Gunther Birznieks is Vanda's Senior Vice President, Business Development and member of the R&D Committee. Prior to his current role, Gunther Birznieks held a number of positions at Vanda Pharmaceuticals including as Clinical Program Head of the Hetlioz and VSF-173 programs, Head of Informatics and in Singapore as Head of Operations since 2003. Mr. Birznieks previously spent the majority of his career in the areas of healthcare and biomedical informatics including bioinformatics support for microarray and genotyping projects with the Human Genome Project at NHGRI. Prior to joining to Vanda, Gunther Birznieks founded Extropia Pte Ltd, a Singaporean company which specialized in business and investment banking applications. Gunther Birznieks has published four books on computer technologies as well as numerous articles and talks on information security, programming, and software development life cycle. He holds a B. A. in Psychology and M. S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.