Melinda Richter's Bio

Melinda Richter, Founder & CEO, Prescience International


Melinda Richter: Championing Sustainable Solutions
With over 15 years of global experience in creating, financing and managing innovative companies in emerging and convergence technologies, Melinda Richter specializes in accelerating the development of products-to-market, and companies-to-investment. She is the founder and CEO of Prescience International, a full-scale management firm which focuses on
accelerating the commercialization of science and technology by starting and operating life science and cleantech centers of innovation, including incubators, institutes and foundations. Prescience centers of innovation include, Janssen Labs, the San Jose BioCenter and the Environmental Business Cluster.

For Janssen Labs, located at Janssen Research & Development in San Diego, she guides an operations management team to enable innovative life sciences companies to rapidly deliver better solutions to the healthcare challenges faced today.

In addition to Janssen Labs, the Prescience innovation center portfolio includes the San Jose BioCenter.  Under Ms. Richter's leadership, the San Jose BioCenter—a $15M state-of-the-art 40,000sf life science research center and incubator—was named one of the best life science incubators in the U.S. by CNN, was honored by the National Business Incubation Association with its 2009 Incubator of the Year Award, and was granted the Harvard’s Bright Ideas Award. 

Also in San Jose is the Environmental Business Cluster (EBC)—one of the first cleantech incubators ever to be established in the U.S. Ranked as one of the "Top 10 Incubators Changing the World" by Forbes.com, one of the “Top 10 Start Up Incubators to Watch” by Inc.com, one of the top incubators in the country by CNN, and named by Popular Science Magazine as one of three Places Where Inventors Are Born, the EBC has successfully attracted more than 180 cleantech companies and continues to lead the way in pushing forward innovative emerging green technologies. 

Ms. Richter has served on the governing board of the National Business Incubation Association and currently sits on boards of University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business Center for Executive Education BioExec Institute, the San Jose State University's Masters of Biotechnology Program and UC San Francisco's School of Dentistry. She holds a Bachelor of
Commerce from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and an M.B.A. from INSEAD
in France. [email protected]