Lon R. Cardon PhD, FMedSci

Dr Lon Cardon, PhD, FMedSci, is Chief Scientific Officer at BioMarin Pharmaceutical in San Rafael, California. Prior to joining BioMarin in 2017, Lon was a Senior Vice President at GSK, leading a number of platform groups spanning Genetics, Molecular Biology, Computational Biology, Statistics, Epidemiology and Clinical Pharmacokinetics, and later a pipeline division called Alternative Discovery and Development which was responsible for developing research programs in new disease areas for GSK such as ophthalmology and rare diseases, embedding novel delivery modalities including oligonucleotide and gene therapy, and incubating non-traditional research paradigms, particularly in the interface between academia, biotechnology and big pharma.

He was a member of the R&D executive team and chaired the governance body responsible for all discovery investment. Prior to 2008, Lon was a senior academic in the UK and US, as Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Oxford until 2006 and then as Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He received his PhD from the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado and conducted his postdoctoral research in the Department of Mathematics at Stanford University. He has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Principal Fellowship and is an elected Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.