Dr Desjarlais is the Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of Xencor, Inc. a Pasadena-based biotechnology company developing antibody therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases. John has led the research team at Xencor since joining the company in 2001 after spending 4 years at Penn State University doing research on proteins and teaching chemistry. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from the University of Massachusetts, and a PhD in Biophysics from The Johns Hopkins University, and spends much of his spare time doing landscape photography.