Gervaise Henry

VP Solutions Engineering

Lead Solutions Engineering at Manifold, the AI platform for life sciences. Responsible for the technical customer-facing function spanning pre-sales and post-sales, partnering with sales, product, and engineering to win, deliver, and expand strategic customer relationships.

• Building and scaling the Solutions Engineering organization, with direct reports spanning solutions leadership and forward deployed engineering, and expanding the team with additional Forward Deployed Builders to meet growing customer demand.
• Provide technical leadership for Forward Deployed Engineers across the broader organization, guiding how they engage with customers on complex implementations even where reporting lines sit elsewhere.
• Partner with the pre-sales Solutions team across the technical customer journey — contributing to discovery, scoping, proof-of-concept development, and platform demonstrations — while owning post-sales implementation, technical delivery, and ongoing customer partnership.
• Maintain broad coverage across Manifold’s customer base with concentrated focus on strategic accounts — particularly high-risk, high-reward engagements where customer problems are technically complex and platform fit requires deep scientific and architectural collaboration.
• Build proof-of-concept, reference implementation, and demo assets across three purposes: supporting pre-sales in customer acquisition, driving expansion within existing accounts, and extending platform functionality for broader customer applicability.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to translate field signal into roadmap priorities and to stress-test new capabilities against customer needs before they ship.
• Serve as a liaison between customers, sales, product, engineering, and support, ensuring customer technical and scientific needs are represented throughout the organization.

VP, Head of Data Engineering

Led data infrastructure and management strategy for Champions’ research and development efforts, with responsibility for the data platform supporting multi-omics and research data workflows in alignment with FAIR principles.

• Set direction on modernizing Champions’ analytic pipelines, initiating rebuilds to bring them in line with current standards for reproducibility, maintainability, and scalability.
• Migrated the analytic compute environment onto a foundation that delivered meaningful reductions in pipeline runtime and cost, improving the economics of recurring analyses.
• Initiated the build-out of data provenance, lineage, and observability infrastructure — evaluating tooling and beginning implementation of the governance layer needed to support regulated multi-omics and research data at scale.
• Owned data organization and deployment for new data commercialization efforts, structuring datasets for external availability and partnering with business stakeholders to bring data products to market.
• Supported sales efforts as the senior scientific and technical voice, providing subject-matter expertise in customer conversations and shaping the technical positioning of data offerings.
• Contributed to new assay development efforts, particularly on the analytical and data-handling side — advising on how downstream analysis requirements should shape assay design, data capture, and output structure.
• Served as the senior technical voice for data strategy, partnering with R&D and executive leadership on platform direction, tooling selection, and long-term data architecture decisions.

Head of Professional Services Engineering

Led the Professional Services Engineering organization — a global team of 15–20 architects, bioinformatics engineers, services engineers, and contractors across the US, Europe, and Asia — responsible for all technical services delivery on the DNAnexus platform.

• Expanded scope from leading the Solutions Engineering function to leading all technical staff across Professional Services, following consistent delivery improvements under prior management.
• Oversaw services delivery across a global, distributed team — including customer-facing engineering, platform integrations, custom solution development, and data engineering for customer data ingestion.
• Managed a sizeable offshore contractor contingent alongside full-time staff, balancing delivery throughput with margin discipline as the services function reached its highest profitability during this period amid continued scaling.
• Partnered with Product Engineering and Product Management on roadmap priorities informed by customer delivery experience, and built proof-of-concept assets to support architectural decisions on new platform capabilities.
• Served as a technical liaison between sales, customers, and internal product and support teams — deployed frequently to strategic or at-risk customer engagements to resolve escalations and restore delivery trajectory.

Manager, Solutions Science Engineering

Managed the Solutions Engineering organization through a period of leadership transition, expanding scope mid-tenure to include a subset of the Professional Services engineering team.

