Willard H. Dere

Willard Dere, M.D., joined BioMarin’s Board in July 2016. Since November 2014, he has served as the Professor of Internal Medicine, B. Lue and Hope S. Bettilyon Presidential Endowed Chair in Internal Medicine for Diabetes Research, Executive Director of Personalized Health, and Co-Principal Investigator of the Center for Clinical & Translational Science at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center. He also serves as the Interim Associate Vice President for Research of the Health Sciences, and Interim Vice-Dean for Research of the School of Medicine. Prior to re-joining academia in November 2014, Dr. Dere was in the biopharmaceutical industry for 25 years. From 2003 until his retirement in 2014, Dr. Dere held multiple roles at Amgen, Inc., a biotechnology company, including serving as head of global development and either the international or corporate chief medical officer from December 2004 to October 2014. He began his career at Eli Lilly in 1989, and held a number of different global roles in clinical pharmacology, regulatory affairs, and both early-stage translational, and late-stage clinical research. He serves on the boards of three public biopharmaceutical companies: Mersana Therapeutics, Inc., Radius Health, Inc., and Seres Therapeutics, Inc. and concluded his service to Ocera Therapeutics, Inc. in December 2017. Since 2014, he has served on the scientific advisory board of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine. Dr. Dere received a B.A. and an M.D. from the University of California, Davis. He trained in internal medicine at the University of Utah and endocrinology/metabolism at the University of California at San Francisco.