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Dr. Eric Ward is the co-CEO of AgBiome. Between 2007 and 2012, he served as the President of the 2Blades Foundation and as Group Leader of the 2Blades Group at the Sainsbury Laboratory. Prior to that he served as CEO of Cropsolution, Inc., a crop protection chemical discovery company, and before that he was Co-President of Novartis (now Syngenta) Agribusiness Biotechnology Research, where he was responsible for a staff of 270, including researchers and all administrative functions, including finance, patents, business development, public affairs, human resources, and facilities. Simultaneously, Dr. Ward was head of target discovery for Novartis Crop Protection AG, where he implemented a fully integrated agricultural chemical lead discovery program based on proprietary molecular targets. This program relied on extensive interactions with biotech firms and academic labs. Prior to that, he was a Research Director for the Novartis herbicide business unit, during which time his team invented Acuron™ herbicide tolerance technology, developed corn and sugar beet varieties engineered with the Acuron™ gene, and built the patent strategy to protect the technology. In 1994-5, he worked in Basel, Switzerland as a project leader for Ciba Crop Protection in the Weed Control business unit. Dr. Ward began his career in 1988 with Ciba-Geigy as a postdoctoral associate, during which time he pioneered methods for cloning of large DNA fragments from plants. He received his Ph.D. in plant biology from Washington University in St. Louis in 1988, where he was a graduate fellow of the National Science Foundation. He received his B.S in biology magna cum laude from Duke University in 1982.