Founder and Chief Strategy Officer
“The ability to make medicine should be as resilient as the need for it.”
Background
Luke Rogers brings over a decade of experience at the intersection of chemistry, manufacturing, and healthcare systems to his role as Chief Strategy Officer at Skellig Manufacturing. His career has been defined by a single conviction: that the gap between what medicine can do and who can access it is not a scientific problem but an infrastructure problem—and infrastructure can be rebuilt.
Luke earned his Ph.D. in Organic and Medicinal Chemistry from Trinity College Dublin, where his research focused on the development of novel porphyrin scaffolds as potential cancer therapeutics. He subsequently completed postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Prof. Klavs Jensen, where he deepened his expertise in process chemistry, continuous manufacturing, and the translation of laboratory discoveries into manufacturable products.
Professional Experience
Luke began his industry career as a process development chemist at Merck Manufacturing in Clonmel, Ireland. There he gained his first experience with continuous manufacturing, helping develop and scale up the first commercial flow chemistry step at the Ballydine site. He worked with process analytical technologies and helped introduce and champion lab automation tools that enabled faster process optimizations.
Before co-founding Skellig, Luke spent seven years at On Demand Pharmaceuticals, where he helped pioneer continuous-flow manufacturing approaches to essential medicines. During his tenure, his teams produced more than 12,000 sterile doses with zero recalls—demonstrating that distributed, flexible manufacturing could meet the highest quality standards while dramatically reducing the time from formulation to patient.
Luke was instrumental in securing over $80 million in federal funding across DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, and the Department of Health and Human Services. His work on these programs positioned Skellig at the forefront of efforts to rebuild America’s pharmaceutical manufacturing resilience. He has developed technical partnerships with leading organizations in automated chemical synthesis, AI tools for process development, and mobile manufacturing.
Vision for Skellig
At Skellig, Luke leads strategic development, federal partnerships, and the articulation of the Internet of Medicine architecture. He works to translate complex technical capabilities into frameworks that resonate with regulators, health systems, and policymakers alike.
His vision is straightforward: manufacturing that responds to patients, not just markets. We have built a healthcare system that can diagnose a rare disease in hours and then wait years for the treatment to arrive. Luke believes that by connecting America’s manufacturing capacity into a distributed, coordinated network, we can make the ability to produce medicine as resilient as the need for it.
Education
- Ph.D., Organic & Medicinal Chemistry — Trinity College Dublin
- Postdoctoral Research — Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- B.A. (mod.) Medicinal Chemistry — Trinity College Dublin
Connect with Luke
Interested in discussing pharmaceutical manufacturing resilience, the Internet of Medicine, or potential partnerships?