Colin South is a New Zealand-born biotechnology executive and the founding leader of ArkeaBio, a Boston climate-tech company building the world's first vaccine to cut methane emissions from cattle. He grew up on a 1,000-head sheep farm, earned a PhD in bioprocess engineering from Dartmouth, and spent 25-plus years turning microbes into commercial products across the food, fuel, and energy industries. He launched ArkeaBio in 2021, ran it as CEO from January 2022, and in September 2025 stepped into the Chief Business Officer seat as the company brought in a new CEO and pushed toward field trials.
Shawn Manchester is the CEO of Triplebar, an Emeryville-and-Oakland based biotech building generative AI 'genome language models' paired with ultra-high-throughput phenotypic screening to slash the cost of biologic therapeutics and food proteins. A chemical engineer by training (BS Brown, PhD MIT), he was the lead scientist in the first AI-versus-human strain engineering contest at Zymergen before joining Triplebar in 2021, where he rose from VP of Product to COO to CEO in March 2025.