Nick is the Founding Partner of Illumina Ventures. His passion is building companies at the intersection of technology and human health. Prior to joining the fund, he served as SVP, Corporate & Venture Development for Illumina where he was responsible for strategic planning, business development, licensing, venture investing and acquisitions. In six years, Nick and his team completed ten acquisitions, more than a dozen venture investments, and a multitude of other transactions including the formation of Helix and GRAIL and the creation of a global NIPT patent pool. Nick also served as the founding General Manager of Illumina’s Enterprise Informatics Business Unit.
Before joining Illumina, Nick co-founded and was the Executive Chairman of the diagnostics company Quanterix. Previously he was Executive Chairman of True Materials and CEO of ParAllele BioScience, life science tools firms that were both acquired by Affymetrix.
Nick got his start in venture investing at Motorola where he led the life science investment team and served on the boards of the SNP Consortium, Genometrix, Clinical Microsensors, and Orchid Bioscience. He founded and led Motorola Life Sciences, an early microarray company that was acquired by GE. Previously he held leadership positions at DARPA and served on the board of SEMATCH.
Nick received a B.S. in Engineering from Duke University, was a Winston Churchill Scholar at Cambridge University, and earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland.