Paul Grossman, ’97

Senior Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development for Life Technologies

The words “forensics” and “DNA” often conjure images of C.S.I. criminologists, their hands encased in latex, plucking the perfect clue from a theatrically lit crime scene. For Paul Grossman ’97 the reality of using DNA sequencing to help solve a crime might not be so glamorous, but it’s intriguing and important.

Grossman is the senior vice president of strategy and corporate development for Life Technologies, a biotechnology tools company that does everything from DNA analyses to monitoring and tracking the H1N1 virus.

“I’m more involved in the big picture,” he says. “But the big picture is made up of all this. I’m never too far away from it.”

Throughout his career, Grossman has been involved in many aspects of the biotechnologies industry. He received B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from U.C. Berkeley, and an M.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Virginia. When he started out as a scientist in the early 1980s, he says, it was clear that biotechnology was on the rise.

“It looked like there was an opportunity for me to impact human health,” he says.

After he received his Ph.D. in 1991, he began working as a research scientist and inventor with a company called Applied Biosystems. As a result of that work, he spent a lot of time with patent attorneys and became interested in patent law (Grossman holds more than 70 U.S. and foreign patents). Eventually, he decided to apply to law school.

Grossman chose Santa Clara because the school offered an evening program with a highly regarded emphasis on intellectual property law.

“At that stage in my life, the evening availability was necessary” he says. “I had a life, a wife and daughter, a house. I couldn’t drop my job.”

Although Grossman’s choice focused, in large part, on practical matters, the outcome of his time at Santa Clara has helped shape his life and career.  

“My degree has helped me tremendously,” he says. “Through my work as a patent lawyer, I eventually became responsible for the legal department at Applied Biosystems. I was able to make contributions in the area of creating new intellectual property…I was able to affect significant change in the organization.”

In 2005, his work as vice president of intellectual property and chief group counsel caught the eye of Applied Biosystem’s president, who promoted Grossman to vice president of strategy and business development. In June of 2007, he began working with Invitrogen, another biotechnology company (it initially focused on kits for molecular cloning). By June, 2008, Invitrogen had acquired Applied Biosystems to become the corporation it is today: Life Technologies.

Grossman’s work as a lawyer continues to influence his work today.

“As a lawyer, your responsibility is around transactions,” he says. “On the corporate development side…you have to come up with the overriding intent of the transaction. I use a lot of the skills I developed as a lawyer but in a different context.”