Peter Barrett, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School, where he teaches the second year MBA course, Lab to Market. He is also the faculty chair of the key advisory board of the Blavatnik Fellowship Program.
In addition to his work at Harvard, Peter is a Partner at Atlas Venture, an early stage life science venture capital firm. Since 2002, Peter has been involved in the creation of several novel therapeutic and drug discovery platform companies.
Prior to Atlas he was co-founder, executive vice president and chief business officer of Celera Genomics, which announced the first successful sequencing of the human genome in 2001.While at Celera, Peter led strategic alliances, acquisitions and business strategy and helped launch it as a public company in 1999.
Prior to founding Celera, Peter held senior management positions at Applera, most recently serving as vice president of corporate planning and business development. During his tenure, he ran several businesses and expanded the life science business through a series of licensing agreements, partnerships and acquisitions.
Peter is currently chairman of Obsidian Therapeutics, Zafgen (NASDAQ:ZFGN), Cadent Therapeutics and Synlogic (NASDAQ:SYBX) and sits on the boards of Indalo and Perkin Elmer (NYSE:PKI). He is also a member of the research council at Boston Children’s Hospital and the board of Living Independently Forever.
Peter received a BS in chemistry from Lowell Technological Institute (now known as the University of Massachusetts, Lowell) and a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from Northeastern University. He also completed Harvard Business School’s Program for Management Development.
Peter and his wife Mary live in Boston. They have 3 children and one granddaughter.
- Cases and Teaching Materials
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- Lakhani, Karim, Peter Barrett, Julia Kelley, and Kerry Herman. "Obsidian: Product or Platform?" Harvard Business School Case 620-018, September 2019. (Revised August 2020.) View Details
- Lakhani, Karim, Peter Barrett, and Noubar Afeyan. "Note on Funding Deep Tech Startups." Harvard Business School Background Note 620-029, October 2019. (Revised April 2020.) View Details
- Barrett, Peter, Karim R. Lakhani, and Kerry Herman. "Kymera Therapeutics: Building a Biotech Execution Plan." Harvard Business School Case 620-017, October 2019. View Details
- Barrett, Peter, Karim Lakhani, and Julia Kelley. "Nimbus Therapeutics." Harvard Business School Case 620-016, September 2019. View Details
- Barrett, Peter, and Kareem Reda. "Celgene: Business Development and Distributed Research." Harvard Business School Case 620-014, September 2019. View Details
- Barrett, Peter, Karim R. Lakhani, Julia Kelley, and Kerry Herman. "Synthetic Biology Investment Opportunity." Harvard Business School Case 620-015, August 2019. View Details
- Areas of Interest