BOSTON– The Food Allergy Science Initiative (FASI), a nonprofit organization on a mission to speed development of breakthrough discoveries to transform the lives of people living with food allergies, today announced the appointment of John E. Walter as the organization’s first Chief Operating Officer. A seasoned healthcare and biopharma executive with a strong track record of building successful organizations, Mr. Walter will be responsible for leading strategic operations and fundraising to support FASI’s expanding research network.
“We are thrilled to welcome John to the FASI team,” said Chris Olsen, President and CEO, FASI. “He will play a crucial role in our next phase of growth and brings a wealth of expertise and experience in operations and revenue development to support the increasing demand for research funding as FASI works closer to discovering a cure for food allergies.”
John joins FASI from the Foundation for Prader-Willi Research where he served as CEO and increased the Foundation’s revenue by more than 30% in his first year. Previously he served as president and CEO of the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy where he was recruited to lead the organization as the successor to the co-founder and president, Barbara Netter. Prior to that role, John spent nearly 20 years helping to lead and build The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) into the largest nonprofit dedicated to creating a world without blood cancers, where he most recently served as its president and CEO. Earlier in John’s professional career, he held leadership positions in financial planning and auditing at the March of Dimes and Bristol-Myers Squibb where his work spanned forty countries in reviewing subsidiaries ranging in size from millions to billions of dollars. He holds a B.S. in Economics with a Minor in Accounting from Southern Connecticut State University.
“I’m excited to join FASI at such a pivotal time in the organization’s history,” said Walter. “In just five years, FASI has changed the trajectory of food allergy research and uncovered a major new theory and research direction – the role of the nervous system in food allergies. I’m honored and energized to roll up my sleeves and help the nation’s leading food allergy science organization achieve its goals.”
FASI was launched in 2016 at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in partnership with a group of Boston-area families who have been affected by food allergies. Together they sought to advance knowledge of the biological basis of food allergy, which affects more than 32 million Americans. Now as an independent nonprofit, FASI is building upon the research progress made at the Broad and is under the leadership of Chief Scientific Officer, Ruslan Medzhitov, Ph.D., Sterling Professor of Immunobiology, Yale School of Medicine, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. FASI has awarded more than $15,000,000 to support cross-disciplinary food allergy research and has made tremendous progress pioneering new research directions for informing development of novel therapies.
