Jonathan M. Rothberg

Jonathan Marc Rothberg (born April 28, 1963) is an American scientist and entrepreneur notable for his contributions to DNA sequencing. He resides in Miami, Florida.

Early life Rothberg was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to Lillian Rothberg and Henry Rothberg, a chemical engineer. Prior to Rothberg's birth, his parents founded Laticrete International, Inc. a family-owned manufacturer of products for the installation of tile and stone. As a child Jonathan went on sales calls with his father.

Education and scientific career

Rothberg earned a BS in chemical engineering with an option in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985. He then went on to earn an MS, MPhil, and PhD in biology from Yale University.

Rothberg himself holds more than 100 patents.

Business career

CuraGen

While a graduate student at Yale, he founded CuraGen, one of the first genomics companies in 1991. CuraGen became a public company via an initial public offering in 1999. By the next year it had a market cap of $5 billion, bigger than that of American Airlines. The idea for 454 Life Sciences came when Noah, his second child, was born in 1999, and had to be sent to the neonatal intensive care unit because of breathing troubles. ). Published in Nature magazine, that genome was made publicly on GenBank and browsable via the efforts of Lincoln Stein's group contributing to personal genomics. Rothberg lost control of 454 Life Sciences by 2007. RainDance was acquired in 2017 by Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc.

Ion Torrent

Rothberg founded Ion Torrent in 2007, which developed ion semiconductor sequencing, a technology utilized by their Personal Genome Machine (PGM) DNA sequencer. He founded the company with an undisclosed amount of his own money and later took in $23 million in venture capital. After experiences at CuraGen and 454 Life Sciences, he made sure to retain supervoting share majority so he could not be forced out.

Butterfly Network

In 2011, Rothberg founded Butterfly Network after seeing a talk by MIT physicist Max Tegmark, who was becoming fascinated by artificial intelligence. Rothberg brought in one of Tegmark's smartest students, Nevada Sanchez, a Hertz Fellow and co-founder of the company who was named among Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2015. In September, 2018, Butterfly Network raised $250 million from investors Fidelity, the Gates Foundation, and Fosun Pharma at an estimated $1.25 billion valuation. In 2021 Quantum-Si went public on the NASDAQ under the ticker $QSI.

In February 2022, Rothberg became interim CEO of Quantum-Si. that can be transported easily between patients and costs a fraction of traditional MRI. Hyperfine received FDA clearance in 2021 to add deep-learning algorithms to boost the quality of images. The Hyperfine Swoop is commercially available and saving lives on multiple continents around the world, including limited resource settings in Africa and Asia where access to MRI was never before possible. Hyperfine went public in December 2021 and is listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker, $HYPR.

Detect

Rothberg launched Detect in partnership with consumer electronics veteran and now Detect CEO Hugo Barra at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic with the goal of bringing pathogen testing into the home.

Detect’s first product is the FDA-authorized Detect Covid-19 Test, which they brought to market in 18 months from company founding. The customer reception and press coverage of the product has been overwhelmingly positive.

Identifeye Health Identifeye Health (formerly Tesseract Health) was founded in 2018 to build technology at the nexus of radiology and laboratory medicine on the diagnostic tree. The company aims to support the screening, diagnosis, and monitoring of disease, both affordably and non-invasively using "the power of data in the human eye".

Liminal Sciences

Rothberg founded Liminal in 2018 with the goal of building a wearable brain monitor for acute and chronic conditions including stroke, traumatic brain injury, hydrocephalus, and epilepsy. Inspired by both the utility and the limitations of EEG (electroencephalogram), Liminal has invented AEG, a new modality that combines blood flow measurement with the existing technology that monitors the electrical activity of the brain. Liminal enables critical “brain vital signs” to make brain monitoring as ubiquitous as heart monitoring.

Protein Evolution, Inc. Protein Evolution was founded in October of 2021 with the mission to help the chemicals and materials industries transition to a lower-carbon, more circular economy. Leveraging recent breakthroughs in synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, the company designs enzymes capable of breaking down end-of-life textile and plastic waste into the raw materials of new textile and plastic products. These raw materials are indistinguishable from the petroleum-derived alternatives used today for new plastic production, and thus the company sees immediate applications within the petrochemical industry, global consumer packaged goods companies, textile manufacturers and others that are looking to significantly reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

In the middle of 2022, the company completed its first outside capitalize raise of approximately $25 million.

Personal life Rothberg and his wife Bonnie, a physician who also holds a Ph.D. in epidemiology from Yale, have five children, whom Rothberg often refers to in his speeches. In 2002, the couple started the nonprofit Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases which works on treatments for tuberous sclerosis, a rare disease that affects one of their children. The TSC project was based on technology known as the Drug Design and Optimization Lab (D2OL), which the institute sponsored through 2009, to use volunteers' personal computers to model interactions of drug candidates with their target molecules.

Rothberg sponsors the Rothberg Catalyzer Prize at four universities: Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University, Brown University, and University of Pennsylvania.

Rothberg had his own version of Stonehenge, which he calls the Circle of Life, built near his home in Guilford, CT, using 700 tons of granite imported from Norway.

Recognition Rothberg was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama in 2016 for his “pioneering inventions and commercialization of next-generation DNA sequencing technologies, making access to genomic information easier, faster and more cost-effective for researchers around the world".

Rothberg received the Connecticut Medal of Technology in 2010. Rothberg made Fortune Magazine's 2001 list of the 40 richest Americans under 40. In 2018, he received the Award for Excellence in Molecular Diagnostics from the Association for Molecular Pathology.