Oxford Nanopore Technologies welcomes Dr. Kathleen Barnes as new Senior Vice President of Population Health and Precision Medicine

We are excited to welcome Dr. Kathleen C. Barnes as our new Senior Vice President of Population Health and Precision Medicine.   

With more than three decades of experience in academic research in population health, and more recently in industry, Kathleen is a prominent figure in the realm of population health and precision medicine — in particular understanding approaches to large-scale precision medicine programmes. Prior to Oxford Nanopore, she was the Founding Director of the Colorado Center for Personalised Medicine and former Head of the Division of Biomedical Informatics & Personalised Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Center before joining Tempus Labs as SVP, Population Health Genomics.   

Kathleen's expertise extends beyond these roles, having served as an advisor and reviewer for prestigious NIH-supported programs, including the National Human Genome Research Institute and international initiatives like H3Africa. She is also a founding executive member of the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute-supported Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) program.  

In her new scientific leadership role at Oxford Nanopore, Kathleen will lead a new initiative focused on accelerating Oxford Nanopore technology adoption at the point of care and empowering health systems, providers and individual users to access precision medicine tools throughout the life journey. This will be achieved by bridging expertise across many teams in Oxford Nanopore, from scientific to life science research and clinical commercial teams.  

Dr Gordon Sanghera , CEO, said: “We’re delighted to welcome Kathleen –whose knowledge of integrating genomics strategies into health systems at scale will be key to our impact in the coming years.  Oxford Nanopore’s vision is to enable the analysis of anything, by anyone, anywhere and this includes broadening the accessibility of our platform to a diversity of populations. We are excited to be reflecting this with leadership in Population Health and committing to strategies that have the potential to drive broad improvements in health systems through multi-omics analyses.” 

Dr. Dr Emma Stanton , SVP, Clinical, said: “We are excited to welcome Kathleen– as a leading scientist in population health, she hugely expands our expertise and our ability to deliver on our impact goals. I look forward to working together to bring the benefits of Oxford Nanopore’s unique technology to bear across complex health systems globally.”  

Dr Rich Compton , SVP, Sales & Commercial Operations, said “Our global teams are increasingly working with scientific communities to innovate better ways to improve health outcomes at scale, and often through national genomics programmes.  We are excited that Kathleen will enhance the value that we are bringing in the delivery of these large-scale strategies, not only in the Americas but also in our Asia Pacific and European/Middle East regions. 

As part of her population health mandate, Kathleen will play a crucial part in our engagements with policymakers and key stakeholders for the implementation of system-wide genomics and multi-omic programs. These insights into large-scale precision medicine programs and translational research will be invaluable as we continue to expand our presence in these critical markets.  

 Please join us in giving Kathleen a warm welcome to the Oxford Nanopore team!  

 #NewHire #PrecisionMedicine #PopulationHealth #OxfordNanopore