Laura Carreira, Principal Research Officer, Co-Founder, leads the Company’s research and development efforts for plant enzymes. Dr. Carreira is one of the world’s leading authorities on the isolation and identification of enzymes from soils. By combining her expertise in chemistry, biotechnology, and genetics, she has developed a proprietary system to identify plants that produce enzymes for commercial applications. For five years, she was Principal Investigator for DynCorp Science and Environmental Division, an on-site contractor for the Athens US EPA, working with sediment enzymes used to degrade organic pollutants. She is a frequently invited speaker at national and international meetings on phytoremediation. Dr. Carreira received her B.A. in Chemistry from Oklahoma State University in 1968, her M.S. in Pharmacology from the University of South Carolina in 1974, and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Genetics from the University of Georgia in 1980. She has extremely relevant expertise working with anaerobic soil bacteria, plant enzyme isolation, the mechanisms regulating plant growth, and the fate and transport of contaminants in the environment.
Michael Coia, Co-Founder, has over 21 years of experience in all phases of environmental remediation, including system design, engineering staff line management, contracting, project management, and fiscal planning. Mr. Coia has directed phytoremediation projects within URS Corporation, with whom APGEN is teamed on several ongoing phytoremediation projects. Prior to that, he directed the Technical Services Group of 130 engineers and technicians for the Northern Region of OHM, one of the largest remediation companies in the United States. Mr. Coia was one of the partners and was a program director for the remediation affiliate of Environmental Resource Management, ERM EnviroClean. Previously, he was a Field Engineer and Project Manager at Roy F. Weston where he participated in some of the first laboratory and field demonstrations of innovative soil vapor extraction and lagoon stabilization/closure technologies.
Mr. Coia is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Water Environment Federation where he sits on the Hazardous Waste and Ground water Committees. He is currently active within the Phytoremediation Subgroups of the EPA-sponsored Contaminated Sediments RTDF and the 26-state regulatory cooperative ITRC. He received his B.S. cum laude in Civil Engineering and his M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Duke University.
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Richard Meagher, Chief Scientific Officer, Co-Founder, is an internationally recognized authority on plant molecular genetics and phytoremediation. He is presently a Professor of Genetics and was formally Head of the Genetics Department at the University of Georgia where he has been teaching and performing research since 1976. Dr. Meagher began his career with Postdoctoral Fellowships from both the American Cancer Society and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at U.C. Berkeley and U.C. San Francisco. He has lead a progressive research program at the University of Georgia for 24 years, receiving grants from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, and the NIH. From 1991 to 1992, Dr. Meagher served as Manager for the USDA Competitive Grants "Plant Genome" Panel. He was a member of the NIH "Molecular Biology" study section from 1992 to 1995.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Meagher launched and directed the University’s Molecular Genetics Instrumentation Facility for automated DNA and protein sequencing and synthesis for plant, animal and bacterial applications. He also co-founded the Biological Scientists Computation Resource, one of the first computing networks in the world to analyze DNA and RNA protein sequences. This Resource now serves over 200 laboratories. Dr. Meagher received his B.S. with honors in Biology from the University of Illinois in 1969. He received both his Master in Biology and Bacterial Physiology in 1971 and his Ph.D. in Biology and Enzymology in 1973 from Yale University working on the degradation of aromatic compounds. In 1975, during his postdoctoral research with Herb Boyer and Howard Goodman at UC San Francisco, he was the first person to clone and express plant DNA in bacteria. Dr. Meagher has published more than 90 research articles in prestigious such journals as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cell, Nature, Genetics, Plant Cell, Plant Journal, Nature Biotechnology, and Virology.
David J. Glass, Chief Executive Officer, has twenty years’ experience in management positions in biotechnology, and for the past ten years has been widely recognized as one of the leading business analysts of remediation markets and technologies. As an independent consultant, Dr. Glass has advised companies in North America, Europe and Australia on the structure of remediation markets, and has assisted firms in North America, South America and Europe locate potential partners or customers for remediation technologies. Dr. Glass is the author of several market reports and articles on bioremediation and phytoremediation, including "U.S. and International Markets for Phytoremediation, 1999-2000" (July 1999), "The 1998 United States Market for Phytoremediation" (April 1998), "Bioremediation in Germany" (co-authored with Thomas Raphael, June 1994), and "The Promising Worldwide Bioremediation Market", published by Decision Resources, Inc. in December 1993. Dr. Glass has been a featured speaker at several major remediation conferences on U.S. and international markets for site remediation, phytoremediation, and bioremediation, and is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Phytoremediation.
Dr. Glass holds a B.S. degree in biological sciences from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in biochemical sciences from Princeton University. From 1981 to 1990, Dr. Glass served in a succession of management roles at BioTechnica International, culminating as Vice President, Government and Regulatory Affairs for the company’s agricultural subsidiary. At BioTechnica, he focused on the commercial uses and government regulation of microorganisms in the environment, and he obtained federal and state government approvals for some of the earliest field tests of genetically modified microorganisms and plants in the U.S. From 1991 to 2001, concurrently with carrying out his consulting activities, Dr. Glass was associate director of the technology transfer office at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he was responsible for managing and providing strategic direction to the hospital’s large portfolio of patent applications arising from biomedical research, and for drafting and negotiating license, option and research agreements with biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical device and agbiotech companies.