Murali Venkatesan

Murali has a deep passion for transforming Science, Technology and Medicine at scale to impact patient lives globally.

Murali joined Danaher (NYSE: DHR) in 2019, a global Science and Technology leader with >$32 Billion in revenue and >$160 Billion market cap, holding and operating companies such as Beckman Coulter, Leica Microsystems and Biosystems, IDT, Sciex, Aldevron, Cytiva and more. As Head of Danaher Ventures, Murali’s team supports Danaher’s overall strategy and investments across healthcare and is responsible for an active portfolio of over 40 companies. Murali serves as a Board Director for more than five companies and has joint responsibilities across Mergers & Acquisitions, and served as a key Business Development leader toward the $9.6B acquisition of Aldevron, enabling the fields of gene and cell therapy and gene editing.  

Prior to joining Danaher, Murali was Director of Business Development at Lam Research (NASDAQ: LRCX), a leader in Semiconductor manufacturing tools and responsible for Lam’s strategy and investments in Life Sciences. Murali had previously spent ~7 years at Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) as a Scientist, Inventor and Senior Manager, across Advanced Research, Technology Development and Product Development, leading technology teams that enabled the $1000 and $100 genomes. These products have generated over $4B in revenue for Illumina and have transformed the fields of genetics and molecular medicine, enabling areas such as non-invasive prenatal testing, liquid biopsy for cancer and many more.

Murali holds a Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a graduate of the Stanford Executive Program. He is an inventor on 20 patents and has published in various scientific journals including Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Scientific Reports, Advanced Materials and Lab on Chip with >3000 citations. Murali also holds Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Engineering degrees in Pure Mathematics, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from University of Western Australia.

Dr. Venkatesan was nominated by Bruce Hajek, ECE Department Head, and Rashid Bashir, Dean of The Grainger College of Engineering.