Dr. Fodor is co-founder of 13.8, Inc. He previously founded and served as chief executive officer of Cellular Research, Inc., a start-up life science technology company founded in 2011 working to develop new technology to improve the precision of measurements in biological samples. He is also founder and former chairman of Affymetrix, Inc., a manufacturer of genetics analysis tools. Affymetrix began as a unit of the Affymax Research Institute in Palo Alto, where Dr. Fodor spearheaded the effort to develop high-density arrays of biological compounds. Of the techniques developed, one approach permitted high-resolution chemical synthesis in a light-directed, spatially defined format. Dr. Fodor and his colleagues were the first to develop and describe microarray technologies and combinatorial chemistry synthesis for measuring the genetics of an organism.
Dr. Fodor is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Chemical Society, the Biophysical Society, and the National Academy of Engineering. In 1992, he and his colleagues were honored by the AAAS with the Newcomb-Cleveland Award for an outstanding paper published in Science. Dr. Fodor has received various honors and awards, including the Washington State University Distinguished Alumni Award, the Intellectual Property Owner’s Distinguished Inventor of the Year Award, the Chiron Corporation Biotechnology Research Award, The Association for Laboratory Automation Achievement Award, the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine, The Takeda Foundation Award, The Economist Innovation Award for Nanotechnology, and the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities Award for outstanding contributions to Biomolecular Technologies.
Dr. Fodor earned a BS in biology in 1978 and an MS in biochemistry in 1981, both from Washington State University, and an MA in 1983 and PhD in 1985 in chemistry from Princeton University. From 1986 to 1989, he was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, working on time-resolved spectroscopy of bacterial and plant pigments.