Asuragen Personnel

As a service provider the quality of our work reflects the quality of our people. Accordingly, we take great pride in the data we generate for our clients and the personnel who generate that data. Our staff has decades of cumulative array target preparation experience and RNA isolation experience with a broad range of human samples. Our bioinformatics group is equipped and experienced with current tools and "best practices" experience for gene expression profiling, pathway analysis, and biomarker discovery and validation. To support our staff and ensure client satisfaction, we have systematic training and qualification procedures for all laboratory and informatics staff, and we monitor key performance metrics on a daily basis for each of our staff. All new staff members must complete extensive hands-on training and pass performance metrics including yield, quality, repeatability, and speed of processing before handling any customer samples. This training and qualification is performed independently for any protocol Asuragen offers, so clients can be assured their samples are being processed by an experienced operator no matter the protocol. As you can see below, our key management and scientific staff have long-standing involvement in the field of gene expression analysis and service. To our core, we are an organization dedicated to client success.

Key staff:

Matt Winkler, Ph.D. - CEO/CSO, Dr. Winkler founded Ambion in 1988, grew it to $58M in revenue and sold the research products division in 2005 to Applied Biosystems. He is the founder of Asuragen. Prior to founding Ambion he was an Associate Professor of Zoology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has a B.S. degree in Genetics and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of California at Berkeley.


Rollie Carlson, Ph.D. - President, Dr. Carlson joined Asuragen in April 2006 from Abbott Laboratories where he served as Vice President, Business Development & Licensing. Prior to this position, Dr. Carlson was Global General Manager and Vice President, Molecular Diagnostics at Vysis, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Abbott Laboratories. Dr. Carlson has served in various senior sales, marketing, and business development positions. He received his Ph.D. in 1984.


Carol E. Berry - VP and General Manager of Services. Ms. Berry has over 20 years of executive management experience in the diagnostic and biotechnology industry. In April 2008 Carol joined Asuragen as the Vice President and General Manager of Pharmacogenomic Services. Prior to Asuragen, Ms. Berry was Vice President of Sales and Marketing at AviaraDx, a start-up commercializing novel tests in breast cancer and mestastic cancer. From 2002 to 2007, Carol was a member of the senior management team at Cipheragen Biosystems, Inc. a proteomic equipment and pharmacoproteomic reasearch company. She held a variety of positions ranging from business development, sales and marketing management to President of Sales/Marketing for Dynacare Laboratories where she was instrumental in expanding Dynacare's market share to a national ranking through acquisitions and organic sales growth. In 1996, Carol joined Cerner Corporation and became the National Sales Director for Cerner's vertical product group called PathNet. Ms. Berry was one of the top fifty General Managers at Roche Biomedical Laboratories where she began her diagnostic career. Carol received her Bachelor of Science degree from Texas A&M University and a Masters in Business Adminstration/Information Technology from University of Dallas.


Fred Fletcher, Ph.D. - VP of Operations, Dr. Fletcher earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from Baylor College of Medicine in 1990. Dr. Fletcher brings 20 years of experience in molecular biology to his current position as Director of Operations for Asuragen Services. In that capacity, he has direct responsibility for Asuragen's regulated (cGLP) Service laboratories. Dr. Fletcher also serves as the Laboratory Director for Asuragen's CLIA laboratory. Dr. Fletcher's professional career includes 4 years as a bench scientist with Immunex in Seattle, WA and ten years with Amgen in Thousand Oaks, CA as a scientist and manager. Dr. Fletcher retired from Amgen in 2003 as Head of Functional Genomics. In that position, he had responsibility for Amgen's molecular biology service cores, including those for DNA sequencing, oligonucleotide synthesis, and microarray-based gene expression analysis, among others.