Team Category: Team

Joined GreenLight after a career in the U.S. Army as a Calvary and Foreign Area Officer. Experiences in the Army included multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and regional experience in Sub Saharan Africa. Served as an Army Attaché to the US Embassy in Lomé, Togo. Army awards include Bronze Star. Degrees include a Bachelor in Geography from the University of Tennessee at Martin, Masters in International Relations from Boston University, Masters in Statistical Business Analytics and an MBA from Suffolk University.

Catie has broad experience across policy, strategy, and marketing in the food and ag industry. Prior to joining GreenLight, she was most recently with Land O’Lakes, Inc. working on driving adoption of sustainable on-farm practices through the Truterra business. She has also held roles as a consultant at Bain & Company and Professional Staff for the United States Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a BA from Williams College.

Nina joined GreenLight in late 2022, bringing nearly 15 years of experience as in-house and outside counsel to public and private technology and life science companies, and most recently as Vice President of Legal Affairs at Gemini Therapeutics, Inc. Previously, she served as Vice President and General Counsel of Allied Minds plc (LSE: ALM), a publicly traded venture firm focused on early-stage company investment and development within the technology and life science sectors. At Gemini and Allied Minds, Nina advised on corporate and securities laws matters, governance, and financing, commercial, and licensing transactions. Prior to Allied Minds, she was a corporate associate with Goodwin Procter LLP, where she represented private equity and venture capital firms as well as a wide range of public and private companies. While at Goodwin, Nina advised her clients on a variety of matters, including mergers and acquisitions, equity and debt financings, corporate and securities law matters, employment, and corporate governance issues. Nina earned her B.S. in Business Administration from Boston University and her J.D. from Boston University School of Law. She is admitted to the bar in Massachusetts.

Marta is a co-founder of GreenLight and leads the company’s Human Health business.

Under her leadership, Greenlight is developing a multiple mRNA-based drugs approach, including efforts around rapid pandemic response for vaccine; antibody therapies; affordable gene therapies, for which her group got a grant for SCD from the Gates Foundation; and has closed multimillion dollar deals with industry partners in the pharmaceutical, food, and agricultural space.

Since the company’s creation, she has had multiple roles as a founder from business development to fundraising to new business creation. Prior to joining GreenLight, Ortega-Valle was an entrepreneur in residence at Kodiak Venture Partners in Boston, where she started GreenLight with her co-founders Andrey Zarur and James Swartz. She started her career in management, strategy, and technology consulting at Accenture, where she held leadership positions in the US and in Europe, closing and leading consulting engagements for life sciences and consumer goods multinationals.

Ortega-Valle was selected to be part of the Accenture IPO team in 2001, then led the Business Intelligence unit in Paris. She is a board member at GaneshaLab and participates in MIT’s Innovation Teams, a flagship program that explores how to take technologies to impact. She holds an MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan Fellows Program at the Sloan School of Management, and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from ETSEIB (UPC) Engineering School of Barcelona.

Mark joined GreenLight with a number of R&D leadership roles and a solid track record for improving and optimizing product and project portfolios.

He led UPL’s transformation in the New Technology space using Platforms selected from many worldwide VC-funded companies.

While overseeing the building of the OpenAg Center in RTP and assembling a world class team of scientists, he came to know about GreenLight’s mission, which naturally falls in line with Mark’s experience and values. At Arysta LifeScience he was appointed as the first ever VP of R&D and Regulatory and oversaw a multi-year program that increased the value of the R&D portfolio five-fold and doubled the contribution of BioSolutions. In doing so, he created more than $2 billion of pipeline value. He also had the opportunity to become Chemtura’s Head of R&D for North America and then became the Global Head of R&D and Regulatory.

The first half of Mark’s 25-year career was spent discovering and developing new products and trying wherever possible to leverage biological solutions or smart delivery systems to minimize chemical usage. Mark has had a wide range of experiences in both agricultural R&D and crop protection.