Mara Aspinall is a biotech industry executive and healthcare pioneer.    

She is Executive Chairman of GenePeeks, a company leading a paradigm shift at the intersection of genetic testing, personalized medicine and computational genomics.  GenePeeks’ proprietary technology can identify the risk of passing on more than 1100 monogenic diseases to progeny prior to conception, through complex data mining of the maternal and paternal genomes, taking into account known, novel and partially-damaging gene variants.

Mara is the former President and CEO of Ventana Medical Systems, a division of the Roche Group, worldwide leader in development and commercialization of tissue-based cancer diagnostics. Mara previously spent 12 years with Genzyme as President of Genzyme Genetics and Genzyme Pharmaceuticals. Genzyme Genetics, set the standard for quality in the diagnostics industry and was the market leader in prenatal and cancer testing. The business was sold to LabCorp for $1 billion.

She is a member of the Board of Directors of Abcam plc (AIM:ABC); Safeguard Scientific (NYSE:SFE), Blue Cross Blue Shield Arizona and Castle Biosciences. Aspinall is a former Director of BCBS Massachusetts, Delta Dental Massachusetts and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. 

Mara is passionate about the importance of educating the healthcare community on the importance and value of diagnostics. With that in mind, she was a co-founder of EPEMED, the European Personalised Medicine Association.  She continued to focus on education with the next generation of physicians and biotech professionals by co-founding the International School of Biomedical Diagnostics at Arizona State University and Dublin City University, the first school dedicated entirely to Diagnostics as an independent discipline. The School awarded their first Master degrees in 2015.  Mara is also Chairman of the Arizona Biosciences Board (statewide CEO group), Director of the Southern Arizona Leadership Council, Sun Corridor and Science Foundation Arizona.

Mara is a sought after national speaker and author of several articles and case studies on healthcare and named one of “100 Most Inspiring People in Life Sciences” by PharmaVOICE.