About Robert Morfino
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Robert Morfino is a life sciences executive, Business Development Lead & Senior Director at Verily, former Senior Director at Ginkgo Bioworks, & former McKinsey Consultant.
Robert is a commercial builder at heart. He takes frontier science and turns it into deployed programs, signed partnerships, and revenue. Today he architects go-to-market approaches in genomics, precision health, and biosecurity from Boston, working with governments and global enterprises.
$100M+
in government contracts secured
15+
Years in life sciences and strategy
5
Languages spoken across global markets
Turning Frontier Science Into Commercial Reality
Robert Morfino has spent his career at the point where laboratory breakthroughs meet the market. For him, the hardest problem in science is rarely the science itself. It is the model, the buyer, the contract, and the operational discipline required to put a technology into the hands of the people who need it.
Across genomics, bioinformatics, precision health, and metagenomics, Robert has built the commercial architecture that allows deep technology to reach scale. He identifies market segments before they are obvious, designs go-to-market approaches that survive contact with real procurement cycles, and negotiates the agreements that turn potential into deployment. His work is not about promising what science might one day do. It is about building the path that gets it there.
Building Programs With Governments and Global Enterprises
Robert Morfino has designed and led some of the most visible biosecurity programs of the last decade. At Ginkgo Bioworks he led the International Partnerships and Strategy team for Ginkgo Biosecurity, building programs for national governments including the US CDC Traveler Genomic Surveillance program and the National Biosurveillance Network for the UK Health Security Agency.
That work required a rare combination of skills. Robert speaks the language of the scientist, the procurement officer, the regulator, and the board. He has secured more than $100M in US and EU government contracts, launched global divisions, and led international teams across multiple continents. He also contributed to institutional thought leadership through publications, white papers, and conference platforms, understanding that credibility in public health markets is built in the open, not behind closed doors.
Robert Morfino's Story
Robert Morfino began as an engineer. He trained in electronics and nanotechnology across Politecnico di Torino, Grenoble INP, and EPFL, and worked as a researcher at CNRS and at UC Berkeley, where he designed and fabricated an antibody-functionalized nanorobot as part of research into a new cancer treatment. He was building at the smallest possible scale long before he was building companies.
His path then widened. A financial analyst role at Procter & Gamble in Geneva, consulting at Deloitte in London, and six years at McKinsey & Company across Geneva and Boston, where he was a consistent top performer working on pricing strategy, sales transformation, and multi-billion dollar M&A transactions for technology and life sciences clients. McKinsey sponsored his Harvard MBA, which he completed with Distinction in the top 15% of his class while co-chairing the European Conference at Harvard.