David A. Giljohann, Ph.D.

Giljohann turned a Brookfield science-club childhood into spherical nucleic acids—DNA and RNA wrapped around a gold core, built to enter a cell and shut off a bad gene—and a Chicago-area biotech career. Brookfield’s science name is not a visiting professor who retired to a cul-de-sac; he swam, ran Science Club, and left East for Northwestern.

He attended Tonawanda Elementary and Pilgrim Park before Brookfield East, class of 1999. At Northwestern he earned a biology degree, a Spanish minor, and a chemistry Ph.D. in Chad Mirkin’s lab in 2009. He licensed the spherical-nucleic-acid work with his advisor, founded AuraSense in 2009, then Exicure in 2011, and ran Exicure as CEO from 2013 while the constructs moved toward clinical trials. Crain’s Chicago put him on its 40 Under 40 list in 2019; Endpoints had already listed him among biopharma executives under 40. Exicure’s later public-company years were rough.

In January 2023 he became CEO of EVOQ Therapeutics in Ann Arbor, an autoimmunity company. His family still lives in Elm Grove, next door to the district that let a science kid stay late. The Elmbrook schools that taught him—teachers including Sue Miller, Marina Kane, Dick Wood, Kathy Drucke, and Mike Rose—remain the place tie; the lab towns are where the papers and the companies live.