Founders and Board of Directors
Donald P. Francis, M.D., D.Sc.
Executive Director
Carter A. Lee, M.B.A.
Managing Director
Management and Staff
Faruk Sinangil, Ph.D.
Managing Director of Research & Development
Ian C. Francis
Senior Research Associate
Keith W. Higgins
Project Coordinator and Specimen Repository Manager
Evie Zaharias
Senior Research Associate
Co-founder and Senior Advisor
Donald P. Francis, M.D., D.Sc.
As an infectious disease trained pediatrician and epidemiologist, Dr. Francis has over 30 years experience in epidemic control and vaccines. He spent 21 years working for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) focusing on vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, cholera, smallpox, and hepatitis B. He directed the World Health Organization’s Smallpox Eradication Program in Sudan and U.P. State in Northern India. His hepatitis B vaccine work included Phase III trials among gay men in the United States and among infants born to carrier mothers in China. Dr. Francis was also a member of the WHO team investigating the world’s first outbreak of Ebola virus in 1976. His work in retroviruses began with Dr. Max Essex at Harvard, where Dr. Francis received his doctorate.
Dr. Francis has worked on HIV/AIDS since its emergence in 1981. He initially directed the AIDS laboratory at the CDC and worked closely with the Institut Pasteur to identify the causative virus. Later, he spent almost 7 years developing and assessing HIV prevention programs in the United States. Dr. Francis’ early efforts to call attention to the threat of AIDS and warn of the inadequacy of the public health response were chronicled in And the Band Played On, journalist Randy Shilts’ seminal account of the early years of the AIDS epidemic.
After his retirement from the CDC in 1992, he joined Genentech to spend full time developing vaccines, while he also helped found what became the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. With waning private sector interest in HIV vaccine development, Dr. Francis started a new company, VaxGen, to ensure that an HIV vaccine would be developed. In 2003, VaxGen completed the world’s first Phase III trials of two candidate HIV vaccines in North America and Europe and in Thailand, respectively. He left VaxGen, where he had served as President, in early 2004 to co-found GSID and serves as its Executive Director and principal investigator of GSID's dengue fever program.
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Mr. Lee earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Masters of Business Administration from California State University, Hayward. He began his career in 1977 with Coopers & Lybrand, now known as PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, initially as an auditor in their Business Assurance division and concluded his tenure there as a supervising consultant in the Management Consulting Services division. After leaving Coopers & Lybrand in 1986, Mr. Lee served as Vice President, Corporate Controller with Landor Associates and later was a founding principal of FutureBrand, both prominent leaders in the corporate branding and strategic design industry. In 1998, he joined VaxGen, as its General Manager and was appointed Senior Vice President, Finance & Administration, in 1999. He left VaxGen in early 2004 to co-found GSID and functions as its chief operating and financial officer.
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Faruk Sinangil has a long career in vaccine development and HIV research. After receiving his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1980 from the Hacettepe Medical School in Turkey, Dr. Sinangil continued his postdoctoral training at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. In 1982, he continued his post-doctoral work at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where he conducted research on various virus-cell interactions, including HIV. In 1987, he took a position as assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at Columbia University and continued his research on the molecular biology and virology of HIV, including development of a novel assay to study fusion of HIV with cultured cells.
In 1990, Dr. Sinangil left academia to pursue work in the private sector with Chiron Corporation (Emeryville, CA). Over the next ten years at Chiron, he lead efforts for pre-clinical and clinical testing of HIV, HBV, and pertussis candidate vaccine programs, oversaw the scientific teams, and worked closely with the clinical, regulatory, manufacturing, QA/QC, and project management teams. In 2001, Dr. Sinangil joined VaxGen, Inc. (Brisbane, CA), where he oversaw the Phase III clinical testing of a prophylactic HIV vaccine (AIDSVAX®). Later, he became the senior director responsible for the pre-clinical program and the development and qualification of assays for the pre-clinical and clinical testing of VaxGen’s anthrax and smallpox vaccine candidates. Over the years, his work has been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals and been presented at numerous national and international conferences. Dr. Sinangil joined GSID in 2006 as the Managing Director of Research and Development, and he is the principal investigator of GSID’s initial HIV research program.
