As director of research informatics at Isis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: ISIS), Mike Pear uses his 25 years management and technology experience to help make it possible for the Carlsbad, Calif. biotech to exploit Isis RNA expertise to discover, develop, and commercialize novel pharmaceuticals such as the TIGER biosensor system, a product with potential to revolutionize identification of infectious organisms. He has spent many years building, managing, and mentoring large, diverse teams of technology professionals at Isis and earlier, in a similar role at Molecular Simulations, Inc. in San Diego (formerly Biosym Technologies, Inc., Cambridge, Mass.). In addition to a special ability to motivate highly technical people and keep them focused on complex and innovative technology projects, he excels at transforming advanced technologies into useful applications.

Before moving into the private sector, Pear served as director of Brown University's Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship. At IRIS he led a very large group of software and networking specialists and managers, making key contributions to the advancement of networking technology and personal computing in the years prior to the development of the Internet.

Pear earned an undergraduate degree and doctorate in physics from Brown. He was a postdoctoral fellow and professor at the University of Houston where he built and managed the academic computing department and a McCammon Group postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla.