Tom Willis

Tom Willis, PhD, is the Chief Executive Officer of Arima Genomics. From 2017 to 2025 they were a venture partner at Illumina Ventures, leading investments in the tools and diagnostics industry and serving on the boards of Cernostics Inc. (acquired by Castle) and Stilla (acquired by Bio-Rad). They co-founded ParAllele Bioscience and served as founding Chief Executive Officer from 2001 to 2005, developing high-throughput genotyping tools that were acquired by Affymetrix in 2005. They also co-founded Sequenta, Inc. and served as Chief Executive Officer from 2008 to 2016, a sequencing-based platform for immune repertoire assessment that merged with Adaptive Biotechnologies in 2015. Earlier, they were Associate Director at the Stanford Genome Technology Center from 1997 to 2000, and earned a PhD in Physics from Stanford University (1990-1996) and a BS in Physics from Yale University (1986-1989).