President & Chief Executive Officer
Rachelle is an experienced leader of scientific innovation with a unique mix of scientific expertise and business strategy acumen. She holds a Ph.D. in pharmacology and contributed to the discovery of multiple therapeutic candidates and marketed products during her 25-year tenure at Eli Lilly and Company. At Lilly, she held numerous scientific and leadership positions, including two years at Elanco Animal Health. Within Elanco, she facilitated organizational change, process improvement, and strategies for disruptive technologies. Rachelle has also consulted for numerous biotechs and start-ups to develop and implement plans to bring innovative solutions to the marketplace.
Christopher Belnap
Founder
Chris co-founded and launched Resilient Biotics in 2017. He holds a Ph.D. in microbiology, and has an extensive research background focused on microbial ecology and multi-omic analyses of microbiome-host systems. Early in his career, Chris held several positions as a scientific leader investigating microbiome communities and conducting discovery of novel strains with unique functions. Since serving as the CEO of Resilient Biotics, he has led the company through multiple rounds of venture funding and secured a strategic partnership to enable the development of the company’s novel respiratory microbiome products. Chris has previously developed microbials for both plant and animal applications in other successful companies including DuPont Pioneer and Taxon Biosciences. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco.
Todd DeSantis
Vice President of Bioinformatics
Todd has deep expertise building flexible informatics teams for biomarker and drug discovery in the microbiome field. He champions the integration of data from diverse laboratory approaches for generating complex “omics” profiles, and he has successfully developed composite markers predictive of disease progression or therapeutic efficacy. Todd has lead high-value R&D projects from the proposal through execution and has coordinated cross-functional teams. Previously, he was a researcher at the Livermore and Berkeley National Labs, where he developed highly-cited databases, software and laboratory assays which have been used extensively for microbiome research. In 2010, Todd co-founded Second Genome and served as VP of Informatics, where he and his team created an industrial scale platform allowing multi-technology meta-analysis to discover novel therapeutics for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, Autism Spectrum Disorder and Cancer. Todd has authored five issued patents, multiple patents pending and >70 peer-reviewed publications with >45,000 citations.
