Jacob Thaysen, PhD is Illumina’s Chief Executive Officer. He joined the company in September 2023.
Prior to Illumina, Jacob was senior vice president of Agilent and president of Agilent's Life Sciences and Applied Markets Group (LSAG) which consists of Agilent's market leading analytical instrument portfolio, informatics and cell analysis franchise. From 2014 to 2018, Thaysen served as the president of Agilent's Diagnostics and Genomics Group (DGG).
Prior to joining Agilent, Thaysen was corporate vice president of R&D at Dako, a Danish cancer diagnostic company. Before joining Dako, he served as management consultant at Copenhagen Consultancy Company (now Bain & Co). Early in his career, he was founder and chief technology officer of Cantion, a research and defense application development company based in Denmark.
Thaysen holds an MSc and PhD in physics from the Technical University of Denmark.