Richard Schwartz joined Vaxart in October 2020 as Senior Vice President of Technical Operations where he is responsible for the oversight and management of the development and manufacturing of Vaxart’s product candidates. Previously, Richard was SVP at CRISPR Therapeutics and Synlogic and the chief of the Vaccine Production Program (VPP) at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) at the NIAID/NIH. At the VRC, he was responsible for development and clinical production of vaccines against viruses which include HIV, Ebola, Zika, Influenza, Chikungunya and Equine Encephalitis, as well as the first broadly neutralizing monoclonal antibody against HIV. Richard has 30 years of experience in pharma and biotech working in diverse areas including pharmaceutical natural product production, hematopoietic stem cells, vaccines and therapeutic proteins. Richard was previously the senior director of process and manufacturing sciences at MedImmune Vaccines (formerly Aviron), where he was responsible for vaccine development and clinical manufacturing of new vaccine candidates, as well as for providing support to commercial vaccine manufacturing operations. Additionally, he was team lead for a BARDA-funded development effort to convert FluMist from an egg-based to a cell culture–based production process. Prior to MedImmune, Richard worked at SyStemix, Aastrom Biosciences and Eli Lilly. Richard received his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan.
