Birgitte Simen

Birgitte Simen is the current Vice President of Biosecurity Technical Platforms at Ginkgo Bioworks. Birgitte has over 17 years of experience in the field of biomedical science and next-generation sequencing.

Simen started their career as a postdoctoral student at Yale University, where they worked on developing assays and robustness studies on sequencing HIV and HLA targets. In 2006, they joined 454 Life Sciences/Roche as a group leader. During their time at 454 Life Sciences/Roche, they were the project lead for Roche Leukemia Assay kits, which were launched in 2012. In 2011, they were promoted to Director, where they oversaw eight reports in two levels.

In 2013, Simen left 454 Life Sciences/Roche to start their own biomedical consulting company, Simen Biomedical Consulting. Birgitte provided consulting services to universities and corporations focused on assay development and validation under CLIA/CAP guidelines. In 2014, they joined Veritas Genetics as Vice President of Product Development. During their time at Veritas Genetics, they oversaw Roche HLA Sequencing kits launched in March 2011 as project lead and was the technical lead for Titanium Series Amplicon Sequencing kits launched in October 2009. Birgitte also coordinated three international inter-laboratory robustness studies on sequencing HIV and HLA targets.

Simen joined Ginkgo Bioworks in August 2019 as VP, Biosecurity Technical Platform

Birgitte Simen has a Ph.D. in Cell Physiology from the University of Chicago and an M.Sc. in Molecular Immunology and B.Sc. in Biochemistry from Københavns Universitet - University of Copenhagen.

Birgitte Simen reports to Chris Mellen, Chief Information Security Officer.