Our Employees
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George Avalos
Technical Sales Specialist
Sales
George Avalos joined Aurora SFC Systems in 2011, after spending the last 11 years at Phenomenex Inc. as an Account Manager where he was an accomplished top sales leader. He has extensive experience selling HPLC, GC, SPE, and Preparative products to key accounts in many industries throughout the United States.
George is well known for his excellent customer-focused skills. He has always valued the importance of trust in relationship building while working with all customers. He continues to foster those strong relationships with Aurora SFC Systems.
George was born and raised in Fresno, California, has a BS in Biology with an emphasis in biochemistry from San Diego State University and today resides in Hawthorne, California with his wife, Celinda and their three-year old son, Joaquin.
Bob Nairn
Director
North American Sales
Robert Nairn, a graduate of the University of New Hampshire, has spent his career building Companies top-line revenue through Sales and Sales Management. His determination, intellect, and drive to succeed has served him well, both during his school years on an athletic scholarship and throughout his business career.
In 1987, Bob joined Porton Instruments, a privately held start-up company with a new innovative state of the art protein sequencer. He was the fifth employee and the only Sales person. In his role as National Sales Manager he developed a team of professionals that captured better than 50% market share from Applied Biosystems the long time market leader. The Company was successfully sold to Beckman Instruments in 1992.
While Beckman wanted Bob to continue in his role as VP of Sales for this division, the desire to build another company made the timing right. Bob joined FormaVitrum, Inc, a Swiss Company, to introduce their products to the US market. He then helped position Research Organics to secure their percentage of the fine chemicals market. He remained with them until Berger Instruments came calling.
Berger Instruments, a privately owned Delaware company, was started in 1996 to introduce Supercritical Fluid Chromatography instrumentation to the Pharma and Biotech markets. The founders recognized Bob's capabilities, network within the marketplace and past successes in driving new business. Bob accepted the position of Equity Partner and of leading their new Sales group, and was the driving force of their success. Berger was acquired by Mettler-Toledo in November of 2000. Bob remained their National Sales Manager until 2005 when he and Terry Berger started the AccelaPure Corporation which utilized the SFC equipment that was developed by Berger Instruments to do analysis and purification services for the Pharma and Biotech industries.
The AccelaPure management team decided to sell AccelaPure to some Princeton University scientific personnel.
The core of the Berger Instruments company regrouped to start Aurora SFC Systems, Inc. in 2009; and this world class SFC team developed a revolutionary product called “Fusion” which interfaces with an HPLC and makes it capable of doing the world’s greatest Analytical SFC. The company also plans on developing Preparative SFC equipment. Bob again took the reins of VP, Sales.
Bob resides in Atlantic Highlands, NJ, and utilizes his Division 1 basketball skills to coach AAU basketball in his spare time and has won 7 Championships with 10 teams he has coached.
David A Boulton
Senior Field Service Specialist
Applications and Customer Education
Former Vice president of Technology & Operations with Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, he is an experienced entrepreneur and innovative chemical technologist. In 1996 he was a founding member of Coelacanth Corporation and was instrumental in the successful merger of Lexicon and Coelacanth, bringing drug discovery chemistry into Lexicon’s genetic target discovery engine. Prior to the start-up of Coelacanth, he was Senior Director of Automated Synthesis at ArQule, where as one of the first employees, he was credited with developing ArQule’s breakthrough chemical library automation platform. During fifteen years of R&D at Merck & Company in Medicinal Chemistry, he helped push the frontiers of technology as a founding member of the automated synthesis group. He has a wealth of practical experience in research facility management, design, and construction, in combination with extensive “hands on” knowledge of synthetic chemistry technology.
Jennifer Van Anda, Ph.D.
Senior Marketing Chemist
Applications and Customer Education
Jennifer received a PhD in Pharmacology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. She did a post-doctorate in the Pharmacology Department at Burroughs Wellcome. She joined Assagai Laboratories, an independent analytical and environmental lab, to be the State Racing Chemist for New Mexico and Arizona and director of the Environmental Lab. Subsequently, she joined Agilent Technologies, Chemical Analysis Group where she worked in a variety of positions. In 2000, she joined Berger Instruments/Mettler-Toledo as a Marketing Chemist. In 2006, Jennifer joined AstraZeneca to be Team Leader for the Purification Group working with Lead Optimization and Lead Generation. In 2010, she joined Aurora SFC Systems as an Application Chemist.
Denis Berger
Head Consultant
CHEMPUTEAM SA
Chemputeam SA is a company involved in R&D, services, support and consulting dedicated to customers from pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology, laboratory instrumentation and related industries, with specific expertise in data acquisition and mining, information sharing and knowledge management. Chemputeam SA and Denis Berger have been appointed as long term consultant for science and technology by several customers, including Mettler-Toledo AutoChem, Berger Instruments, Synlogic, Ibex Objects Systems, Siemens, HP, and is providing new drugs discovery expertise to many of the major pharmaceutical companies.
During the last 10 years, the main focus has been the scientific support and applications development using both analytical and preparative Supercritical Fluid Chromatography (SFC).