Hannah Monds, MBA - Director of Business Development - Hannah Monds has over 12 years of operational, business and consulting experience in the pharmaceutical drug sector. Prior to joining Gene Express, Ms. Monds spent more than 10 years with AAIPharma, a global provider of product development and support services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries. She began her career at AAIPharma performing laboratory analyses of pharmaceuticals. Ms. Monds then served as Manager of AAIPharma’s Stability Management Services division. Here she developed the department’s operations and drove the growth of the business unit through customer development and management.  

Over the past seven years, Ms. Monds has also performed operational audits and provided consulting services for various pharmaceutical organizations, presented at several conferences regarding the stability of pharmaceuticals throughout the drug development process, and contributed to technical publications. In 2006, Ms. Monds received an M.B.A from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

Larissa Karnaoukhova, Ph.D. - Director of Strategic Relations - prior to joining Gene Express she served as the Biosciences Sales Manager at VWR International, a leading product supplier to the global research laboratory industry. In this role, she was responsible for promoting and selling drug discovery and development services from a broad range of contract research organizations (CROs) to biotech, pharmaceutical and medical device companies in Southern California and Arizona. At VWR International, she succeeded in identifying customer needs, in turn presenting solutions through a diverse portfolio of services in genomics, proteomics, pre-clinical development, scale-up manufacturing, imaging, lab automation instrumentation, and clinical trials. Ultimately, this enabled Ms. Karnaoukhova to design strategies to broaden the customer base.

Over the previous nine years, Dr. Karnaoukhova developed her scientific career at Invitrogen Corporation, where she took on positions of increasing responsibility. She developed innovative products and services in gene identification and cloning, and served most recently as a Senior Scientist, facilitating program management in cloning and protein expression. She has authored several academic and scientific publications, highlighting her expertise in gene isolation, cloning, and gene expression. Dr. Karnaoukhova is currently working towards receiving an MBA from UCSD, RADY School of Management. She received her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia in 1998, and an M.Sc. in Physics/Biophysics from Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia in 1992.

Brad Austermiller - SEM Center Manager - Mr. Austermiller has been an employee of Gene Express since June of 2006, but was involved with the SEM Center at the Medical College of Ohio since 2003.  He graduated from the University of Toledo with a degree in Bioengineering.  Brad continues to play a key role in the development of the SEM Center and its software, including the recent upgrades to bring the HT S-GEM Suite software package closer to 21 CFR Part 11 compliance.  In July of 2007, Brad was promoted to SEM Center Manager.

Keller Pollock - Senior Manager of Human Resources - Over the last decade, Ms. Pollock has gained valuable marketing insight by working in a variety of settings, from start-ups to global corporations in NYC, Ft. Lauderdale, and Atlanta, GA. Prior to Gene Express, Inc. she was the manager for the well known salon/spa, Ecotage, part of Macy's Federated. Currently, she enjoys planning and executing the conception, promotion and distribution of GEI's proprietary technology. She is very excited to spread the word about StaRT-PCR and all other Gene Express, Inc. endeavors. Ms. Pollock has a B.A. from Smith College and is a LMT.