The useful part of Reza Rezaei's résumé is not the stack of letters after his name, though DVM, PhD and MBA make an arresting little skyline. It is the route those letters enabled. Veterinary medicine led to animal science. Animal science led to published research. Research led to technical selling. Selling led to management, then strategy, then the chief executive's chair at Cyagen. Each turn stayed close enough to the previous one that nothing was discarded. The laboratory kept showing up in the sales call. The customer kept showing up in the operating plan.
This is a particular kind of biotech career, built less on a single breakthrough than on translation. Cyagen makes genetically engineered animal and cell models and provides preclinical research services. Its work lives upstream of a finished drug, in the long stretch where researchers need to test what a gene does, reproduce a biological condition or evaluate an experimental therapy. The sale is therefore attached to someone else's hypothesis. Get the translation wrong and the problem does not end with an unhappy buyer; it can land inside the design of an experiment.
Rezaei came to that commercial problem with firsthand scientific context. Cyagen says he worked with laboratory animals both as a clinical practitioner and as a research scientist. At Texas A&M, his studies centered on animal science and nutritional biochemistry. The papers that carry his name examine amino acids in animal feed, the way young animals use dietary amino acids, and the relationship between nutrition, mammary development and growth. These are patient subjects in the old sense of the word. They reward measurement, repetition and attention to mechanisms that refuse to fit inside a slogan.
The laboratory before the pitch
His academic record begins publicly in College Station. Rezaei completed a master's degree at Texas A&M from 2008 to 2010 and a doctorate from 2011 to 2014. During much of that period, he worked as a research and teaching assistant at Texas A&M AgriLife. One early paper, published in 2011, catalogued the amino-acid composition of feed ingredients. Later work tested dietary supplementation and surveyed the biochemical basis of amino-acid use in young pigs. A 2016 review connected amino acids with mammary-gland development and neonatal growth.
The publication trail did not simply stop when his job title became commercial. Papers bearing his name appeared again in 2022, including work on protein turnover in porcine mammary epithelial cells. That overlap is revealing without requiring mythology. His research identity remained active while his day job moved deeper into sales leadership. Science was not a prologue to be politely forgotten. It was part of the working vocabulary.
Our comprehensive model services cover every stage of preclinical research - from design and development to drug screening and efficacy evaluation. We partner with clients to accelerate their scientific breakthroughs.Reza Rezaei, Cyagen leadership statement
Technical sales is sometimes described as the softer exit from the bench. The phrase misses the actual difficulty. A research customer rarely arrives with a clean shopping list. There is a target, a species, a genetic background, a desired readout, a budget and a clock. Some constraints conflict. Others emerge only after the first answer. The seller has to hear the experiment hiding inside the request and know when a confident answer would be less useful than another question.
Model design
Research constraints
Experimental readout
Scope and timing
Product strategy
Reliable delivery
A career made of adjacent moves
Rezaei began selling life-science products while still connected to Texas A&M, working as a territory manager at Scientist Solutions in 2013 and 2014. Public career records describe a mix of event coordination and technical support. It was a practical bridge: the person who knew the research environment was now responsible for helping other researchers navigate products and services.
He joined Cyagen as a regional manager late in 2014. The next decade can be read as a series of widening circles. Regional sales became the director of sales role in 2015. In 2018, he became vice president of sales and business development, with responsibilities spanning global sales planning, marketing and product development. By 2025, he had moved into the CEO job. Cyagen's current leadership page places founder Lance Han as president and chief innovation officer and Rezaei as chief executive, a pairing that separates the founder's innovation remit from day-to-day executive leadership.
There is no public account of a cinematic promotion meeting, and none is needed. The chronology offers a more useful explanation. Rezaei learned the company by carrying progressively larger pieces of it. First came a geography. Then the sales function. Then business development, marketing and product work. The CEO role was not a jump across a canyon. It was the next ring out.
In a technical market, customer proximity is not merely a distribution advantage. Repeated contact with real constraints can become a form of product research.
He added a formal business lens along the way, completing an MBA at Boston University's Questrom School of Business from 2021 to 2023. By then, he had years of commercial management behind him. The degree reads less like a permission slip into business than a way to organize experience already accumulated in the field.
Where the company meets the room
Conference floors provide the public snapshots. At AACR in 2024, Cyagen advertised Rezaei and scientist Joseph Wekselblatt as the experts visitors could meet to discuss preclinical oncology work. At the CIMT annual meeting in 2025, Rezaei met Professor Jacob Hochman, whose work helped establish the antibody Fv region, and discussed Cyagen's humanized antibody mouse platform. The charming detail is the collision of timelines: an idea named in 1972 meeting a contemporary platform built to make antibody discovery more systematic.
Earlier that year, at Cyagen's global partnership forum in Taicang, China, Rezaei joined chairman Lance Han in welcoming international partners. The program combined technical sessions, facility tours and partnership discussions. It is hard to invent a tidier stage for his job: science in one room, channel relationships in another, and the operating system required to connect them.
By ARVO 2026 in Denver, Cyagen was billing him as chief executive and inviting vision researchers to book individual consultations with him and the business development team. The title had changed; the proximity to customer conversations had not. This is one quiet marker of an operator's style available in the public record. Rezaei still appeared where researchers brought specific projects, not only where executives presented finished strategy.
The scale hidden inside a model
Cyagen's broader expansion makes that translation job larger. Founded in 2006, the company now presents itself as a provider of model generation and preclinical services across major therapeutic research areas. Its catalog includes humanized and genetically engineered mice, cell lines, viral-vector services and drug-evaluation workflows. The important unit is not a single mouse. It is an infrastructure of design, generation, validation, breeding, delivery and support.
A 2025 partnership with Taconic makes the point visible. The companies connected Cyagen's library of more than 16,000 conditional and constitutive knockout models, plus more than 200 Cre and reporter models, with Taconic's breeding and distribution network in North America and Europe. For customers, the proposition is time: a ready model can remove months that would otherwise be spent generating one from scratch. For the operators, the proposition is coordination. A model library has value only when researchers can find, obtain and confidently use what it contains.
That is the business Rezaei now leads. It is part catalog, part custom shop and part research partner. Each mode asks for a different balance of standardization and judgment. Catalogs want consistency. Custom work wants careful listening. Partnerships want both sides to agree on who carries which uncertainty.
The value of staying bilingual
Rezaei's public profile lists Persian and English, but his career suggests another kind of bilingualism: fluency in the languages of evidence and execution. The first asks whether a claim survives a test. The second asks whether a team can deliver it repeatedly, for many customers, across borders and deadlines. Companies need both questions in the same room.
The temptation with a scientist-turned-executive story is to make the first identity disappear as the second one arrives. Rezaei's record resists that neatness. His papers remain technical. His conference appearances remain customer-facing. His company statement describes a sequence from design through evaluation. The connecting habit is not reinvention. It is carrying context forward.
That offers a small, stealable career idea. The next move does not always require abandoning the last skill. Sometimes the advantage is precisely that you remember it: the clinical detail inside the research question, the research question inside the sales conversation, the sales conversation inside the product plan. Titles change. Useful context compounds.