Yield10 Bioscience, Inc. announced two new hires. Tichafa Munyikwa has been appointed director of regulatory affairs. In this new role, Munyikwa will be responsible for developing and executing regulatory strategy for Yield10’s performance and content traits deployed in Camelina. In addition, Nicholas Renegar has been appointed director, business analytics and operations. In this new role, Renegar will be responsible for business analytics and project management as well as supporting Yield10’s business development, supply chain development, and seed operations activities.
“We are delighted to have Tichafa join the Yield10 team as we are scaling up seed production and intensifying our efforts to develop and commercialize performance traits as well as novel traits to produce nutritional oils, meal and PHA bioplastics on our Camelina platform,” said Oliver Peoples, president and CEO of Yield10. “Tichafa’s experience in major agricultural companies as well as with startups provides him with a unique perspective on developing new crops and products for the agricultural sector. We are confident he will make important contributions and provide our team with invaluable strategic insights and guidance on achieving regulatory approval to enable commercialization of our agbiotech crops and products.”
“Nick brings to this role a strong background in food safety and global supply chain analytics, areas we will be focused on as we advance Yield10’s Camelina business plan,” said Peoples. “We are delighted to welcome Nick to Yield10 and look forward to his contributions as he will serve as an important asset to the team as we expand our seed scale up across Canada, the U.S. and South America and as we intensify our commercial and business development activities.”
Munyikwa possesses 25 years’ experience working in the agriculture sector in a career spanning crop research and development, global regulatory affairs and management as well as successfully obtaining regulatory approval for several genetically modified crops. From 2018 to 2021, he was vice president, global regulatory affairs for Trait Biosciences and Pebble Labs. From 2008 to 2018, Munyikwa held various positions at Syngenta Company in regulatory affairs and trait R&D, most recently as global regulatory affairs lead for New Technologies and Early Phase Research Projects (2014-2018) and chair, Plant Breeding Innovations Team, Genome Editing (2013 to 2018). From 1998 to 2007, Munyikwa was at Monsanto Company (now Bayer) where he joined as a post-doc and became a senior research scientist in the Biotechnology Program in 1999. At Monsanto he was named an inventor on six issued patents and focused on experimental and commercialization strategies for RNAi (gene silencing) technology and mechanisms of plant disease resistance.
In his professional experience, Munyikwa has been a board member for the International Enzyme Technical Association, North Carolina State University Genetic Engineering & Society Institute and the Association of African Agricultural Professionals in Diaspora (AAAPD). Munyikwa earned a Ph.D. at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He earned an M.S. in Biotechnology – Molecular Biology, Fermentation Technology and a B.S. in Biological Sciences Microbiology, Parasitology, Invertebrate Zoology from the University of Zimbabwe.
Renegar recently earned a PhD in Operations Research from the MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA, where he was advised by Retsef Levi. While pursuing his PhD, Renegar was a member of MIT’s Operations Research Center, and MIT’s Food Supply Chain Analytics and Sensing (FSAS) Initiative. He has conducted and published research in food safety, including supply chain analytics, big data and optimization, with a focus on international supply chains and China. His Doctoral Thesis is entitled “Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning for the Risk-Based Management of Agricultural Supply Chains”. Renegar has also worked on auction theory and online algorithms, including a research internship at Google, Inc. focused on mechanism design for search ads. Prior to MIT, from 2010 to 2015, Renegar worked as a Healthcare Consulting Actuarial Analyst at Milliman, Inc. where he utilized predictive analytics to help healthcare organizations plan for the future. Renegar earned a B.A. in Mathematics and a B.S. in Operations Research at Cornell University.
