Emily Leproust, Ph.D. serves as CEO, co-founder and director of Twist Bioscience. As an early pioneer in the high throughput synthesis and sequencing of DNA, Dr. Leproust desires to disrupt the current process of gene synthesis to enable the exponential growth of synthetic biology applications in multiple fields including medicine, agricultural biology and industrial chemicals. Prior to Twist Bioscience, she held escalating positions at Agilent Technologies where she architected the successful SureSelect product line that lowered the cost of sequencing and elucidated dozens of Mendelian diseases.

She also developed the Oligo Library Synthesis technology, where she initiated and led product and business development activities for the team. Dr. Leproust designed and developed multiple commercial synthesis platforms to streamline microarray manufacturing and fabrication. Prior to Agilent, she worked with Dr. X. Gau at the University of Houston developing DNA and RNA parallel synthesis processes on solid support, a project developed commercially by Xeotron Corporation. Dr. Leproust has published more than 34 peer-reviewed papers—many on applications of synthetic DNA, and is the author of numerous patents. She earned her Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Houston and her M.Sc. in industrial chemistry from the Lyon School of Industrial Chemistry in France.