Pharma CEO Series:
An Evening with Robert Chess, Chairman of Nektar Therapeutics
Rob Chess is Chairman of Nektar Therapeutics, (NASDAQ:NKTR), a health care biotechnology company developing new treatments for cancer, autoimmune diseases, and pain.
Rob has been with Nektar for 27 years, joining as its first non-founder employee in 1991 and serving as the company’s CEO through 1999 and as Chairman since then. In addition, he is co-founder and Chairman of Biota Technologies, which is pioneering DNA sequencing applications in the oil and gas industry. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Pelvalon, a medical device company, and Twist Biosciences, which manufactures synthetic DNA using high-throughput production methods. Rob co-founded and was President of Penederm, a dermatology company that went public and was acquired by Mylan Laboratories, and was the start-up CEO and later Chairman of OPX Biotechnologies, a renewable chemicals company, which was sold to Cargill. He started his career in the technology field and held management positions at Intel and Metaphor Computer Systems (later acquired by IBM). Rob served on the White House Staff in the first Bush Administration as a White House Fellow and Associate Director of the White House Office of Economic and Domestic Policy.
Since 2004, Rob has served on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses in the MBA program on the health care industry and on starting new businesses. He is a trustee of Caltech, Chairman of the Trustee Technology Transfer Committee, and was visiting professor at Caltech teaching entrepreneurship. Rob was a long-time Board member of the Biotechnology Industry Organization where he was chairman of the Emerging Companies Section and co-chairman of the Intellectual Property Committee. He was the first Chairman and is a current Board member of Bio Ventures for Global Health. Rob received a BS in engineering with honors from Caltech and an MBA from Harvard.
March 7, 2018
6:30 - 8:30 PM
Gibson Dunn Law Firm
555 Mission Street
Suite 3000
San Francisco, CA 94105
$25 HCSF members
$25 HBSHAA members
$35 non-member
No refunds 72 business hours prior to the event
Refunds prior to the deadline subject to $5 processing fee
Click here for tickets!
Registration deadline: March 5
Organizer:
Anupam Agarwal, MPH ’05, VP Membership
membership@harvardclubsf.org