Independent Director
Dr. Persing was Executive Vice President and Chief Medical & Scientific Officer at Cepheid, and was the Chief Scientific Officer for the Danaher Diagnostics platform after the acquisition of Cepheid in 2016.
A clinical pathologist by training, he completed MD and PhD degrees at University of California, San Francisco and residency training in Clinical Pathology at Yale University School of Medicine. Early in his career, he designed and established the first PCR reference laboratory at the Mayo Clinic and later moved into industry leadership in molecular diagnostics.
At Cepheid since 2005, he is credited with advancing the enablement and scale-up of rapid molecular testing across infectious disease and oncology applications, and he has been a long-standing advocate for “democratizing” molecular diagnostics (making high-performance testing accessible in routine and resource-limited settings). He has published 300+ peer-reviewed articles/reviews and edited several widely used molecular diagnostics textbooks. In October 2020 he was listed as one of Fierce Pharma's 22 most influential people in the fight against Covid-19, and in 2024 he received the Pantheon award from California Life Sciences for visionary leadership in molecular diagnostics.
