Amber Murray, PhD

Founder + SVP, Application

One of the pillars of the popular Gallup Strengths Finder is that you get a lot more return on investment by investing in your strengths. For Amber Murray, that strength is learning.

“I enjoy the process of learning, and I'm passionate about applying that knowledge to make a tangible difference right now.”

With a Bachelor's degree from MIT and a Ph.D. from Scripps Research in Biology, Amber could have gone in any number of directions, but she saw early disease detection as the pathway to have an immediate, tangible impact on improving patient lives.

“I have people on both sides of my family with neurodegenerative diseases,” Murray says. “I knew that understanding the molecular underpinnings of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s could make a difference in the lives of people I care about, and that the people I care about represent countless others.”

A dedication to learn meaningfully led Murray to liquid biopsy, because of its impact on early disease detection, for both cancer and neurodegenerative disorders.

Because life is on the line with the work EXOKĒRYX does, learning with integrity is essential when creating tests and tools to detect disease. Murray took an extra three years to achieve her Ph.D. after recognizing an experimental artifact that affected her work and that of several other labs. Not sacrificing integrity for publication, she called out the misinterpretation, worked with her PI to correct it, and changed the way experiments were performed in the field at large.

“I inherited a project in grad school that taught me how lack of rigor and integrity can cost you years of research,” she says. “Integrity is critical in everything we build at EXOKĒRYX. Time is a precious resource, and I am focused on finding ways to spend my time meaningfully. There are no time savings when you cut corners. Our team is in the business of building technologies that work well and will positively impact the world. The focus I bring to the organization is integrity of results that you can rely on every time.”