Robert Chess (Lecturer)

Personal bio
Rob Chess is a serial entrepreneur in the life sciences field and a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He currently is Chairman of Nektar Therapeutics, (NASDAQ:NKTR), a health care biotechnology company; OPX Biotechnologies, a private company in the renewable chemicals field; and Biota Technologies, a start-up developing industrial applications of the analysis of microbial communities. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Pelvalon, a medical device company, and Twist Biosciences, which is pioneering a new high throughput system for producing synthetic genes. Rob joined Nektar as its first non-founder employee in 1991 and led the company as CEO through 1999 and as Chairman since then. Rob also served as the initial CEO for OPX and is a co-founder of Biota. Rob co-founded and was President of Penederm, a dermatology company that went public and was sold to Mylan Laboratories. He started his career in the technology field and held management positions at Intel and Metaphor Computer Systems (later acquired by IBM). Rob served on the White House Staff in the first Bush Administration as a White House Fellow and Associate Director of the White House Office of Economic and Domestic Policy. In additional to his entrepreneurial endeavors, Rob is on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he teaches courses in the MBA program on starting technology-based businesses and on the health care industry. He is a trustee of Caltech, Chairman of the Trustee Technology Transfer Committee, and is a lecturer at Caltech teaching entrepreneurship. Rob was a long-time Board member of the Biotechnology Industry Organization where he was chairman of the Emerging Companies Section and co-chairman of the Intellectual Property Committee. He is the former Chairman and current Board member of Bio Ventures for Global Health, and a trustee of the Committee for Economic Development where he was co-chairman of their Health Care task force. Rob received a BS in engineering with honors from Caltech and an MBA from Harvard.

Currently teaching