Melissa Netwal

Role within the company

Melissa joined SPT Labtech in October 2022 as a Field Application Scientist (FAS) based in Oakland, California. As a member of the North American FAS Team, Melissa was responsible for supporting our liquid handling customers on the US West Coast with a focus on firefly. In 2025 she transitioned to a new role focused on strategic partnerships and collaborations.

Background

Melissa earned a bachelor’s degree in cell and molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse where she studied protein-protein interactions in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. In 2015, Netwal joined Zymergen in California’s Bay Area where she worked across several groups to build and scale automated liquid handling workflows for microbial strain engineering and to optimize CRISPR engineering workflows for novel organisms. In 2020 she joined Demetrix, a Keasling/JBEI startup, engineering Saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce novel cannabinoids, as a senior research associate on their strain engineering team. There she optimized and implemented CRISPR-based editing strategies, built out an enzyme engineering core and earned her scientist title. 

Day-to-day tasks

Melissa's current focus is partnerships to expand firefly^® – SPT Labtech's groundbreaking new liquid handling platform for genomics. Her days vary from raveling to meet partners & customers, waking up early to connect with our product management and marketing teams in the UK and building out internal infrastructure to advise on applications development priorities.

Best part of the role

Melissa has enjoyed the change in pace from working exclusively at the bench and now travels to laboratories, gaining exposure to scientific fields outside of her main areas of expertise. To help customers automate their workflows in the best way she can, Melissa is excited about reading literature from other disciplines less familiar to her.  

Making a difference

For Melissa, the most rewarding aspect of her role at SPT Labtech is the opportunity it gives her to teach other scientists how to get the most out of automation. Melissa came to us from a startup environment and is keenly aware of the issues and hesitations around the pivot from manual pipetting to automated workflows. She is excited about easing that transition for SPT Labtech's customers. What sets SPT Labtech apart from other automation solution providers is the focus and time dedicated to applications training and maintaining close working relationships with customers. Melissa tells customers, "I'm just a phone call away", which is not something she has experienced elsewhere in the industry. 

Outside work

Melissa enjoys yoga, painting and spending time with her neurotic Australian Shepard, Bernie. She also likes exploring PNW as she recently relocated from the Bay area to Seattle along with all of the places her travel for SPT Labtech takes her. Melissa says the travel for work is always an adventure, but she is also happy to head back to Wisconsin to visit her friends and family whenever she gets the opportunity.