• Led a team of 5–6 Solutions Engineers distributed across the US and EMEA, supporting presales engagements globally across all customer verticals.
• Took on additional management responsibility for part of the Professional Services engineering function following a leadership vacuum, tightening integration between presales and services — notably in SOW scoping accuracy and services utilization — which led to subsequent promotion to Head of PS Engineering.
• Built DNAnexus’s external technical presence in Europe and North America, delivering invited oral presentations at EU Biobank Week 2024, ACMG 2024, BioTechX Europe 2023, and the Precision Medicine Leaders Summit 2023, with additional panel participation at BioIT World 2023 on precision medicine and FAIR multimodal data.
• Built and refined proof-of-concept and demo assets to demonstrate platform capabilities against customer-specific scientific and technical needs.
• Partnered with Product Engineering and Product Management on roadmap prioritization based on field signal, and served as liaison between sales, customers, product, professional services, and support.

Senior Solutions Engineer

Individual contributor presales engineer supporting customers globally across all verticals, with particular depth in top-5 pharma and diagnostics.

• Partnered with sales on customer discovery, scoping, and technical qualification — translating customer scientific and operational needs into platform-fit assessments and architectural proposals.
• Built proof-of-concept assets to validate the DNAnexus platform against real customer workflows, including substantial WDL and Nextflow pipeline development and lift-and-shift work.
• Delivered platform demonstrations, technical training, and white-glove technical support for strategic accounts throughout the presales cycle.
• Served as technical liaison between sales, customers, and internal product, professional services, and support teams — recognized for technical depth and customer trust that led to first-line management responsibility following departures of other team leaders.

Computational Biologist

Applied computational, cellular, and molecular techniques to investigate normal biology of the lower urinary tract and the development and progression of benign and malignant pathologies. Focused on single-cell and bulk RNA-sequencing of FACS-sorted populations to characterize normal and diseased cellular heterogeneity. Developed and deployed standardized pipelines for data analysis and exploration, including cloud-based (AWS, Azure) implementations.

Research Associate

Designed, conducted, and analyzed cellular and molecular experiments investigating normal prostate biology and the development and progression of benign prostatic hyperplasia and prostate cancer. Leveraged single-cell and bulk RNA-sequencing of FACS-sorted populations to characterize cellular heterogeneity in healthy and diseased tissue, and identified immune infiltrate signatures in primary human prostate samples to associate with cell-type-specific gene expression, epithelial dynamics, and clinical outcomes. First or co-authored eight journal publications during this period, including a first-author paper in Cell Reports (2018).

Research Associate

Developed high-content image-based assays for high throughput drug discovery. Optimized high throughput assays for early-stage drug discovery on marine natural products.

RA/TA

Used cellular and molecular biology techniques to investigate the effect of adipocytes and obesity on the multiple myeloma bone marrow tumor microenvironment. Techniques included cell culture (including co-culture), immunoblotting, ELISA, qPCR, tubulogenesis assays, invasion assays, viability assays, immunofluorescence, and confocal microscopy. Independently taught undergraduate lab courses, including design of laboratory content, assessments, grading, and student counseling.

Courses taught: Bio 200 Structure and Function of the Human Body, Bio 210 General Biology II, Bio 300 Cell Biology, Bio 356 Genetics.

Lab Technician

Investigated the relationship between the peptidyl-prolyl cis/trans isomerase Pin1 and IL13 in asthma models, using cellular, molecular, and biochemical techniques. Managed lab budget, ordering, and vendor relationships.

Screening Scientist

Conducted high-throughput compound and RNAi screens in the HTS/RNAi Core, working with a 200,000-compound library, whole-genome human siRNA, Drosophila dsRNA, and custom libraries. Primary project used compound and RNAi screens to functionally categorize NSCLC cell lines into familial groups, identifying molecular susceptibilities exploitable based on biomarkers. Contributed across all aspects of projects: assay choice and development, optimization, implementation, data analysis, bioinformatics, and follow-up experiments. Additional projects included screens for osteoclast differentiation modifiers, novel-mechanism antimicrobial agents, iron homeostasis regulators (siRNA), and miRNA sensitizers to sub-lethal chemotherapy in cancer cells with specific genetic profiles.

Summer Undergraduate Research Intern

Screened for NF-κB inhibitors using a cell-based luciferase reporter assay on a library of partially purified marine natural products. Confirmed prospective inhibitors via flow cytometry and immunoblotting, and identified active compounds using HPLC, MS, and 1D/2D NMR.

American University

Eckerd College