Nevin Summers serves as Executive Director for the MIT Synthetic Biology Center and Research Scientist-Architect in the Weiss Lab. In these roles he recently helped organize the First International Mammalian Synthetic Biology Workshop and the Pfizer-MIT Partnership in Synthetic Biology. He is Founder and President of Novation, Inc., a consultancy providing due diligence, business planning, corporate development, and technology assessment services to venture capitalists, universities, and life science companies. Previously, Nevin was Director of Corporate Development for Biomedical Enterprise Program, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology. He was co-founder of MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation and was Life Sciences Specialist to MIT Sloan School of Management, grant reviewer to MIT Deshpande Center and mentor in the Commercializing Science course at Harvard Business School.
Nevin held executive positions at biotechnology companies. He was Chairman and Founding CEO of CISTRAN Corp., a genome sequencing startup co-founded in 2001 with Harvard Prof. George Church, and was Senior Director for Strategic Planning, Technology Assessment & Genomics at Hybridon. He worked previously on finance, regulatory approval, design and construction of mixed-use high-rise real estate developments in Boston and Washington for The Beacon Companies. He won First Prize in Westinghouse-Intel Science Talent Search at age 17, studied molecular biology at Johns Hopkins (BS '71) and Stanford, and later earned professional graduate degrees in architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design (MArch '80) and in management of technology at MIT Sloan School and MIT School of Engineering (SM '93). Nevin is a student of Bauhaus industrial design philosophy. For a decade he was assistant to Mrs. Walter Gropius at the Gropius House in Lincoln, MA, during which time he organized her late husband's writings, now available to scholars at Harvard and Bauhaus Archive in Berlin.
For more information, visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/nevinsummers/.