test used by oncologists to identify the tissue of origin of a tumor, a critical piece of information for selecting appropriate treatment.
Earlier in her career, Deborah served as president of BD Biosciences (a global business segment of Becton Dickinson), holding a series of roles with increasing responsibilities over 15 years. As President of BD Biosciences, she built and led a high-growth, worldwide business that developed and commercialized biomedical research and clinical diagnostic products in cellular analysis and immunocytometry, with profitable revenue of approximately $700 million. Prior to her tenure at BD, she held various management positions at Organon-Teknika Corp. and CooperBiomedical Inc. Her career began with technical and supervisory roles in the clinical laboratories at two major medical centers in Southern California.
Deborah has a BS in Physiology from UC Davis and completed graduate training and licensure in clinical laboratory science, with a specialist in blood banking. She attended executive business programs in finance, marketing, leadership and organizational development at UCLA, Wharton, Stanford and Harvard Business Schools.
Deborah is currently a Director on the Board of Atomo Diagnostics Limited, an Australian publicly listed company, and a Director on the Board of Cytek Biosciences Inc, a NASDAq listed company. She is also the Chair of the Board of Directors for Guide Dogs for the Blind, Inc., a non-profit organization. Deborah currently serves as the Chair of the Board of Trustees for the UC Davis Foundation, and is a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council for the College of Biological Sciences. She previously served on the boards of Bio-Rad Inc, Advanced Medical Optics, Inc (acquired by Abbott), and ForteBio, Inc. (acquired by Pall Corp).