AgriMetis adds industry leaders to its team

Date:05-29-2015

The US company AgriMetis (Baltimore, MD) recently recruited agriculture industry veterans Dr. John Atkin to its board of directors and Dr. Pat N. Confalone to its scientific advisory board.

Dr. Atkin has a four-decade career in the agriculture industry. He served as Chief Operating Officer for Syngenta from 2000 until 2014. Previously, he held roles as Chief Executive Officer for Novartis Crop Protection as well as a number of commercial and R&D leadership positions in Sandoz, FMC and Rhône-Poulenc. Dr. Atkin is currently a board member of the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture and Driscoll’s. On joining AgriMetis, Dr. Atkin said; "I am very pleased to join the board of AgriMetis and support them in developing some extremely promising products."

Dr. Confalone served as DuPont’s Vice President of Global R&D, Crop Protection from 2003 through 2013.  During his career at DuPont, he developed a number of blockbuster products, including Rynaxypyr™, one of the safest and most active new insecticides with world-wide sales approaching a billion dollars a year. Dr. Confalone is chairman of the board of the American Chemical Society.  He held prior executive roles at DuPont-Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Hoffman-La Roche. On how he sees the AgriMetis opportunity, Dr. Confalone said, "I’m excited to work with an innovative team that combines expertise in synthetic biology and chemistry to discover novel crop protection products."

Founded in 2014, AgriMetis develops natural product derived compounds to protect crops from weeds, fungal disease and insects.