Crystal R Icenhour, PhD

Since her undergraduate days and throughout her career, Dr. Icenhour has demonstrated leadership and business skills in addition to scientific capabilities and has expressed a goal of “bridging the translational gap between the two worlds of science and business.”

While a postdoctoral fellow at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, she was the first to identify and characterize Pneumocystismelanins. She holds two patents, has authored and co-authored numerous publications, and has been a prolific speaker and presenter at scientific and business conferences. Dr. Icenhour has served on review panels for National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, and National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants.

Dr. Icenhour currently serves as Vice Chair of Virginia BIO. She is a member of Sigma Xi, Medical Mycology Society of the Americas, Association for Molecular Pathology, Virginia BIO, National Postdoctoral Association, and the American Society for Microbiology.

Following her undergraduate degree from the University of Tulsa Department of Biological Sciences, Dr. Icenhour received her doctoral degree from the University of Cincinnati Medical School of Graduate Studies in Pathobiology and Molecular Medicine. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Thoracic Diseases Research Unit at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and was a senior postdoctoral fellow at Duke University Medical Center’s Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology.

In 2006, Dr. Icenhour became President and Director of Research for Phthisis Diagnostics, a molecular diagnostic company focused on infectious diseases. She is also an adjunct assistant professor at Duke University Medical Center’s Division of Infectious Diseases in their Department of Medicine. In 2014, she joined Aperiomics in as its founding CEO. Aperiomics is a bioinformatics company transforming global health through advanced data analysis of next-generation sequencing for infectious diseases.