Tom brings to Synosia an investment background, having joined the company from one of the founding investors, Versant Ventures. While at Versant, Tom wrote the business plan and negotiated the license agreements that led to the formation of Synosia. In collaboration with Brad Bolzon, a managing director at Versant, Tom enabled the formation of two additional early stage start-up companies: Amira Pharmaceuticals, where he served as the acting chief business officer, and Sentient Therapeutics, where he continues to serve on the board of directors. Prior to Versant, Tom worked as a medicinal chemist at XenoPort on methods to improve the gastrointestinal absorption of drug candidates. In this role, he led the development of a new high-throughput screening technology to enable the identification of pathways capable of transporting large molecule therapeutics across the gastrointestinal barrier. Tom graduated from University of California, Berkeley summa cum laude with highest honors for his bachelor’s degree in English and earned the departmental citation for his bachelor’s in chemistry. Tom went on to earn his doctorate in organic chemistry as an NSF fellow at Stanford University