Kevin Oldenburg, Ph.D.

Grants Committee Chair

Kevin Oldenburg is a serial entrepreneur. His latest venture is the start-up 2nd Sight Bioscience where is serves as CEO and is co-founder of this AgTech company that develops and engineers innovative devices to further automate the agricultural industry. Oldenburg was the co-founder of MatricCal Bioscience, a company he grew in Spokane that focused on designing and building scientific equipment for the pharmaceutical industry. MatriCal was sold in 2013 to Brooks Life Sciences. Oldenburg received his doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) where he focused on protein structure function relationships in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Upon completion of his Ph.D, he joined Affymax as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Peter Schultz of UC-Berkeley, where he performed some of the seminal work with “peptides on phage,” a virus on bacteria, demonstrating that small peptides could mimic and inhibit sugar binding to lectins. In 1996 he became the Director of Biomolecular Screening at DuPont Pharmaceuticals where his group focused on both conventional screening as well as assay miniaturization. Dr. Oldenburg currently holds over 20 patents issued and pending and has over 50 peer-reviewed publications. In addition, he has extensive industrial experience in biotechnology, with particular expertise in the areas of assay development, high throughput screening and technology development.

City of Spokane Appointee Third Term: 12.1.21-11.30.25