Founder Mike Ignatius, PhD, received his BS at the University of Oregon in Biochemistry and Neuroscience then completed a PhD at Stanford with Eric Shooter in development and repair of the nervous system. After a post-doc with Louis Reichardt in the HHMI institute at UCSF, he joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1991. He then became interested in the instrumentation around the exploding field of fluorescence and microscopy. He spent 5 years in the instrumentation sector, including Nikon industries. Then moved to the leader in fluorescence detection, Molecular Probes in 2002 , where he was Director of the imaging and microscopy group for over a decade. He launched over 100 SKUs, including the Prolong Gold Anti-Fade Mountant which has been cited over 122K times. He then moved to Marker Gene and later AbCam/Danaher where he launched 2 dozen products. Since then he has been developing products independently. He has several patents and his research work has been cited over 3000 times.
Mike has 3 sons, Nate, Hunter, and Kenji, who play pivotal roles. In his free time, he plays too much tennis and misses rock climbing, backpacking, running and skiing.