Benjamin Oakes

Benjamin L. Oakes is co-founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer at Scribe Therapeutics, a genetic medicines company unlocking the potential of CRISPR to transform human health. Under his leadership, Dr. Oakes and his Scribe team pioneered CRISPR by Design™, a data-driven design and engineering process, to enable a new era of in vivo CRISPR-based standard of care treatments for patients with highly prevalent diseases.

Previously, as an Innovative Genomics Institute Entrepreneurial Fellow, Dr. Oakes focused on the holistic engineering of genome editing technologies to build novel genome editing molecules.

Dr. Oakes has contributed to over 35 publications and patent applications across synthetic biology, molecular engineering, CRISPR, and zinc finger-based genetic modification. He has been named to the MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35, San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40, Endpoints 20 Under 40 in Biopharma, Business Insider 30 Under 40 Transforming Healthcare, and the Biocom Life Sciences Catalyst Awards.

He received a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked in the lab of Nobel laureate and CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna. Prior to his doctorate, Dr. Oakes received his BA in the fields of philosophy and neurobiology.