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Ian Francis graduated from Stanford University in 1993 with a degree in German Studies. He began his career at Goldman Sachs on the Institutional Equities desk in Frankfurt, Germany, and then moved to the Investment Research Department in New York, where he worked with regional brokerage firms distributing Goldman Sachs research. Afterwards, he moved to London and worked on the trading desk as a liaison between the equity research, sales, and trading departments, including being a member of the European Stock Selection Committee. He joined GSID in March 2005 as a Senior Research Associate. Ian is the nephew of Executive Director Don Francis.
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Keith Higgins has been involved in vaccine development, sample management, and HIV research for many years. He received his MS. in Marine Sciences in 1979 from the Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge. He did his postgraduate training in immunology and cytogenesis at Florida Institute of Technology, in Melbourne Florida, under Dr J.C Hozier, working on Non-histone proteins. In the early ‘80’s, he moved to California and started his involvement in biotechnology and HIV research at Chiron Corporation (Emeryville, CA) Over the next fourteen years at Chiron, he was directly involved in managing pre-clinical in vivo studies. In 1999, Mr. Higgins joined Covance, Inc. (Richmond, CA), where he functioned as Study Director for a diverse array of client’s projects. Later, he joined VaxGen (South San Francisco, CA) where he was Pre-clinical Program Manager for their anthrax and smallpox vaccine projects. Over the years, he has contributed to research which has been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals and presented at numerous national and international conferences. Mr. Higgins joined GSID in 2008 as the Project Coordinator and Repository Manager.
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Evie Zaharias earned her undergraduate degree in Biology from Oberlin College, and began working on the gp120 vaccine project as a research associate during VaxGen’s start-up phase in 1997. She developed and performed antibody assays to support Phase I-III AIDSVAX clinical trials, and was involved in laboratory automation, data management, and sample management in the Immunoassay group. She also coordinated GLP compliance efforts within the Clinical Assay group for the anthrax vaccine project. Evie joined GSID in late 2007 to focus on repository management and the GSID HIV Data Browser project.
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Dr. Phillip Berman, a biotech veteran, has been at the forefront of recombinant DNA research and vaccine development for his entire career. He began his postdoctoral career in the Neurobiology Laboratory of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Ca. In 1981, when scientists announced the first breakthrough in the development of recombinant DNA, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue this new field at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Berman worked with Dr. Herbert Boyer from 1981-82 on projects relating to the expression of recombinant proteins and in 1982, he joined Genentech, the company founded by Dr. Boyer. Over the course of a 15-year career at Genentech served as Staff Scientist and Project Team Leader in the Divisions of Discovery Research and Process Sciences. During this time he played a leadership role on various projects including vaccines to prevent Herpes Simplex Virus and HIV infections, humanized antibodies to treat inflammation, and technology development programs to improve the yield and quality of recombinant proteins. He has published more than 85 scientific articles and holds multiple patents in vaccines and recombinant DNA technology. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Berman has played a pivotal role in the quest for an AIDS vaccine. During the early 1980s, he was a principal scientist on a research team that produced the recombinant gp120 protein and showed, for the first time, that antibody to recombinant gp120 could neutralize HIV-1. A major milestone came in 1990 with the development of the first vaccine that was able to protect chimpanzees from HIV infection.
Dr. Berman co-founded VaxGen and joined the company in 1997 as Senior Vice President, Research and Development. At VaxGen he managed the HIV vaccine research program, the clinical assay program, and the scale-up process development and manufacturing programs. Using the gp120 model, Dr. Berman conducted molecular epidemiological studies and selected new antigens to complement and improve earlier Genentech vaccine and to expand the breadth of immunity that could be achieved with the VaxGen AIDS vaccine. This research led to the development of AIDSVAX, a bivalent vaccine designed to attack both the laboratory strain of HIV and strains typical of HIV infections in the Americas, Western Europe, the Caribbean and South Asia. Following the completion of the VaxGen Phase III HIV vaccine field trials, Dr. Berman initiated an anthrax vaccine program which eventually led to the award of an $877 million national stockpile contract. He left VaxGen in early 2004 to co-found GSID and in 2006 was appointed professor and chair of the Department of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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