Dede Willis
Dede Willis joined Ventac Partners in 2003. She brings over 25 years of international experience in start-ups and turn-arounds to the group. She has expertise in strategic planning & execution, cross cultural team building, joint ventures & strategic alliances, acquisition negotiation & integration, product development from concept to commercialization, capital project management, business process reengineering, FDA & CLIA regulatory processes for drugs & devices, sales & marketing, and forecasting, budgeting & financing.
Dede spent the first 15 years of her career with the former Hoechst Group where she worked in several corporate start-ups in the U.S. and Germany, gaining operational experience in every functional role and across multiple industries. In her first overseas assignment, she was responsible for developing and implementing a global innovation process for corporate research which became the process for allocating a $500 million research budget. Her last position with the Hoechst Group was President and CEO of a $100 million coatings subsidiary. Since then, she has served as CEO or COO of multiple life science companies in the US and Germany where she managed numerous product launches, clinical trials and capital projects. Most recently, she was co-founder and COO of Boulder Diagnostics, a company whose technology was acquired by Oxford Immunotec in 2014 and she was a Director of Panion Animal Health, AB. She is currently CEO & Cofounder of Orbit Genomics, Inc., a Ventac Partners portfolio company.
Dede has a B.Sc. Degree in Chemical engineering from Clemson University and an executive MBA from the University of Houston.