Management Team

Michael Keefe, MBA
Chief Executive Officer
Michael Keefe, a partner at Six.02 Bioservices (www.six02bio.com), has more than 20 years of leadership experience in the bioservices industry. Most recently, at A&G Pharmaceutical, he secured significant private equity and strategic investment that enabled the company’s therapeutic division to move from candidate R&D to “first in human” clinical trials. Concurrently, Mike oversaw the sales and marketing operations of A&G’s antibody development service division, Precision Antibody Services. During his nine-year tenure as Chief Operating Officer for Precision Antibody, he grew the division from start-up into a multimillion-dollar revenue center. He received a BBA in Finance from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

David Hicks
Chief Operating Officer & Head of Quality
David Hicks, a partner at Six.02 Bioservices (www.six02bio.com), has more than 35 years of international experience in leadership roles at instrumentation, diagnostic, research and development, and oncology therapeutic companies, where his responsibilities have covered Lab Sciences, Sales & Marketing, Quality & Regulatory, Intellectual Property, Business Development, and General Management. Over the past 15 years, David has held senior positions at several oncology-focused companies. He previously served as a director at Serologicals, a company involved in the roll-up of plasma donor centers and life sciences companies before it was acquired by EMD Millipore in 2006. He is an Applied Biology graduate of de Montfort University, England.

Carter Mitchell, PhD
Chief Scientific Officer
Carter Mitchell is a protein chemist and structural biologist with 20 years of direct experience isolating and characterizing difficult proteins from a variety of recombinant and natural sources. He earned a PhD in Structural Biology where he enzymatically characterized and solved the structures of a multidomain proteins involved in the biosynthesis of metabolites. During his first postdoctoral fellowship he developed and led a drug discovery pipeline with a team of scientist that isolated and characterized bioactive small-molecules and peptides from mammalian microbiomes as well as solved the structure of a unique peptide with novel secondary structural elements. At the National Cancer Institute, Carter focused on the isolation of bioactive proteins from marine aqueous extracts, which required creative purification strategies and earned the Director’s Innovation Award. Prior to joining Kemp Proteins, he was the Chief Technology Officer and Director of Structural Biology at a Biotech start-up where he built, developed, and implemented protein expression and isolation laboratory and managed the protein production and purification team.

Sneha Rangarajan, PhD
Director, Expression
Sneha Rangarajan is responsible for overseeing the insect, mammalian, and microbial expression departments at Kemp Proteins.  Prior to joining Kemp Proteins, she was a Senior Scientist and Team Lead at IDT Biologika’s Rockville site in Maryland. She was part of the upstream process development team, where she specialized in the production of vaccines-viral vectors as well as proteins using mammalian cells. Sneha was leading efforts on gene therapy platform optimization for viral vector production. She received her PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the State University of New York at Albany after which she pursued her post-doc at the University of Maryland in the Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology Research.

Melissa Kerzic, MS
Director, Purification
Melissa Kerzic manages the Protein Purification Department at Kemp Proteins. Melissa has over 20 years of experience in protein expression and purification from mammalian and bacterial systems. She has experience in development of purification processes and technical transfer of processes to GMP manufacturing. Prior to her position at Kemp, Melissa worked at IDT Biologika and the Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology Research at the University of Maryland. She has over 15 scientific publications. Melissa has a BS in Chemistry from Wingate University and a MS in Chemistry from Georgia Tech.

Sharath Madasu, PhD
Director, Characterization and Cell Line Development
Sharath Madasu is responsible for protein-based /small molecule characterization and assay development activities at Kemp Proteins. He leads the antibody characterization department in the optimization of immunoassays & biophysical assays to characterize antibody and proteins for stable cell line, humanization, reagent development, biomanufacturing process development, and host of important thereapeutic and diagnostic programs. Prior to Kemp Proteins, Sharath led a team of scientists at Ibex Biosciences in the identification of and development of new therapeutic modalities and therapeutic antibodies. As a Biomedical Scientist and life long learner, he has strong analytical skills and expertise in antibody development, biochemistry, molecular biology, confocal microscopy, western blots, QPCR, flow cytometry, cell culture, and project management. He earned his PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biologly at the University of Vermont, where he pioneered the identification of quantitative changes in protein – protein interactions and post translational modifications of Kv1.2 proteome in ex-vivo pharmacological stimulation using bottom up quantitative Mass spectrometry and identified potential biomarkers for drug targeting.