As Chromatin’s CEO, Daphne Preuss has assembled a vertically integrated sorghum business with state-of-the-art technologies, a market-leading breeding team, and global sales and distribution networks. After joining the company in 2006, she led the transition from a research stage to a commercial stage, through a series of alliances with leading agriculture companies, acquisitions, and commercial product sales. Preuss previously spent 16 years in plant research, founding Chromatin to commercialize synthetic chromosome technology developed in her laboratory at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and The University of Chicago. She served as the chair of the international committee that oversaw the sequencing of the first plant genome and currently serves on the Board of the Biotechnology Industry Organization as a member of its Food & Agriculture Governing Section Board. She earned a Ph.D. from MIT and performed postdoctoral work at Stanford.