He has an MD, a PhD, and zero interest in seeing patients. The patient he treats is the research pipeline itself.
CEO, HistoWiz · New York & Boston · MD, PhD
Linh Hoang // the operator who industrialized the microscope
A tissue sample arrives at a lab in Queens. A machine slices it thinner than a thought, stains it, scans it, and posts the image to a platform where a researcher three time zones away can pull up a top pathologist's read with a turnaround that used to take weeks. That platform is called PathologyMap, the company is HistoWiz, and the person steering it is Linh Hoang.
Hoang took the CEO seat at HistoWiz in October 2022. The company had already existed since 2013, built around a simple, stubborn idea: histology, the centuries-old craft of reading disease in tissue, was still done by hand, on glass, on someone else's schedule. HistoWiz wanted to turn that craft into infrastructure. Automate the processing. Digitize the result. Connect the researcher to the expert. Make the unseen test fast.
His job is to scale that promise. Within months of his arrival, HistoWiz expanded its laboratory footprint with a new headquarters in Queens, New York, a bet on physical capacity in a business that lives and dies by how quickly a sample becomes an answer.
"I am proud to join HistoWiz's accomplished team who has developed a differentiated platform to accelerate research and discovery."
It is the kind of company that does not make headlines, because the thing it sells is the absence of a wait. Researchers at universities, biotechs, and pharma companies do not think about histology until it is the bottleneck. HistoWiz exists so that it stops being one.
The proprietary technology behind BMF's core products is truly unmatched and will have a tremendous impact on the clinical diagnostics industry and telemedicine.
Most people with a Penn MD-PhD end up in a white coat or a research lab. Hoang detoured through a consulting firm. His early career ran through Boston Consulting Group, the place where scientists go to learn that biology has a balance sheet. It is an unusual first move for a physician-scientist, and it set the tone for everything after: he would spend his career on the commercial side of the bench, not the clinical side of the bed.
From there, the resume reads like a tour of the diagnostics industry. At Thermo Fisher Scientific and its Life Technologies arm, he ran the clinical controls and standards business and directed personalized-medicine initiatives, the unglamorous plumbing that keeps a lab's results trustworthy. At PerkinElmer, he became Vice President and General Manager of Reproductive Health Diagnostics, overseeing the prenatal and neonatal businesses, tests that families never see but depend on completely.
Then came the CEO chairs. In June 2020, in the chaos of the pandemic's first summer, he took over Boston Microfluidics, a company building a better way to collect blood at home, just as at-home testing and SARS-CoV-2 antibody assays turned urgent overnight. The company later became Weavr Health, where he served as CEO and Chairman of the Board.
The thread through all of it is the unseen test. Blood you collect at home. A prenatal screen. A control sample. A slide of tissue. Hoang keeps choosing the part of medicine that happens before the diagnosis, the moment biology becomes data. HistoWiz is the latest, and arguably the purest, expression of that instinct.
HistoWiz's pitch is a pipeline. The old way ran on glass slides, courier envelopes, and whoever happened to be free to look. The HistoWiz way runs the same biology through automation and a cloud platform, then drops a network of pathologists from places like Harvard, Mayo Clinic, UC Davis, and Vanderbilt at the end of it.
PathologyMap hosts digitized slides and bridges researchers to top pathologists for on-demand interpretation, with turnaround times the industry struggles to match.
Universities, biotech and pharma research teams, and contract research organizations, anyone for whom histology has become the slow step.
A Penn MD-PhD and a stint at Boston Consulting Group on the same resume. Scientist's training, operator's reflexes.
His first chief-executive seat landed in June 2020, just as at-home blood collection and antibody testing became a national obsession.
Blood collection, prenatal screens, control samples, tissue slides. He keeps picking the part of medicine nobody sees.
HistoWiz was founded in 2013. Hoang joined nearly a decade later, hired not to invent it but to scale it.
Fully credentialed to practice, he chose instead to build tools that serve thousands of researchers at once.
To make histology stop being a wait, turning slow manual tissue work into fast, searchable, cloud-native data.