Leadership Team

DAVID MARGULIES, MD, Co-founder & Chairman of the Board - David Margulies is a physician executive and entrepreneur with career-long interests in computational biology and the neurosciences. In his 35 year career, David founded or co-founded six successful technology-based health system and health services companies and has served in senior executive or director roles for multiple public and private companies. He created the first clinical computing programs at both Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and Boston Children Hospital, serving as BCH’s first Chief Information Officer. From BCH, David went to Cerner Corporation as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, also serving as a Director of Cerner. He co-founded CareInsite, now WebMD, serving in Director and senior executive roles. In 2000, David co-founded Correlagen Diagnostics, and was CEO and Chairman. LabCorp acquired Correlagen in 2011 to be its National Center of Excellence for DNA Diagnostics. David was co-founder of Generation Health, subsequently acquired by CVS/Caremark. More recently, while serving as Executive Director of the Gene Partnership at Boston Children’s Hospital, David was the driving force behind the creation of Claritas Genomics, where he now serves as a Director. David is a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Medical School, and board certified in Internal Medicine. He holds an appointment as Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and is a member of the faculties of Genetics, Developmental Medicine, and Informatics.

Jonathan Fleming, President and Chief Executive Officer - Previously serving on Q-State's Board of Directors, Jonathan transitioned to his new leadership role in December 2015. He has deep experience in neuroscience drug discovery and the development of critical instrumentation used by the pharmaceutical industry to screen drugs. Prior to joining Q-State Mr. Fleming had a 30 year venture capital career in starting, financing and building neuroscience companies dedicated to drug discovery and development. Examples of companies he has been involved in starting and building include: Chairman of Synaptic Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Lundbeck; Chairman of Memory Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Hoffman La Roche; Chairman of Brain Cells; Chairman of Hypnion Pharmaceuticals which was acquired by Eli Lilly. In addition Mr. Fleming's venture capital firm Oxford Bioscience Partners, of which he was the Managing Partner, was closely involved in the creation of the instrument by Solexa, subsequently sold to Illumina, that is used in high thru put sequencing throughout the world. Mr. Fleming's firm was also deeply involved in the creation of the high content screening market in the pharmaceutical industry by building Cellomics - now part of Thermo Fisher. Mr. Fleming was a lead director of the Board of Cellomics in the years prior to its acquisition. For the past ten years Mr. Fleming has taught the core course on life science strategy at the MIT Sloan School of Business. He is a director of Leerink Partners a highly regarded investment bank specializing in the life sciences as well as several other private life science companies.

Owen McManus, PhD, Chief Technology Officer - Owen is a drug discovery scientist with extensive experience in drug discovery, electrophysiology, and technology development. He worked for over twenty years at Merck Research labs where he led basic research teams at multiple discovery stages including target identification and validation, assay development, lead identification and optimization. These teams produced a number of clinical candidate compounds in multiple therapeutic areas. He was also Director of Operations at the Johns Hopkins Ion Channel Center, which provided HTS screening and lead optimization for ion channel and transporter targets for the academic community through the NIH Molecular Libraries program. He also worked as Director, Ion Channel Screening and Drug Discovery at Essen Bioscience, a leading instrument development company. At both Essen and Merck, he worked on development of novel instrumentation and technologies to support drug discovery, which have led to several marketed products. He is currently Chief Technology Officer at Q-State Biosciences working to advance Q-State technologies in drug discovery efforts.

Graham Dempsey, PhD, Director of Research and Development - Joining as one of the first full time members of the Q-State team in early 2014, Graham leads Q-State's research and development efforts. Graham began his scientific career at the University of Pennsylvania, developing novel strategies for investigating ribosomes at the single-molecule scale using single-molecule Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (smFRET) and single molecule Fluorescence Polarization (smFP). He received his doctorate from Harvard Medical School where he developed a new super-resolution imaging technique called stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM), allowing for multicolor, live-cell fluorescence imaging of biological samples with nanometer spatial resolution. The technique was commercialized by Nikon Instruments. In addition to his efforts leading the research and development team, Graham has also proven pivotal in the successful execution of several key projects for pharmaceutical clients.

Maria Grunwald, PhD, MBA, Vice President of Business Development – Maria has extensive experience in business development and licensing in the life sciences. She has worked with numerous seed-stage, venture-backed and publicly-traded companies on transactions that involved all stages of clinical development. At AesRx, Maria supported the company’s acquisition by Baxter. At Radius Health, she negotiated many licensing and collaboration agreements with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and large supplier organizations. Earlier in her career, Maria worked with Dyax Corp., where she led the company’s in-licensing activities. In 2009, Maria was named a mentor for the MIT Venture Mentoring Service, an organization that educates entrepreneurs and helps them build successful businesses.