Bill Efcavitch

Bill Efcavitch was a founding member of Applied Biosystems, as the company’s 9th employee.  At Applied Biosystems, Dr. Efcavitch built and managed the R&D group that led the commercialization of phosphoramidite oligonucleotide synthesis and the Models 380A, 380B and 381 DNA synthesizers. He spent 18 years at the company, managing the development of many successful biotechnology instrument and reagent systems, including the AB 1700 Expression Array System, Model 3900 DNA Synthesizer, ABI Prism Models 377 and 3700, ABI Model 310 DNA Analyzer, and the Model 230A Micro Preparative Electrophoresis System.

In 2004 Dr. Efcavitch joined Helicos BioSciences Corporation as Senior Vice President of R&D and later became Chief Technology Officer. At Helicos, he led the development of the Helicos® Genetic Analysis System, the world’s first commercially available single molecule DNA sequencer.  In 2010 Dr. Efcavitch joined Affymetrix as the Senior Vice President of R&D.  From 2012 until the present, he has served as an independent consultant to several venture capital firms and biotechnology start-up companies. He is co-inventor of a flowable polymer for capillary electrophoresis DNA sequencing used in all Applied Biosystems’ capillary sequencers as well as virtual terminator nucleotides for single molecule DNA sequencing.

Dr. Efcavitch received his PhD in 1981 at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, where he studied with Dr. Thomas E. Wagner.  He was also a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Marvin H. Caruthers at the University of Colorado in Boulder.