Schroth is expected to oversee the company’s biology and chemistry research, the development of new genomic applications, and the SmartChip Gene-Expression Profiling Services offered by WaferGen scientists at the company’s headquarters facility in Fremont, Calif.
Schroth is expected to report directly to Mona Chadha, chief operating officer and executive vice president.
Schroth joins WaferGen from Illumina where he was serving as senior director of Research and Development and was responsible for expression applications R&D.
Prior to Illumina, he held various research and management roles at Applied Biosystems (now part of Life Technologies), Genelabs Technologies and Gen-Probe.
WaferGen chairman and CEO Alnoor Shivji said that the WaferGen SmartChip Real-Time PCR platform addresses the growing need for validation of vast quantities of information being discovered through the use of sequencing.
"Schroth will be an enormous asset to expand the further development and adoption of our platform into discovery and validation markets," Shivji said.
Schroth said that he was excited to join the WaferGen team and help develop new applications to drive the adoption of the SmartChip platform by researchers around the world who are looking to create improved and more targeted therapeutics.
"The high throughput capabilities of the SmartChip system enable researchers to extend their research across large panels of genes, and hundreds of samples, at a very reasonable cost," Schroth said.