Mark O’Neil-Johnson

Mark O’Neil-Johnson has over 25 years of experience in the field of NMR spectroscopy and application development of NMR to chemical characterization. Mark began his career as a natural products chemist, performing total synthesis of natural products under Professor John McMurry at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His industrial work began at IBM Research where he worked as a synthetic chemist at the IBM San Jose Research Lab. Mark joined IBM Instruments in its inception, starting up the San Jose Dem Lab. When IBM exited the analytical instruments business, Mark joined Bruker Instruments, setting up the West Coast NMR Demo facility in the San Jose area. While a Bruker Instruments, Mark’s activates included demonstrating NMR spectrometers at 300, 400 and 500 MHz; leading on-site user training at over 250 customer sites, developing and demonstrating flow NMR and LC-NMR-MS capabilities, as well as developing NMR applications with scientific collaborators. After joining Sequoia in its inception as a scientific co-founder, Mark built Sequoia’s advanced analytical capabilities for the structure characterization group. He successfully negotiated collaborations with Bruker BioSpin and Protasis, the CapNMR probe company. These collaborations resulted in state-of-the-art small volume NMR research by Sequoia, pushing the frontiers of structure elucidation to the microgram scale. Since 2001, Mark has been presenting Sequoia’s research at scientific conferences in the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He has been Issue Editor for the special editions of Planta Medica, a leading international journal for natural products research that have covered annual meetings of the American Society of Pharmacognosy (ASP). Mark was the Co-Chair and Scientific Chair for the 2013 ASP annual meeting in Saint Louis, MO.