Chris Gibson, Ph.D., is the Co-Founder and Board Chair of Recursion, a leading clinical stage TechBio company leveraging the latest in automation and AI to decode biology to radically improve lives. Chris developed the technology behind Recursion’s approach as part of his graduate work in the lab of Dr. Dean Li (currently President of Merck Research Labs) at the University of Utah and launched the company in 2013.
As CEO from the company’s founding in 2013 through 2025, Chris built Recursion from an early-stage startup to a category-defining, publicly listed TechBio company, with more than 600 employees. Under his leadership, the company scaled its proprietary data-generation engine to create one of the world’s largest integrated biological and chemical datasets, and built an in-house supercomputer—the fastest wholly owned and operated by any pharma or biotech company when built—to train and deploy advanced AI models at the frontier of computational biology and chemistry. He established landmark partnerships with pharma leaders like Roche and Genentech, Sanofi, and Bayer, demonstrating the industry’s conviction in the power of Recursion’s platform to discover novel biology and advance potential new medicines for large, complex diseases. During his tenure, the company advanced a pipeline of first-in-class and best-in-class clinical-stage assets across oncology and rare disease, all while assembling the foundational team, culture, and technology suite capable of transforming how medicines are discovered and developed at scale.
