Joseph Beechem
Joe Beechem joined NanoString in 2012 as the Senior Vice President of Research and Development and is now also the company’s Chief Scientific Officer. He has become a scientific powerhouse for the company, co-inventing 3D Biology – the simultaneous profiling of DNA, RNA, and Protein on the nCounter® system – as well as the GeoMx® Digital Spatial Profiler (DSP), which affords highly-multiplexed and quantitative profiling of RNA and protein from tissue sections in user-defined geographic regions of interest. Dr. Beechem leads a multidisciplinary team at NanoString based in Seattle, WA where he and his colleagues develop innovative technology platforms and assays based on the company’s nucleic-acid based optical barcodes for multiplexed quantification of biomolecules. At NanoString, he has played an integral role in bringing the Hyb and Seq™ chemistry to life, making NGS from FFPE sections without library prep a reality.
Dr. Beechem is an author on over 150 peer-reviewed papers in diverse fields: biomathematics, physics, chemistry, physiology, spectroscopy, diagnostics, medicine and biology. He received a doctorate in Biophysics from The Johns Hopkins University and started his career as a tenure-track faculty member at Vanderbilt University. His varied skills were sought-after in industry; in 2004, he joined Invitrogen as their Chief Science/Technology Officer and quickly rose to become the Head of R&D, Advanced Sequencing Technologies.