IVF Automation | Fertilis

Prof Jeremy Thompson

Founder - Chief Scientific Officer

Professor Jeremy Thompson graduated with a PhD in 1986. Jeremy has been a Research Fellow for the last 35 years, with continuous funding across human reproductive health and livestock production. He has held leadership positions within The University of Adelaide, in particular The Robinson Research Institute and the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale Biophotonics. He is a Fellow of the Society for Reproductive Biology and awarded its highest honour, The Founders Lecture. He has demonstrated significant research skills by obtaining three consecutive Australian National Health & Medical Research Council fellowships, and successfully navigating an interdisciplinary research focus. He has over 200 publications (book chapters, reports, reviews, journals). He gained clinical experience as the Laboratory Director of Reproductive Medicine Laboratories for four years, which serviced the laboratory needs, then purchased by, the clinical IVF group, Repromed. His commercialization experience was developed through a ten-year partnership between The University of Adelaide, Cook Medical LLC and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, the latter he still collaborates with on translating research into practice. He has initiated two start-ups, ART Lab Solutions Pty Ltd., and this latest company Fertilis Pty Ltd. He has the role of commercialisation champion (mentoring the transition from research to business development team) within the Robinson Research Institute. He is a passionate advocate for better care of embryos through IVF automation. He will lead the research required as Chief Scientific Officer.

Prof David Gardner

Global Science and Industry Director

Professor David Gardner graduated with BSc (Hons) in 1984 and DPhil (1988) from the School of Biological Sciences, University of York, UK. He is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor (continuing position), School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne, and Scientific Director, Melbourne IVF (2017 to present). He leads a research groups of 2 fellows, and 5 PhD students. His vast contributions to reproductive biology were recognised in 2017 by his election into the Australian Academy of Science, and by the “Distinguished Researcher” Award from the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, the highest honour from the oldest society in the field.

He is an IVF pioneer, with considerable translational and commercial experience in human ART, having developed the most successful culture system for the human embryo (G1/G2) and commercialised this system with Vitrolife AB (Sweden) in the late 1990s. He continues to lead innovation in human IVF, and as Scientific Director of Melbourne has been able to run successful clinical trials in both embryo culture and the use of artificial intelligence. Total publications (books, chapters, reviews and research papers) is 285. Total citations (Google Scholar) > 24,700.

Marty Gauvin

Founder - Chief Executive Officer

Marty Gauvin has had an extensive career in commercialisation. While still an undergraduate he founded GCL Systems, which commercialised research into the use of computers by people with very poor eyesight. Later he worked for Ngapartji (a Cooperative Multimedia Centre based in Adelaide) and spun out Hostworks, which become Australia’s largest critical application hosting company, listing on the ASX before being bought by a Macquarie Bank subsidiary in 2007. Marty was a member of the O’Kane review into the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) program in 2008 and he was the chair of the organisation that founded Australia’s first social good CRC, Young and Well CRC, in 2010. Marty has now founded or co-founded eight start-ups which have collectively raised over $20M in private capital. He has chaired the Innovation Investment Committee of Innovation and Science Australia since 2016 which governs the venture capital sector in Australia. More recently Marty co-founded Virtual Voices Pty Ltd, together with Prof Andrew Downing of Flinders University. Virtual Voices is commercialising technology which lets everybody achieve success in singing, a venture that aims to provide significant assistance for dementia, Parkinson’s disease and PTSD patients. Outside of running his own businesses, Marty has extensive experience working with others who have done so. Since 2001 Marty has been variously a member of government and private investment boards that have invested or overseen the investment of billions of dollars into the commercialisation of Australian research.

Allison Love

Chief Product Engineering Officer

Allison Love has an impressive track record of 19+ years in Product Development, specialising in leading edge medical devices and instrumentation. Having achieved success in a variety of technical & managerial roles within global medical device and product development organisations, she has a proven record developing products for healthcare and diagnostics. As the Chief Product Engineering Officer, Allison leads Fertilis in converting market opportunities into successfully launched products.

Roger Yerramsetti

Chief Operating Officer

Roger has 20 years’ experience leading operational, innovation, and technology departments of ASX100 companies, contact centres, startups and early stage companies. He is a critical thinker and can quickly come up to speed to understand problems from a customer, business and technical point of view, and able to propose creative and innovative solutions.

Roger has supported the founders of Fertilis since 2019 in assessing and validating the commercial opportunity. This involved researching and assessing market dynamics and evidence of market need, potential customers and evidence of demand, creation of financial models that allowed for the testing of assumptions and cash flow needs, and proposed incremental prototype delivery to de-risk the business.

His personal mantra is to “imagine a better way” when approaching challenges.