Kenny Beckman

Kenneth Beckman, Ph.D. is the Director of the University of Minnesota Genomics Center (UMGC), a 40-person core facility which provides genomic technology and consulting, carries out technology innovation, and delivers clinical (CLIA) next-generation sequencing in collaboration with Fairview Health System / MHeath. Dr. Beckman earned his B.A. from Cornell University, majoring in Biology. After his undergraduate work, he won a Keasbey Scholarship to pursue a PhD at the University of Cambridge (UK), from which he graduated with a degree in Molecular Plant Pathology. Moving to the University of California, Berkeley, Beckman was a postdoc, and then staff scientist, in the laboratory of Bruce Ames, where he worked on the biochemistry of DNA damage, and its role in aging and mitochondrial function. In the late 1990s, he left academia to work in a number of Bay Area start-up companies and was co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Gorilla Genomics, Inc. from 1999-2003. Returning to the academic track in 2003, Beckman was Principal Investigator and founding Director of the Functional Genomics Core at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI) in Oakland, CA, before coming to the University of Minnesota in 2009 to take on the directorship of the Genomics Center. Between 2009 and the present, Beckman modernized and grew the UMGC from a 10-person services unit with an annual budget of around $2M to a 40-person unit with a $12M annual budget, an active research program. This re-structuring included the addition of cutting-edge next-generation sequencing instrumentation and services including microbiome profiling for academic researchers. In 2017 Kenny, along with Drs. Daryl Gohl and Dan Knights founded CoreBiome, now Diversigen, a microbiome analysis company bringing together cutting-edge machine learning and genomics. Kenny is now COO of Diversigen.