Jay West's Biography

Jay West, Senior Director of R&D, Fluidigm Corporation

Jay West is a molecular cell biologist and the Senior Director of Research and Development at Fluidigm Corporation in South San Francisco. His group leads new technology development and has recently completed the C1 and Polaris systems to enable a variety of novel single cell workflows. The group works collaboratively with the global scientific community to innovate and advance biomolecular detection and quantification tools that accelerate systems biology approaches using single-cell samples and workflows. This portfolio of emerging methods will further facilitate elucidation of the molecular basis for cell pathway architectures in cancer, immune responses, neurological disorders, stem cells, and early development. Before joining Fluidigm in late 2010, Jay spent 6 years innovating qPCR and integrated molecular detection systems at Arcxis Biotechnologies, which he co-founded. Jay has been a lead investigator in the development of novel qPCR assay systems and chemistry, materials development for sample enrichment and rapid detection systems. Prior to co-founding Arcxis, Jay was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National laboratories where he led development of a variety of CE and microarray based detection systems. He received his undergraduate instruction in Environmental Science and Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and graduate training in Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, Davis. Jay has coauthored numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, technical book chapters, and has issued and published patent applications in the biomolecular detection and quantification fields.