Christopher Woelk

Christopher Woelk, known as Topher, heads our Translational Genomics team and has over 18 years experience managing cross-disciplinary teams focused on reverse translation from clinical data for target and biomarker identification across a range of indications (infections disease, oncology, respiratory disease and neurological disorders). Before joining Verge, Topher was Head of Systems Biology at Merck’s Exploratory Science Center in Cambridge, where he built a team of computational biologists, provided leadership around the portfolio of projects and platforms with a number of deliveries into therapeutic areas, and oversaw a data science cluster of over 80 data scientists in early discovery.

Prior to Merck, Topher held a number of academic roles, the last of which was Professor of Genomics and Bioinformatics at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. He was also the director of the Bioinformatics Core for the University of Southampton and served as the Director of the Genomics Core for the Collaboratory of AIDS Researchers for Eradication, one of the first collaborations set up with the aim of curing HIV.

Topher earned his Ph.D. at the University of Oxford and conducted his postdoctoral training at the Center for AIDS Research at the University of California San Diego. He is an author on over 80 peer-reviewed journal publications and an inventor on a number of patents.