Francisco Garcia, PhD

Francisco brings over 20 years of experience leading the development of software and instrumentation for the life sciences industry. Before joining Element as Vice President of Software and Informatics, he served as General Manager at the GSWC Group, LLC providing technical consulting services for companies in software strategy, data analysis and cloud-native development.

Francisco’s experience includes almost 19 years at Illumina, most recently as Vice President of Software Engineering and Embedded Systems. In 2009, he won the annual Illumina Innovation Award for the development of RTA, the on-instrument real-time primary analysis software for sequencing. He was directly involved with the launch of every major system, from the BeadArray Reader to the NovaSeq, and spearheaded the re-invention of Illumina’s cloud platform.

Francisco holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, where he received numerous awards and scholarships, including being named a National Merit Scholar, an Eastman Kodak Scholar and a Merrill Presidential Scholar. He was awarded his PhD from the Space Plasma Physics Group in Electrical Engineering at Cornell University, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow.