• /

  • Board of Directors

Dr. Frances Arnold, PhD

Director

Dr. Frances Arnold, PhD
"Altos offers a whole new research and development model targeted to the oldest of human problems, slowing and even ultimately reversing the effects of disease. This remarkable team is poised to discover the secrets of cellular health and transform how we think about disease. Now more than ever is the time to restructure our approach to health by understanding, slowing, and even reversing the processes that lead to illness and death."

Dr. Frances Arnold is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology.

Dr. Arnold received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2018) for pioneering directed evolution methods used to make enzymes for applications across medicine, consumer products, agriculture, fuels, and chemicals. She was appointed Co-Chair of the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) by President Biden in 2021.

Co-inventor on more than 60 issued US patents and active in technology transfer, Dr. Arnold co-founded Gevo, Inc. in 2005 to make fuels and chemicals from renewable resources, Provivi, Inc. in 2014 to develop non-toxic modes of agricultural pest control, and Aralez, Inc. in 2019 to develop sustainable biocatalytic processes for producing medicines and chemicals. She is a Director of Illumina and Alphabet. Dr. Arnold has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the US National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering; she was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Francis in 2019. She received her B.S. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.