Dr. Nelms is currently the Director of Business Development at the Australian National University.  Prior to this, he was the co-founder of Phenomix Corporation based in San Diego, USA, and director of Phenomix Australia, the largest privately held biotechnology start-up company ever founded in Australia, a drug discovery and development company using a forward genetics technology to facilitate drug development for a pipeline of proprietary compounds in preclinical and clinical stages.  In 2005, the company raised US$40 million in a private placement of Series B preferred stock, for a total raised after inception of US$65.5 million. 

Dr. Nelms received a Ph.D in biochemistry from the University of Minnesota and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK, where he worked as a Fulbright Scholar.  Dr. Nelms also worked as a post-doctoral fellow and a staff scientist at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.  Prior to founding Phenomix, Dr. Nelms worked at G.D. Searle & Co. as well as at the John Curtin School of Medical Research of the Australian National University where he focused on the development and commercialisation of the genome-wide mutagenesis approach to gene discovery that became the technology platform for Phenomix.